""The spell of Alaska,"" Ella Higginson wrote in 1908, ""falls upon every lover of beauty who has voyaged along those far northern snow-pearled shores...or who has drifted down the mighty rivers of the interior which flow, bell-toned and lonely, to the sea....No writer has ever described Alaska;no one writer ever will; but each must do his share, according to the spell that the country casts upon him."" In A Republic of Rivers, John Murray offers the first comprehensive anthology of nature writing in Alaska and the Yukon, ranging from 1741 to the present. Many of the writers found here