Thoreau's vigorous, contented years came to a close in 1862, when he was only forty-five. He sleeps in the burying-ground of his well-loved Concord, from which he rarely strayed far during his lifetime. Said his friend, William Ellery Channing, "His love of wildness was real. This child of an old civilization, this Norman boy with the blue eyes and brown hair, held the Indian's creed, and believed in the essential worth and integrity of plant and animal. This was a religion; to us mythical. So far a recluse as never to seek popular ends, he was yet gifted with the ability and courage to be a captain of men. Heroism he possessed in its highest sense,--the will to use his means to his ends, and these the best."
[Illustration: FROM THE JOHN MUIR MEMORIAL NUMBER OF THE SIERRA CLUB BULLETIN
In John Muir's own story of his boyhood and youth he declares, "When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures." Muir was born at Dunbar, on the stormy coast of Scotland, April 21, 1838. From his grandfather he learned his letters, before he was three years old, with the aid of shop signs. His was an adventurous boyhood, punctuated by riotous school fights, hunts for skylark's nests and fox holes, scrambles among the crags of Dunbar Castle, games of running, jumping and wrestling, and repeated chastisements by a father who believed in the efficacy of the rod, and used it to emphasize his disapproval of "shore and field wanderings." A grammar-school reader gave the Scotch lad his first knowledge of the birds and trees of America. Eagerly he read descriptions of the fish hawk and the bald eagle by Alexander Wilson, the Scotch naturalist, and Audubon's wonderful story of the passenger pigeon.
When John Muir was eleven years old he crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel with his father, a sister and a brother. In Wisconsin the father set about preparing a home for the wife and children waiting in Scotland. The future "patriarch of the mountains" spent joyous hours exploring pastures new--looking for songbirds' nests, game haunts and wildflower gardens. At night, when the household slept, he would creep out of bed, though weary after long hours of labor in the fields, and read his treasured books, or work on his inventions. For a few months he worked as assistant to an inventor in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Longing to resume the education interrupted when he was eleven years old, the youth returned to Madison, where, despite almost insurmountable handicaps, he was able to take a four-year course in the new State University. In vacation time he worked on a farm, cradling four acres of grain a day, then sitting up till midnight to analyze and classify plants native to the region. At the end of four years the embryo naturalist, geologist, explorer, philosopher and protector of Nature left his Alma Mater. In his own words, he was "only leaving one university for another, the Wisconsin University for the University of the Wilderness."