had actually committed favorite lines to memory. More than this, they wrote poetry of their own, and Davie Taylor even sang some of his own verses. To Johnnie Muir the fact that two boys so like himself and living so near could possess such privileges, develop such talents, was almost incredible.
The first time Muir heard his peers discussing literature, the “twa Davies,” as Muir called them, were talking of Dickens. They were in a swamp, discharging their families’ neighborhood civic duties by building a corduroy road across it, and there amid the mire and the sweat was a sudden music that transformed the whole scene into something utterly different. Davie Gray and Davie Taylor were now not just day hands mucking about in swampy waters, cutting logs and fitting them: they were artists, men of literature.
Muir had, of course, known both music and poetry: he had those old ballads running in his head and blood, and he had most likely also heard his father play the fiddle and sing the ancient airs in the days before that stern patriarch had put music away as an unseemly frivolity. After he had escaped the farm, he would write back to his sister Mary that there must be something at least mildly poetic in the family since “Mother made poetry when first acquainted with father and I think that father must have made some verses too. …” Still, belles lettres were hardly a part of the strait life of that household, where even casual talk at mealtimes was discouraged as sacrilegious. And as for frankly imaginative prose—novels—this was little less than lies.
Now with the help and examples of Gray and Taylor, Muir discovered lodes of inspiration and reflection. With an even greater avidity than he had displayed in taking to his mathematical studies, he plunged his mind and heart into literature, borrowing books, saving small sums to buy his own, forming part of a neighborhood lending library. He read Shakespeare, and the Romantic poets—Cowper, Thomas Campbell, Mark Akenside, and others. He saw the Bible with a new eye and heard its verses as treasures of sound. Perhaps closest to him was the great apologist Milton, whose lines in Paradise Lost he would remember forever. He memorized and savored images and whole passages, spoke them aloud to himself in the fields and woods or during some chore at the house, and applied them to the landscape through which he moved, learning, as Campbell had written, to “muse on Nature with a poet’s eye!’’
What Campbell and the others gave him was not an appreciation of the natural world; he already had that and better and deeper than almost any of them. It was rather their gift of reflection that was significant: reflection on the meanings of life as these were manifested in nature and, perhaps equally significant at this stage, the reflection of himself in their words. For in the pages of the poets he found expressions of that mystical affinity he had himself experienced since childhood when the “magic of Nature first breathed on my mind,’’ as his countryman Campbell had written. Here in print and bound between covers—and codified thus—were confirmations of his own deepest predilections and intuitions. There had been others like himself! And not only that, but some of them had been famous. The effect of this discovery on Muir can hardly be overemphasized, for it gave him a view of himself that had been utterly unobtainable before and that would prove a source of continuous encouragement. Campbell’s once-famous The Pleasures of Hope is only the most obvious example of the effect of the poets on this young farmer. In truth, all of them were hope bringers, as tangible as those sweet-songed bluebirds that announced spring.
Like Gray and Taylor, Muir now also began to write verses, though about what must remain a mystery since all but two specimens have been lost, and one of these survives merely as a reference to its subject matter. But the reference to his elegy on the death of an old tree in the neighborhood does indicate the influence of the Romantics for whom this subject was a favorite.
He read novels, too, but these had to be consumed in secret. Still, he managed to get through several of Scott’s, which he borrowed from William Duncan, smuggling them into the house under his clothing and turning their pages in moments almost as precious as the books themselves.
He also began to get his first sense of the vast reaches of history through his reading of Plutarch and Josephus as well as John George Wood’s then-standard Natural History. Ultimately this scale of vision would rival the Romantic humanism he was now imbibing and encourage a cosmic vision in which man himself was almost lost, a tiny, puny creature distinguished mainly by his outsized claims to dominion over the earth. But now literature and history harmonized to broaden Muir’s scope of thought and provide him with creative ways to think about the world and himself in it.
Once it became known in the neighborhood that Daniel Muir’s son, Johnnie, liked to read books, help and encouragement came to him from unsuspected sources. A number of Scots immigrants nearby were intellectually active and a few had brought with them modest but good libraries. Now they began to come forward with offers of help and, equally as vital, with words of encouragement, words that fell with the sweetness of benediction on ears long tuned to the rasp of criticism. In particular Mrs. Jean Galloway (David Galloway’s mother and a woman Muir was to remember as a second mother to him), William Duncan, and Dr. William Meacher took active interest in Muir’s development. Duncan had perhaps the largest library in that neighborhood, and he often suggested to Muir that he come by and browse in its treasures.
The neighborhood situation, so fortuitous to Muir, was not as extraordinary as might appear. The Scots had a proud and ancient intellectual tradition, and figures of the Scottish Enlightenment had been potent influences in the thought of the entire European community. In the New World, Scots immigrants had been conscious of the need to carry on that tradition, and so in the eighteenth century, while some Caledonians were blazing trails and creating homesteads in woodlands, others were maintaining intellectual ties with the Old World and vitalizing the life of the mind in the New. Cadwallader Colden, for example, became an active and systematic botanizer in upper New York State and kept close ties for years with the great Linnaeus. Moreover, his treatise on the Iroquois confederacy, The History of the Five Indian Nations (first published in 1727), is a mine of ethnographical information. Another who sent a steady stream of information about the New World to Linnaeus was the Charleston doctor Alexander Garden (for whom the gardenia is named). In addition to making important early studies of epidemics of yellow fever and smallpox, Garden was also interested in the medicinal properties of local plants and wrote Linnaeus of the vermifuge qualities of pinkroot. And John Lining of that same city made early observations on the relationship between forest clearances and regional climatic conditions, a relationship of which Wisconsin settlers in Muir’s century were still ignorant.
Nor was the keeping of the Scots intellectual tradition confined to formally educated immigrants. Travelers along the edges of the advancing American civilization constantly remarked on the presence of books, newspapers, and almanacs in the often rude homes of the settlers, and many of those on the very fringes were the hardy Scots. In Muir’s own reminiscences of his neighborhood there is further evidence, for the substance of the debate he described there on the whites’ treatment of the Indians shows the settlers were familiar with the arguments of such Scots philosophers as William Robertson and Adam Ferguson, who had addressed this same tangled problem.
For Muir the importance of the existence of the Scots intellectual tradition on the frontier is obvious, for without the help of its carriers, such as Duncan, Meacher, and the Gray and Taylor families, it is hard to see how Muir, wholly unaided, might have found his way into the life of the mind. What is less obvious is that through the help and example of these people Muir was making another crucial discovery: that the Scots had a parallel tradition of the intelligent, intellectually curious workingman. William Duncan, miner and stonemason, was perhaps the nearest example, but as Muir went on with his reading and his conversations with his neighbors, he discovered other examples, and all his life he was to continue to do so and to take a special, telling pride in them. Hugh Miller, the great Scots geologist of whom Jean Galloway spoke to Muir, had begun his career as an untutored laborer in a stone quarry, and one of his most important collaborators had been Robert Dick, a workingman from Thurso who gave Miller his own collections of fossil fish. David Douglas, whose explorations of the Pacific Northwest added so much to the fund of knowledge of the New World, had been the son of a stone mason and had begun his botanical studies as the apprentice to the head gardener at Scone Castle. So even now Muir began to see that a life of manual labor—if indeed this was to be his lot—need not mean a