Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska

No other of the qualities of the journal and drawings goes home to me more than the unforced authenticity of the impression set down by this strong and ardent artist. Emerson's grandeur is in finitely more convincing to me because of his homeliness, and I feel a perverse Yankee suspicion of those who deal in sublimities only. The man who can extract the whole quaint savor out of that magical, prosaic, humorous moment of human life, the first stretch ing yawn of the early morning, that man can make me believe that I too see the north wind running mightily athwart the sky. And the artist who can put into the simplest drawing of a man and a little boy eating together at a rough table in a rough cabin, all the dear solidity of family and home life, with its quiet triumph against over powering Nature, that artist can make me how my head before the sincerity of his impressive Night.

The homeliness of the diary, its courageously unaffected natural ness, how it carries one out of fussy complications to a long breath of relief in the fewness and permanence of things that count! And the humor of it sometimes deliciously unintentional like the picture of the artist finishing a fine drawing, setting the beans to soak, bathing in the bread pan, and going to bed to read a chapter of Blake, sometimes intentional and shrewd like a banana - peel on a mountain - top tames that wilderness, or colds, like bad temper and loss of faith, are a malady of the city crowd sometimes outright and hearty like a child's joke, as in the amusingly faithful portrait of the pot-bellied, self-important personality of the air-tight stove!

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