Muir's 'Calypso Borealis'
1.
After earning a few dollars working on my brother-in law's farm near Portage [Wisconsin], I set off on the first of my long lonely excursions, botanizing in glorious freedom around the Great Lakes and wandering through innumerable Tamarac and arbor-vitae swamps, and forests of maple, basswood, ash, elm, balsam, fir, pine, spruce, hemlock, rejoicing in their bound wealth and strength and beauty, climbing the trees, reveling in their flowers and fruit like bees in beds of goldenrods, glorying in the fresh cool beauty and charm of the bog and meadow headwords, grasses, caprices, ferns, mosses, liverworts displayed in boundless profusion.
Choose two of the following phrases Muir uses in his writing about the Calypso Borealis and explain how …show more content…
2.
Writers organize their writings to make an impact on their readers. In Muir's writing about the Calypso Borealis, he places opposing views of his journey close together. Read the following paragraphs and explain the opposite views of the two paragraphs. What impact does Muir make when he places these opposite views close together?
The rarest and most beautiful of the flowering plants I discovered on this first grand excursion was Calypso borealis (the Hider of the North). I had been fording streams more and more difficult to cross and wading bogs and swamps that seemed more and more extensive and more difficult to force one's way through. Entering one of these great Tamarac and arbor-vitae swamps one morning, holding a general though very crooked course by compass, struggling through tangled drooping branches and over and under broad heaps of fallen trees, I began to fear that I would not be able to reach dry ground before dark, and therefore would have to pass the night in the swamp and began, faint and hungry, to plan a nest of branches on one of the largest trees or windfalls like a monkey's nest, or eagle's, or Indian's in the flooded forests of the Orinoco described by
After earning a few dollars working on my brother-in law's farm near Portage [Wisconsin], I set off on the first of my long lonely excursions, botanizing in glorious freedom around the Great Lakes and wandering through innumerable Tamarac and arbor-vitae swamps, and forests of maple, basswood, ash, elm, balsam, fir, pine, spruce, hemlock, rejoicing in their bound wealth and strength and beauty, climbing the trees, reveling in their flowers and fruit like bees in beds of goldenrods, glorying in the fresh cool beauty and charm of the bog and meadow headwords, grasses, caprices, ferns, mosses, liverworts displayed in boundless profusion.
Choose two of the following phrases Muir uses in his writing about the Calypso Borealis and explain how …show more content…
2.
Writers organize their writings to make an impact on their readers. In Muir's writing about the Calypso Borealis, he places opposing views of his journey close together. Read the following paragraphs and explain the opposite views of the two paragraphs. What impact does Muir make when he places these opposite views close together?
The rarest and most beautiful of the flowering plants I discovered on this first grand excursion was Calypso borealis (the Hider of the North). I had been fording streams more and more difficult to cross and wading bogs and swamps that seemed more and more extensive and more difficult to force one's way through. Entering one of these great Tamarac and arbor-vitae swamps one morning, holding a general though very crooked course by compass, struggling through tangled drooping branches and over and under broad heaps of fallen trees, I began to fear that I would not be able to reach dry ground before dark, and therefore would have to pass the night in the swamp and began, faint and hungry, to plan a nest of branches on one of the largest trees or windfalls like a monkey's nest, or eagle's, or Indian's in the flooded forests of the Orinoco described by