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Steep Trails by John Muir
page 85 of 268 (31%)
to terrible trials. City Creek, coming from its high glacial
fountains, enters the streets of this Mormon Zion pure as an angel,
but how does it leave it? Even roses and lilies in gardens most loved
are tainted with a thousand impurities as soon as they unfold. I
heard Brigham Young in the Tabernacle the other day warning his people
that if they did not mend their manners angels would not come into
their houses, though perchance they might be sauntering by with little
else to do than chat with them. Possibly there may be Salt Lake
families sufficiently pure for angel society, but I was not pleased
with the reception they gave the small snow angels that God sent among
them the other night. Only the children hailed them with delight.
The old Latter-Days seemed to shun them. I should like to see how Mr.
Young, the Lake Prophet, would meet such messengers.

But to return to the storm. Toward the evening of the 18th it began
to wither. The snowy skirts of the Wahsatch Mountains appeared
beneath the lifting fringes of the clouds, and the sun shone out
through colored windows, producing one of the most glorious after-storm
effects I ever witnessed. Looking across the Jordan, the gray
sagey slopes from the base of the Oquirrh Mountains were covered with
a thick, plushy cloth of gold, soft and ethereal as a cloud, not
merely tinted and gilded like a rock with autumn sunshine, but deeply
muffled beyond recognition. Surely nothing in heaven, nor any mansion
of the Lord in all his worlds, could be more gloriously carpeted.
Other portions of the plain were flushed with red and purple, and all
the mountains and the clouds above them were painted in corresponding
loveliness. Earth and sky, round and round the entire landscape, was
one ravishing revelation of color, infinitely varied and interblended.

I have seen many a glorious sunset beneath lifting storm clouds on the
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