John Muir

John Muir was kind of a hippie botanist, and also a racist which was pretty much standard fare in the late 1800s. He walked from Kentucky to Florida. His writing was somewhat Victorian in it's overt flowery form. But he was somewhat different than his contemporaries as he was a botanist first, and a writer second. Actually he had enough other hobbies that writing was somewhere trailing long behind.

"Of death among our own species, to say nothing of the thousand styles and modes of murder, our best memories, even among happy deaths, yield groans and tears, mingled with morbid exultation; burian companies, black in cloth and countenance, and, last of all, a black box burial in an oll-omened place, haunted by imaginary glooms and ghosts of every degree. thus death becomes fearful, and the most notable and incredible thing heard around a death-bed is , "I fear not to die."