Muir's prose is a miracle of immediacy. His books are illuminated by sunshine and starlight. The cold mineral air of the mountains and the resiny reek of coniferous forests lift bracingly off his pages. No other writer is so ceaselessly astonished by the natural world as Muir, or communicates that astonishment more urgently. Muir lived "in an infinite storm of beauty", and his readers live in it with him Robert Macfarlane