Now that you understand the rhetorical situation, let’s look a little more closely at the resources of language that Muir uses to achieve his purpose, which is to persuade his audience that they must commit to the cause of saving the redwoods. We’re looking specifically for how that purpose is achieved through the speaker’s choice of words (also called diction) and how those words are arranged (called syntax).

You probably noticed that Muir opens his remarks with the word “We.” He creates common ground with the assumption that we all believe that the world is going from bad to worse and that greed (as suggested by “mammon”) is the cause. He counters that argument, however, noting that the “righteous uprising in defense of God’s trees” tells a “different story.” His use of the term “righteous,” with its religious connotation, and his labeling of the trees as “God’s,” set the tone for the rest of the piece, in which Muir ennobles both the trees and the humans who he hopes will protect them.

Muir establishes an emotional connection between the reader and the trees by personifying the trees and imagining them feeling both joy and pain. He creates an image of every Sequoia “waving its branches for joy” (par. 1), having heard the good news of the growing conservation movement, and then uses the term “skinned alive” (par. 1) to describe the desecration of a three-hundred-foot tree. In the short second paragraph, Muir asks the reader to imagine the effect if one of these majestic trees could come to town “to plead its own cause,” extending the personification of the tree to an entity that not only feels but also thinks. In these examples, we see the full range of the tree’s humanity—joy, pain, thought—and come to think of those who cut down the redwoods as murderers.

Muir builds on that emotional appeal by presenting the trees as not just human but divine. He describes the trees as having a “godlike majesty” (par. 2). And after being skinned alive, the tree responds in Christlike fashion by saying, “Forgive them; they know not what they do” (par. 1). Muir’s use of a biblical reference to deliver that message increases the emotional impact. Now, those who destroy redwoods are not just murderers; they are killing “God’s trees” and possibly even a manifestation of God himself. The emotional stakes can’t get much higher than that.

Muir employs a few other resources of diction and syntax that help him connect with his audience at the same time that he keeps his purpose in the forefront. For example, he uses metonymy (a figure of speech in which something is represented by another thing that is related to it or emblematic of it), substituting the “axe and saw” (par. 4) for the humans who destroy the trees. He thus separates most of mankind from those who benefit from the destruction. He begins the sixth paragraph with a bit of unconventional syntax, opening with a prepositional phrase—“For the thousands of acres of Sequoia forest outside of the reservation and national parks”—before revealing the subject and predicate: “no help is in sight.” The syntax highlights the vulnerability of the redwoods by putting these trees that are dependent on us in a phrase that is grammatically dependent. The vulnerability is further reinforced by Muir menacingly putting these trees “in the hands of lumbermen.” This structure delays the subject and predicate, so that when it does come, it carries the grim finality of a death sentence: “no help is in sight.”

But Muir’s argument is not just emotional. His piece is anchored by facts and figures that both bring to life the majesty of the redwood forests and reveal the rate at which they are being destroyed. He provides examples of how “thousands of the finest Sequoias have been felled, blasted into manageable dimensions, and sawed into lumber by methods destructive almost beyond belief” (par. 4), including specific numbers of sawmills and trees. He names the forests and the men whose names are associated with them. He invokes the “[t]housands of travelers” (par. 6) from around the world who visit them every year.

In his closing, Muir returns to the spiritual tone of the beginning, but he is more direct about his purpose: to remind us both that “[a]ny fool can destroy trees” and that he has faith that his fellow man will prevent that from happening. He acknowledges God’s role in creating the beauty of the trees and protecting them from natural disasters such as “drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand storms,” but he puts the responsibility on the American people to save them from “sawmills and fools,” and his phrase takes the form of a structure you may recognize as a zeugma—the use of two incongruous words in a grammatically parallel way. Muir’s metaphor in this paragraph—striking the iron of public sentiment while it is hot—is a bit of a cliché, but in Muir’s time it likely had more punch. It is in this paragraph that Muir’s call for action is strong and precise. It is essential for the mighty redwoods to come under protection and be permitted to stand in “perfect strength and beauty.”