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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Our Friend John Burroughs, by Clara Barrus
+
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+Title: Our Friend John Burroughs
+
+Author: Clara Barrus
+
+Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6561]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 28, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR FRIEND JOHN BURROUGHS ***
+
+
+
+
+This etext was produced by Joyce M. Noverr (JMNoverr@att.net).
+
+
+
+
+
+OUR FRIEND JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+by: Clara Barrus
+
+[Illustration: John Burroughs.  From a photograph
+by Theona Peck Harris]
+
+CONTENTS
+
+OUR FRIEND JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+THE RETREAT OF A POET-NATURALIST
+
+AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
+     ANCESTRY AND FAMILY LIFE
+     CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
+     SELF-ANALYSIS
+
+THE EARLY WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+A WINTER DAY AT SLABSIDES
+
+BACK TO PEPACTON
+
+CAMPINGING WITH BURROUGHS AND MUIR
+
+JOHN BURROUGHS: AN APPRECIATION
+
+
+
+
+OUR FRIEND JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+
+We all claim John Burroughs as our friend. He is inextricably
+blended with our love for the birds and the flowers, and for all
+out of doors; but he is much more to us than a charming writer of
+books about nature, and we welcome familiar glimpses of him as one
+welcomes anything which brings him in closer touch with a friend.
+
+A clever essayist, in speaking of the "obituary method of
+appreciation," says that we feel a slight sense of impropriety
+and insecurity in contemporary plaudits.  "Wait till he is well
+dead, and four or five decades of daisies have bloomed over him,
+says the world; then, if there is any virtue in his works, we will
+tag and label them and confer immortality upon him."  But Mr.
+Burroughs has not had to wait till the  daisies cover him to be
+appreciated.  A multitude of his readers has sought him out and
+walked amid the daisies with him, listened with him to the birds,
+and gained countless delightful associations with all these things
+through this personal relation with the author; and these friends
+in particular will, I trust, welcome some "contemporary plaudits."
+
+As a man, and as a writer, Mr. Burroughs has been in the public
+eye for many years.  At the age of twenty-three he had an article
+printed in the "Atlantic Monthly," and in 1910 that journal
+celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his contributions to its
+columns.  Early in his career he received marked recognition from
+able critics, and gratifying responses from readers.  It is rare in
+the history of an author that his books after fifty years of writing
+have the freshness, lucidity, and charm that Mr. Burroughs's later
+books have.  A critic in 1876 speaks of his "quiet, believing style,
+free from passion or the glitter of rhetoric, and giving one the
+sense of simple eyesight"; and now, concerning one of his later
+books, "Time and Change," Mr. Brander Matthews writes: "In these
+pellucid pages--so easy to read because they are the result of hard
+thinking--he brings home to us what is the real meaning of the
+discoveries and the theories of the scientists. . . . He brings
+to bear his searching scientific curiosity and his sympathetic
+interpreting imagination. . . . All of them models of the essay
+at its best--easy, unpedantic, and unfailingly interesting."
+
+From school-children all over the United States, from nearly every
+civilized country on the globe, from homes of the humble and of the
+wealthy, from the scholar in his study, from the clergyman, the
+lawyer, the physician, the business man, the farmer, the raftsman,
+the sportsman, from the invalid shut in from the great outdoors
+(but, thanks to our friend, not shut /out/ from outdoor blessings),
+have come for many years heartfelt letters attesting the wholesome
+and widespread influence of his works.
+
+President Roosevelt a few years ago, in dedicating one of his books
+to "Dear Oom John," voiced the popular feeling:  "It is a good thing
+for our people that you have lived, and surely no man can wish to
+have more said of him."
+
+Some years ago, the New York "Globe," on announcing a new book
+by Mr. Burroughs, said, "It has been the lot of few writers of
+this country or of any country to gain such good will and personal
+esteem as for many years have been freely given to John Burroughs."
+If we ask why this is so, we find it answered by Whitman, who,
+in conversation with a friend, said, "John is one of the true
+hearts--one of the true hearts--warm, sure, firm."
+
+Mr. Burroughs has been much visited, much "appreciated," much
+rhymed about, much painted, modeled, and photographed, and--much
+loved. Because he has been so much loved, and because his influence
+has been so far-reaching, it has seemed to me that a book which
+gives familiar and intimate glimpses of him will be welcomed by
+the legion who call him friend.  The exceptional opportunities I
+have enjoyed for many years past of observing him encourage me
+in the undertaking.
+
+The readers of Mr. Burroughs crave the personal relation with him.
+Just as they want to own his books, instead of merely taking them
+from the public libraries, so they want to meet the man, take him
+by the hand, look into his eyes, hear his voice, and learn, if
+possible, what it is that has given him his unfailing joy in life,
+his serenity, his comprehensive and loving insight into the life of
+the universe. They feel, too, a sense of deep gratitude to one who
+has shown them how divine is the soil under foot--veritable star-dust
+from the gardens of the Eternal.  He has made us feel at one with
+the whole cosmos, not only with bird and tree, and rock and flower,
+but also with the elemental forces, the powers which are friendly or
+unfriendly according as we put ourselves in right or wrong relations
+with them. He has shown us the divine in the common and the near at
+hand; that heaven lies about us here in this world; that the
+glorious and the miraculous are not to be sought afar off, but are
+here and now; and that love of the earth-mother is, in the truest
+sense, love of the divine:  "The babe in the womb is not nearer its
+mother than are we to the invisible, sustaining, mothering powers of
+the universe, and to its spiritual entities, every moment of our
+lives." One who speaks thus of the things of such import to every
+human soul is bound to win responses; he deals with things that come
+home to us all. We want to know him.
+
+Although retiring in habit, naturally seeking seclusion, Mr.
+Burroughs is not allowed overindulgence in this tendency.  One
+may with truth describe him as a contemporary described Edward
+FitzGerald--"an eccentric man of genius who took more pains to
+avoid fame than others do to seek it." And yet he is no recluse.
+When disciples seek out the hermit in hiding behind the vines at
+Slabsides, they find a genial welcome, a simple, homely hospitality;
+find that the author merits the Indian name given him by a clever
+friend--"Man-not-afraid-of-company."
+
+The simplicity and gentleness of this author and his strong interest
+in people endear him to the reader; we feel these qualities in his
+writings long before meeting him--a certain urbanity, a tolerant
+insight and sympathy, and a quiet humor.  These draw us to him.
+Perhaps after cherishing his writings for years, cherishing also
+a confident feeling that we shall know him some day, we obey a
+sudden impulse, write to him about a bird or a flower, ask help
+concerning a puzzling natural-history question, tell him what a
+solace "Waiting" is, what a joy his books have been; possibly we
+write some verses to him, or express appreciation for an essay
+that has enlarged our vision and opened up a new world of thought.
+Perhaps we go to see him at Slabsides, or in the Catskills, as the
+case may be; perhaps in some unexpected way he comes to us--stops
+in the same town where we live, visits the college where we are
+studying, or we encounter him in our travels.  In whatever way
+the personal relation comes about, we, one and all, share this
+feeling: he is no longer merely the favorite author, he is /our
+friend/ John Burroughs.
+
+I question whether there is any other modern writer so approachable,
+or one we so desire to approach.  He has so written himself into his
+books that we know him before meeting him; we are charmed with his
+directness and genuineness, and eager to claim the companionship his
+pages seem to offer.  Because of his own unaffected self, our
+artificialities drop away when we are with him; we want to be and
+say and do the genuine, simple thing; to be our best selves; and one
+who brings out this in us is sure to win our love.
+
+[Illustration: Slabsides.  From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott]
+
+Mr. Burroughs seems to have much in common with Edward FitzGerald;
+we may say of him as has been said of the translator of the
+"Rubaiyat":  "Perhaps some worship is given him . . . on account
+of his own refusal of worship for things unworthy, or even for things
+merely conventional."  Like FitzGerald, too, our friend is a lover
+of solitude; like him he shuns cities, gets his exhilaration from
+the common life about him; is inactive, easy-going, a loiterer
+and saunterer through life; and could say of himself as FitzGerald
+said, on describing his own uneventful days in the country: "Such
+is life, and I believe I have got hold of a good end of it." Another
+point of resemblance:  the American dreamer is like his English
+brother in his extreme sensitiveness--he cannot bear to inflict or
+experience pain.  "I lack the heroic fibre," he is wont to say.
+FitzGerald acknowledged this also, and, commenting on his own
+over-sensitiveness and tendency to melancholy, said, "It is well
+if the sensibility that makes us fearful of ourselves is diverted
+to become a case of sympathy and interest with nature and mankind."
+That this sensibility in Mr. Burroughs has been so diverted, all who
+are familiar with his widespread influence on our national life and
+literature will agree.
+
+In a bright descriptive article written a few years ago, Miss Isabel
+Moore dispels some preconceived and erroneous notions about Mr.
+Burroughs, and shows him as he is--a man keenly alive to the human
+nature and life around him.  "The boys and girls buzzed about him,"
+she says, "as bees about some peculiarly delectable blossom.  He
+walked with them, talked with them, entranced them . . . the most
+absolutely human person I have ever met--a born comrade, if there
+ever was one; in daily life a delightful acquaintance as well as a
+philosopher and poet and naturalist, and a few other things."  She
+describes him riding with a lot of young people on a billowy load of
+hay; going to a ball-game, at which no boy there enjoyed the contest
+more, or was better informed as to the points of the game. "Verily,"
+she says, "he has what Bjornson called 'the child in the heart.'"
+
+It is the "child in the heart," and, in a way, the "child" in his
+books, that accounts for his wide appeal.  He often says he can
+never think of his books as /works/, because so much play went into
+the making of them. He has gone out of doors in a holiday spirit,
+has had a good time, has never lost the boy's relish for his
+outings, and has been so blessed with the gift of expression that
+his own delight is communicated to his reader.
+
+And always it is the man behind the book that makes the widest
+appeal.  In 1912, a Western architect, in correspondence with the
+writer concerning recent essays of Mr. Burroughs, said:--
+
+
+I have had much pleasure and soul-help in reading and re-reading
+"The Summit of the Years."  In this, and in "All's Well with
+the World," is mirrored the very soul of the gentlest, the most
+lovable man-character I have ever come across in literature or
+life. . . .To me all his books, from "Wake-Robin" to "Time and
+Change," radiate the most joyous optimism. . . . During the past
+month I have devoted my evenings to re-reading [them]. . . . He
+has always meant a great deal more to me than merely intellectual
+pleasure, and, next to Walt Whitman, has helped me to keep my life
+as nearly open to the influences of outdoors and the stars as may
+be in a dweller in a large town.
+
+
+As I write, a letter comes from a Kansas youth, now a graduate
+student at Yale, expressing the hope that he can see Mr. Burroughs
+at Slabsides in April: "There is nothing I want to say--but for a
+while I would like to be near him. He is my great good teacher
+and friend. . . . As you know, he is more to me than Harvard or
+Yale.  He is the biggest, simplest, and serenest man I have met
+in all the East."
+
+I suppose there is no literary landmark in America that has had a
+more far-reaching influence than Slabsides.  Flocks of youths and
+maidens from many schools and colleges have, for the past fifteen
+years, climbed the hill to the rustic cabin in all the gayety and
+enthusiasm of their young lives.  But they have seen more than
+the picturesque retreat of a living author; they have received a
+salutary impression made by the unostentatious life of a man who
+has made a profound impression on his day who has made a profound
+impression on his day and age; they have gone their separate ways
+with an awakened sense of the comradeship it is possible to have
+with nature, and with an ennobling affection for the one who has
+made them aware of it. And this affection goes with them to whatever
+place on the globe their destinies carry them.  It is transmitted to
+their children; it becomes a very real part of their lives.
+
+"My dear John Burroughs--Everybody's dear John Burroughs," a friend
+writes him from London, recounting her amusing experiences in the
+study of English birds. And it is "Everybody's dear John Burroughs"
+who stands in the wide doorway at Slabsides and gives his callers
+a quiet, cordial welcome. And when the day is ended, and the
+visitor goes his way down the hill, he carries in his heart a
+new treasure--the surety that he has found a comrade.
+
+Having had the privilege for the past twelve years of helping
+Mr. Burroughs with his correspondence, I have been particularly
+interested in the spontaneous responses which have come to him
+from his young readers, not only in America, but from Europe,
+New Zealand, Australia.  Confident of his interest, they are boon
+companions from the start.  They describe their own environment,
+give glimpses of the wild life about them, come to him with their
+natural-history difficulties; in short, write as to a friend of
+whose tolerant sympathy they feel assured.  In fact, this is true
+of all his correspondents.  They get on easy footing at once. They
+send him birds, flowers, and insects to identify; sometimes live
+animals and birds--skylarks have been sent from England, which he
+liberated on the Hudson, hoping to persuade them to become
+acclimated; "St. John's Bread," or locust pods, have come to him
+from the Holy. Land; pressed flowers and ferns from the Himalayas,
+from Africa, from Haleakala.
+
+Many correspondents are considerate enough not to ask for an answer,
+realizing the countless demands of this nature made upon a man like
+Mr. Burroughs; others boldly ask, not only for a reply, but for
+a photograph, an autograph, his favorite poem written in his own
+hand, a list of favorite books, his views on capital punishment,
+on universal peace, on immortality; some naively ask for a sketch
+of his life, or a character sketch of his wife with details of their
+home life, and how they spend their time; a few modestly hope he
+will write a poem to them personally, all for their very own.  A
+man of forty-five is tired of the hardware business, lives in the
+country, sees Mr. Burroughs's essays in the "Country Calendar,"
+and asks him to "learn" him to "rite for the press."
+
+Some readers take him to task for his opinions, some point out
+errors, or too sweeping statements (for he does sometimes make
+them); occasionally one suggests other topics for him to write
+about; others labor to bring him back into orthodox paths; hundreds
+write of what a comfort "Waiting" has been; and there are countless
+requests for permission to visit Slabsides, as well as invitations
+to the homes of his readers.
+
+Many send him verses, a few the manuscripts of entire books, asking
+for criticism. (And when he does give criticism, he gives it
+"unsweetened," being too honest to praise a thing unless in his
+eyes it merits praise.)  Numerous are the requests that he write
+introductions to books; that he address certain women's clubs;
+that he visit a school, or a nature-study club, or go from Dan to
+Beersheba to hold Burroughs Days--each writer, as a rule, urging his
+claim as something very special, to which a deaf ear should not be
+turned. Not all his correspondents are as considerate as the little
+girl who was especially eager to learn his attitude toward snakes,
+and who, after writing a pretty letter, ended thus: "Inclosed you
+will find a stamp, for I know it must be fearfully expensive and
+inconvenient to be a celebrity."
+
+Occasionally he is a little severe with a correspondent, especially
+if one makes a preposterous statement, or draws absurd conclusions
+from faulty observations. But he is always fair.  The following
+letter explains itself:--
+
+
+Your first note concerning my cat and hog story made me as mad as a
+hornet, which my reply showed.  Your second note has changed me into
+a lamb, as nearly as a fellow of seventy-five can become one. . . .
+
+I have read, I think, every book you ever wrote, and do not let any
+production of yours escape me; and I have a little pile of framed
+copies of your inimitable "My Own" to diffuse among people at
+Christmas; and all these your writings make me wonder and shed
+metaphorical tears to think that you are such a heretic about
+reason in animals.  But even Homer nods; and it is said
+Roosevelt has moments of silence.         S. C. B.
+
+
+The questions his readers propound are sometimes very amusing. A
+physician of thirty years' practice asks in all seriousness how
+often the lions bring forth their young, and whether it is true
+that there is a relation between the years in which they breed
+and the increased productivity of human beings.  One correspondent
+begs Mr. Burroughs to tell him how he and his wife and Theodore
+Roosevelt fold their hands (as though the last-named ever folded
+his), declaring he can read their characters with surprising
+accuracy if this information is forthcoming.  In this instance,
+I think, Mr. Burroughs folded his hands serenely, leaving his
+correspondent waiting for the valued data.
+
+The reader will doubtless be interested to see the kind of letter
+the children sometimes get from their friend.  I am fortunate in
+having one written in 1887 to a rhetoric class in Fulton, New York,
+and one in 1911, written to children in the New York City schools,
+both of which I will quote:--
+
+
+West Park, N. Y., February 21, 1887
+
+My Dear Young Friends,--
+
+Your teacher Miss Lawrence has presumed that I might have something
+to say to a class of boys and girls studying rhetoric, and, what is
+more, that I might be disposed to say it.  What she tells me about
+your interest in my own writings certainly interests me and makes me
+wish I might speak a helpful word to you. But let me tell you that
+very little conscious rhetoric has gone into the composition of those
+same writings.
+
+Valuable as the study of rhetoric undoubtedly is, it can go but a
+little way in making you successful writers.  I think I have got
+more help as an author from going a-fishing than from any textbook
+or classbook I ever looked into.  Miss Lawrence will not thank me for
+encouraging you to play truant, but if you take Bacon's or Emerson's
+or Arnold's or Cowley's essays with you and dip into them now and
+then while you are waiting for the fish to bite, she will detect
+some fresh gleam in your composition when next you hand one in.
+
+There is no way to learn style so sure as by familiarity with nature,
+and by study of the great authors.  Shakespeare can teach you all
+there is to be learned of the art of expression, and the rhetoric
+of a live trout leaping and darting with such ease and sureness
+cannot well be beaten.
+
+What you really have in your heart, what you are in earnest about,
+how easy it is to say that!
+
+Miss Lawrence says you admire my essay on the strawberry.  Ah! but
+I loved the  strawberry--I loved the fields where it grew, I loved
+the birds that sang there, and the flowers that bloomed there, and
+I loved my mother who sent me forth to gather the berries; I loved
+all the rural sights and sounds, I felt near them, so that when, in
+after years, I came to write my essay I had only to obey the old
+adage which sums up all of the advice which can be given in these
+matters, "Look in thy heart and write."
+
+The same when I wrote about the apple.  I had apples in my blood and
+bones.  I had not ripened them in the haymow and bitten them under
+the seat and behind my slate so many times in school for nothing.
+Every apple tree I had ever shinned up and dreamed under of a long
+summer day, while a boy, helped me to write that paper.  The whole
+life on the farm, and love of home and of father and mother, helped
+me to write it.  In writing your compositions, put your rhetoric
+behind you and tell what you feel and know, and describe what
+you have seen.
+
+All writers come sooner or later to see that the great thing is
+to be simple and direct; only thus can you give a vivid sense of
+reality, and without a sense of reality the finest writing is
+mere froth.
+
+Strive to write sincerely, as you speak when mad, or when in
+love; not with the tips of the fingers of your mind, but with
+the whole hand.
+
+A noted English historian [Freeman] while visiting Vassar College
+went in to hear the rhetoric class.  After the exercises were over
+he said to the professor, "Why don't you teach your girls to spin a
+plain yarn?" I hope Miss Lawrence teaches you to spin a plain yarn.
+There is nothing like it.  The figures of rhetoric are not paper
+flowers to be sewed upon the texture of your composition; they have
+no value unless they are real flowers which sprout naturally from
+your heart.
+
+What force in the reply of that little Parisian girl I knew of!  She
+offered some trinkets for sale to a lady on the street.  "How much
+is this?" asked the lady, taking up some article from the little
+girl's basket.  "Judge for yourself. Madam, I have tasted no food
+since yesterday morning."  Under the pressure of any real feeling,
+even of hunger, our composition will not lack point.
+
+I might run on in this way another sheet, but I will stop.  I have
+been firing at you in the dark,--a boy or a girl at hand is worth
+several in the bush, off there in Fulton,--but if any of my words
+tingle in your ears and set you to thinking, why you have your
+teacher to thank for it.
+
+Very truly yours,
+John Burroughs.
+
+
+La Manda Park, Cal., February 24, 1911
+
+My Dear Young Friends,--
+
+A hint has come to me here in southern California, where I have
+been spending the winter, that you are planning to celebrate my
+birthday--my seventy-fourth this time, and would like a word from
+me.  Let me begin by saying that I hope that each one of you will
+at least reach my age, and be able to spend a winter, or several of
+them, in southern California, and get as much pleasure out of it
+as I have.  It is a beautiful land, with its leagues of orange
+groves, its stately plains, its park-like expanses, its bright,
+clean cities, its picturesque hamlets, and country homes, and all
+looked down upon by the high, deeply sculptured mountains and
+snow-capped peaks.
+
+Let me hope also that when you have reached my age you will be as
+well and as young as I am.  I am still a boy at heart, and enjoy
+almost everything that boys do, except making a racket.
+
+Youth and age have not much to do with years.  You are young so
+long as you keep your interest in things and relish your daily
+bread.  The world is "full of a number of things," and they are
+all very interesting.
+
+As the years pass I think my interest in this huge globe upon which
+we live, and in the life which it holds, deepens.  An active interest
+in life keeps the currents going and keeps them clear.  Mountain
+streams are young streams; they sing and sparkle as they go, and our
+lives may be the same.  With me, the secret of my youth in age is the
+simple life--simple food, sound sleep, the open air, daily work, kind
+thoughts, love of nature, and joy and contentment in the world in
+which I live. No excesses, no alcoholic drinks, no tobacco, no tea
+or coffee, no stimulants stronger than water and food.
+
+I have had a happy life. I have gathered my grapes with the bloom
+upon them.  May you all do the same.
+
+With all good wishes,
+John Burroughs
+
+
+"I have no genius for making gifts," Mr. Burroughs once said to
+me, but how his works belie his words!  In these letters, and in
+many others which his unknown friends have received from him, are
+gifts of rare worth, while his life itself has been a benefaction
+to us all.
+
+One day in recounting some of the propitious things which have
+come to him all unsought, he said:  "How fortunate I have always
+been!  My name should have been 'Felix.'" But since "John" means
+"the gracious gift of God," we are content that he was named
+John Burroughs,
+
+
+
+THE RETREAT OF A POET-NATURALIST
+
+
+We are coming more and more to like the savor of the wild and the
+unconventional.  Perhaps it is just this savor or suggestion of
+free fields and woods, both in his life and in his books, that
+causes so many persons to seek out John Burroughs in his retreat
+among the trees and rocks on the hills that skirt the western bank
+of the Hudson.  To Mr. Burroughs more perhaps than to any other
+living American might be applied these words in Genesis: "See, the
+smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord hath
+blessed"--so redolent of the soil and of the hardiness and plenitude
+of rural things is the influence that emanates from him.  His works
+are as the raiment of the man, and to them adheres something as racy
+and wholesome as is yielded by the fertile soil.
+
+We are prone to associate the names of our three most prominent
+literary naturalists,--Gilbert White, of England, and Thoreau and
+John Burroughs, of America,--men who have been so /en rapport/ with
+nature that, while ostensibly only disclosing the charms of their
+mistress, they have at the same time subtly communicated much of
+their own wide knowledge of nature, and permanently enriched our
+literature as well.
+
+In thinking of Gilbert White one invariably thinks also of Selborne,
+his open-air parish; in thinking of Thoreau one as naturally recalls
+his humble shelter on the banks of Walden Pond; and it is coming to
+pass that in thinking of John Burroughs one thinks likewise of his
+hidden farm high on the wooded hills that overlook the Hudson,
+nearly opposite Poughkeepsie.  It is there that he has built himself
+a picturesque retreat, a rustic house named Slabsides.  I find that,
+to many, the word "Slabsides" gives the impression of a dilapidated,
+ramshackle kind of place.  This impression is an incorrect one.
+The cabin is a well-built two-story structure, its uneuphonious but
+fitting name having been given it because its outer walls are formed
+of bark-covered slabs.  "My friends frequently complain," said Mr.
+Burroughs, "because I have not given my house a prettier name, but
+this name just expresses the place, and the place just meets the
+want that I felt for something simple, homely, secluded--something
+with the bark on."
+
+Both Gilbert White and Thoreau became identified with their
+respective environments almost to the exclusion of other fields.
+The minute observations of White, and his records of them, extending
+over forty years, were almost entirely confined to the district of
+Selborne.  He says that he finds that "that district produces the
+greatest variety which is the most examined."  The thoroughness
+with which he examined his own locality is attested by his "Natural
+History of Selborne." Thoreau was such a stay-at-home that he
+refused to go to Paris lest he miss something of interest in
+Concord.  "I have traveled a good deal in Concord," he says in his
+droll way.  And one of the most delicious instances of provinciality
+that I ever came across is Thoreau's remark on returning Dr. Kane's
+"Arctic Explorations" to a friend who had lent him the book--"Most of
+the phenomena therein recorded are to be observed about Concord."
+In thinking of John Burroughs, however, the thought of the author's
+mountain home as the material and heart of his books does not come
+so readily to consciousness. For most of us who have felt the
+charm, of his lyrical prose, both in his outdoor books and in his
+"Indoor Studies," were familiar with him as an author long before we
+knew there was a Slabsides--long before there was one, in fact, since
+he has been leading his readers to nature for fifty years, while the
+picturesque refuge we are now coming to associate with him has been
+in existence only about fifteen years.
+
+Our poet-naturalist seems to have appropriated all outdoors for
+his stamping-ground.  He has given us in his limpid prose intimate
+glimpses of the hills and streams and pastoral farms of his native
+country; has taken us down the Pepacton, the stream of his boyhood;
+we have traversed with him the "Heart of the Southern Catskills,"
+and the valleys of the Neversink and the Beaverkill; we have sat
+upon the banks of the Potomac, and sailed down the Saguenay; we
+have had a glimpse of the Blue Grass region, and "A Taste of Maine
+Birch" (true, Thoreau gave us this, also, and other "Excursions"
+as well); we have walked with him the lanes of "Mellow England";
+journeyed "In the Carlyle Country"; marveled at the azure glaciers
+of Alaska; wandered in the perpetual summerland of Jamaica; camped
+with him and the Strenuous One in the Yellowstone; looked in awe and
+wonder at that "Divine Abyss," the Grand Canon of the Colorado; felt
+the "Spell of Yosemite," and idled with him under the sun-steeped
+skies of Hawaii and by her morning-glory seas.
+
+Our essayist is thus seen not to be untraveled, yet he is no
+wanderer.  No man ever had the home feeling stronger than has
+he; none is more completely under the spell of a dear and familiar
+locality.  Somewhere he has said: "Let a man stick his staff into
+the ground anywhere and say, 'This is home,' and describe things
+from that point of view, or as they stand related to that spot,--the
+weather, the fauna, the flora,--and his account shall have an
+interest to us it could not have if not thus located and defined."
+
+[Illustration: Riverby from the Orchard.  From a photograph
+by Charles S. Olcott]
+
+Before hunting out Mr. Burroughs in his mountain hermitage, let
+us glance at his conventional abode, Riverby, at West Park, Ulster
+County, New York.  This has been his home since 1874.  Having chosen
+this place by the river, he built his house of stone quarried from
+the neighboring hills, and finished it with the native woods; he
+planted a vineyard on the sloping hillside, and there he has
+successfully combined the business of grape-culture with his
+pursuits and achievements as a literary naturalist.  More than
+half his books have been written since he has dwelt at Riverby,
+the earlier ones having appeared when he was a clerk in the Treasury
+Department in Washington, an atmosphere supposedly unfriendly to
+literary work.  It was not until he gave up his work in Washington,
+and his later position as bank examiner in the eastern part of New
+York State, that he seemed to come into his own.  Business life, he
+had long known, could never be congenial to him; literary pursuits
+alone were insufficient; the long line of yeoman ancestry back of
+him cried out for recognition; he felt the need of closer contact
+with the soil; of having land to till and cultivate.  This need, an
+ancestral one, was as imperative as his need of literary expression,
+an individual one.  Hear what he says after having ploughed in his
+new vineyard for the first time: "How I soaked up the sunshine
+to-day!  At night I glowed all over; my whole being had had an
+earth bath; such a feeling of freshly ploughed land in every
+cell of my brain.  The furrow had struck in; the sunshine had
+photographed it upon my soul."  Later he built him a little study
+somewhat apart from his dwelling, to which he could retire and muse
+and write whenever the mood impelled him.  This little one-room
+study, covered with chestnut bark, is on the brow of a hill which
+slopes toward the river; it commands an extended view of the Hudson.
+But even this did not meet his requirements.  The formality and
+routine of conventional life palled upon him; the expanse of the
+Hudson, the noise of railway and steamboat wearied him; he craved
+something more retired, more primitive, more homely. "You cannot
+have the same kind of attachment and sympathy for a great river;
+it does not flow through your affections like a lesser stream," he
+says, thinking, no doubt, of the trout-brooks that thread his
+father's farm, of Montgomery Hollow Stream, of the Red Kill, and
+of others that his boyhood knew.  Accordingly he cast about for
+some sequestered spot in which to make himself a hermitage.
+
+[Illustration: The Study, Riverby.  From a photograph
+by Charles S. Olcott]
+
+During his excursions in the vicinity of West Park, Mr. Burroughs
+had lingered oftenest in the hills back of, and parallel with,
+the Hudson, and here he finally chose the site for his rustic
+cabin.  He had fished and rowed in Black Pond, sat by its falls
+in the primitive forest, sometimes with a book, sometimes with
+his son, or with some other hunter or fisher of congenial tastes;
+and on one memorable day in April, years agone, he had tarried
+there with Walt Whitman. There, seated on a fallen tree, Whitman
+wrote this description of the place which was later printed in
+"Specimen Days":--
+
+
+I jot this memorandum in a wild scene of woods and hills where
+we have come to visit a waterfall.  I never saw finer or more
+copious hemlocks, many of them large, some old and hoary.  Such
+a sentiment to them, secretive, shaggy, what I call weather-beaten,
+and let-alone--a rich underlay of ferns, yew sprouts and mosses,
+beginning to be spotted with the early summer wild flowers.
+Enveloping all, the monotone and liquid gurgle from the hoarse,
+impetuous, copious fall--the greenish-tawny, darkly transparent
+waters plunging with velocity down the rocks, with patches of
+milk-white foam--a stream of hurrying amber, thirty feet wide,
+risen far back in the hills and woods, now rushing with volume--every
+hundred rods a fall, and sometimes three or four in that distance.
+A primitive forest, druidical, solitary, and savage--not ten visitors
+a year--broken rocks everywhere, shade overhead, thick underfoot with
+leaves--a just palpable wild and delicate aroma.
+
+
+"Not ten visitors a year" may have been true when Whitman described
+the place, but we know it is different now.  Troops of Vassar girls
+come to visit the hermit of Slabsides, and are taken to these falls;
+nature-lovers, and those who only think themselves nature-lovers,
+come from far and near; Burroughs clubs, boys' schools, girls'
+schools, pedestrians, cyclists, artists, authors, reporters,
+poets,--young and old, renowned and obscure,--from April till November
+seek out this lover of nature, who is a lover of human nature as
+well, who gives himself and his time generously to those who find
+him. When the friends of Socrates asked him where they should bury
+him, he said: "You may bury me if you can /find/ me."  Not all who
+seek John Burroughs really find him; he does not mix well with every
+newcomer; one must either have something of Mr. Burroughs's own
+cast of mind, or else be of a temperament capable of genuine sympathy
+with him, in order to find the real man.  He withdraws into his
+shell before persons of uncongenial temperament; to such he can
+never really speak--they see Slabsides, but they don't see Burroughs.
+He is, however, never curt or discourteous to any one.  Unlike
+Thoreau, who "put the whole of nature between himself and his
+fellows," Mr. Burroughs leads his fellows to nature, although it
+is sometimes, doubtless, with the feeling that one can lead a horse
+to water, but can't make him drink; for of all the sightseers that
+journey to Slabsides there must of necessity be many that "Oh!" and
+"Ah!" a good deal, but never really get further in their study of
+nature than that.  Still, it can scarcely fail to be salutary even
+to these to get away from the noise and the strife in city and town,
+and see how sane, simple, and wholesome life is when lived in a sane
+and simple and wholesome way. Somehow it helps one to get a clearer
+sense of the relative value of things, it makes one ashamed of his
+petty pottering over trifles, to witness this exemplification of
+the plain living and high thinking which so many preach about, and
+so few practice.
+
+"The thing which a man's nature calls him to do--what else so well
+worth doing?" asks this writer.  One's first impression after
+glancing about this well-built cabin, with the necessities of body
+and soul close at hand, is a vicarious satisfaction that here, at
+least, is one who has known what he wanted to do and has done it.
+We are glad that Gilbert White made pastoral calls on his outdoor
+parishioners,--the birds, the toads, the turtles, the snails, and
+the earthworms,--although we often wonder if he evinced a like
+conscientiousness toward his human parishioners; we are glad that
+Thoreau left the manufacture of lead pencils to become, as Emerson
+jocosely complained, "the leader of a huckleberry party",--glad
+because these were the things their natures called them to do,
+and in so doing they best enriched their fellows. They literally
+went away that they might come to us in a closer, truer way than
+had they tarried in our midst.  It must have been in answer to a
+similar imperative need of his own that John Burroughs chose to
+hie himself to the secluded yet accessible spot where his mountain
+cabin is built.
+
+"As the bird feathers her nest with down plucked from her own
+breast," says Mr. Burroughs in one of his early essays, "so one's
+spirit must shed itself upon its environment before it can brood
+and be at all content."  Here at Slabsides one feels that its master
+does brood and is content.  It is an ideal location for a man of his
+temperament; it affords him the peace and seclusion he desires, yet
+is not so remote that he is shut off from human fellowship.  For he
+is no recluse; his sympathies are broad and deep.  Unlike Thoreau,
+who asserts that "you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and
+nature," and that "those qualities that bring you near to the one
+estrange you from the other," Mr. Burroughs likes his kind; he is
+doubtless the most accessible of all notable American writers,--a
+fact which is perhaps a drawback to him in his literary work, his
+submission to being hunted out often being taken advantage of, no
+doubt, by persons who are in no real sense nature-lovers, but who
+go to his retreat merely to see the hermit in hiding there.
+
+After twelve years' acquaintance with his books I yielded to the
+impulse, often felt before, to tell Mr. Burroughs what a joy his
+writings had been to me.  In answering my letter he said: "The
+genuine responses that come to an author from his unknown readers,
+judging from my own experience, are always very welcome.  It is no
+intrusion but rather an inspiration."  A gracious invitation to make
+him a visit came later.
+
+The visit was made in the "month of tall weeds," in September,
+1901. Arriving at West Park, the little station on the West Shore
+Railway, I found Mr. Burroughs in waiting.  The day was gray and
+somewhat forbidding; not so the author's greeting; his almost
+instant recognition and his quiet welcome made me feel that I had
+always known him.  It was like going home to hear him say quietly,
+"So you are here--really here," as he took my hand.  The feeling of
+comradeship that I had experienced in reading his books was realized
+in his presence.  With market-basket on arm, he started off at a
+brisk pace along the country road, first looking to see if I was
+well shod, as he warned me that it was quite a climb to Slabsides.
+
+His kindly face was framed with snowy hair.  He was dressed in
+olive-brown clothes, and "his old experienced coat" blended in color
+with the tree-trunks and the soil with which one felt sure it had
+often been in close communion.
+
+We soon left the country road and struck into a woodland path, going
+up through quiet, cathedral-like woods till we came to an abrupt
+rocky stairway which my companion climbed with ease and agility
+despite his five-and-sixty years.
+
+I paused to examine some mushrooms, and, finding a species that I
+knew to be edible, began nibbling it.  "Don't taste that," he said
+imperatively; but I laughed and nibbled away.  With a mingling of
+anxiety and curiosity he inquired: "Are you sure it's all right?
+Do you really like them?  I never could; they are so uncanny--the
+gnomes or evil genii or hobgoblins of the vegetable world--give
+them a wide berth."
+
+He pointed to a rock in the distance where he said he sometimes sat
+and sulked. "/You/ sulk, and own up to it, too?" I asked.  "Yes, and
+own up to it, too.  Why not?  Don't you?"
+
+"Are there any bee-trees around here?" I questioned, remembering
+that in one of his essays he has said: "If you would know the
+delight of bee-hunting, and how many sweets such a trip yields
+besides honey, come with me some bright, warm, late September or
+early October day. It is the golden season of the year, and any
+errand or pursuit that takes us abroad upon the hills, or by the
+painted woods and along the amber-colored streams at such a time
+is enough."  Here was a September day if not a bright one, and here
+were the painted woods, and somehow I felt half aggrieved that he
+did not immediately propose going in quest of wild honey.  Instead
+he only replied: "I don't know whether there are bee-trees around
+here now or not.  I used to find a good deal of wild honey over at
+a place that I spoke of casually as Mount Hymettus, and was much
+surprised later to find they had so put it down on the maps of this
+region.  Wild honey is delectable, but I pursued that subject till
+I sucked it dry.  I haven't done much about it these later years."
+So we are not to gather wild honey, I find; but what of that?--am I
+not actually walking in the woods with John Burroughs?
+
+Up, up we climb, an ascent of about a mile and a quarter from the
+railway station.  Emerging from the woods, we come rather suddenly
+upon a reclaimed rock-girt swamp, the most of which is marked off in
+long green lines of celery. This swamp was formerly a lake-bottom;
+its rich black soil and three perennial springs near by decided Mr.
+Burroughs to drain and reclaim the soil and compel it to yield
+celery and other garden produce.
+
+Nestling under gray rocks, on the edge of the celery garden,
+embowered in forest trees, is the vine-covered cabin, Slabsides.
+What a feeling of peace and aloofness comes over one in looking up
+at the encircling hills!  The few houses scattered about on other
+rocks are at a just comfortable distance to be neighborly, but not
+too neighborly.  Would one be lonesome here?  Aye, lonesome, but--
+
+          "Not melancholy,--no, for it is green
+          And bright and fertile, furnished in itself
+          With the few needful things that life requires;
+          In rugged arms how soft it seems to lie,
+          How tenderly protected!"
+
+Mr. Burroughs has given to those who contemplate building a house
+some sound advice in his essay "Roof-Tree."  There he has said that
+a man makes public proclamation of what are his tastes and his
+manners, or his want of them, when he builds his house; that if
+we can only keep our pride and vanity in abeyance and forget that
+all the world is looking on, we may be reasonably sure of having
+beautiful houses.  Tried by his own test, he has no reason to be
+ashamed of his taste or his manners when Slabsides is critically
+examined.  Blending with its surroundings, it is coarse, strong,
+and substantial without; within it is snug and comfortable; its
+wide door bespeaks hospitality; its low, broad roof, protection
+and shelter; its capacious hearth, cheer; all its appointments
+for the bodily needs express simplicity and frugality; and its
+books and magazines, and the conversation of the host--are they
+not there for the needs that bread alone will not supply?
+
+"Mr. Burroughs, why don't you PAINT things?" asked a little boy of
+four, who had been spending a happy day at Slabsides, but who, at
+nightfall, while nestling in the author's arms, seemed suddenly to
+realize that this rustic house was very different from anything he
+had seen before. "I don't like things painted, my little man; that
+is just why I came up here--to get away from paint and polish--just
+as you liked to wear your overalls to-day and play on the grass,
+instead of keeping on that pretty dress your mother wanted you to
+keep clean." "Oh!" said the child in such a knowing tone that one
+felt he understood.  But that is another story.
+
+The time of which I am speaking--that gray September day--what a
+memorable day it was!  How cheery the large, low room looked when
+the host replenished the smouldering fire!  "I sometimes come up
+here even in winter, build a fire, and stay for an hour or more,
+with long, sad, sweet thoughts and musings," he said. He is justly
+proud of the huge stone fireplace and chimney which he himself
+helped to construct; he also helped to hew the trees and build the
+house.  "What joy went into the building of this retreat!  I never
+expect to be so well content again."  Then, musing, he added: "It
+is a comfortable, indolent life I lead here; I read a little, write
+a little, and dream a good deal.  Here the sun does not rise so
+early as it does down at Riverby.  'Tired nature's sweet restorer'
+is not put to rout so soon by the screaming whistles, the thundering
+trains, and the necessary rules and regulations of well-ordered
+domestic machinery.  Here I really 'loaf and invite my soul.'  Yes,
+I am often melancholy, and hungry for companionship--not in the
+summer months, no, but in the quiet evenings before the fire, with
+only Silly Sally to share my long, long thoughts; she is very
+attentive, but I doubt if she notices when I sigh.  She doesn't even
+heed me when I tell her that ornithology is a first-rate pursuit for
+men, but a bad one for cats.  I suspect that she studies the birds
+with greater care than I do; for now I can get all I want of a bird
+and let him remain in the bush, but Silly Sally is a thorough-going
+ornithologist; she must engage in all the feather-splittings that
+the ornithologists do, and she isn't satisfied until she has
+thoroughly dissected and digested her material, and has all the
+dry bones of the subject laid bare."
+
+We sat before the fire while Mr. Burroughs talked of nature, of
+books, of men and women whose lives or books, or both, have closely
+touched his own.  He talked chiefly of Emerson and Whitman, the
+men to whom he seems to owe the most, the two whom most his soul
+has loved.
+
+"I remember the first time I saw Emerson," he said musingly; "it
+was at West Point during the June examinations of the cadets. Emerson
+had been appointed by President Lincoln as one of the board of
+visitors.  I had been around there in the afternoon, and had been
+peculiarly interested in a man whose striking face and manner
+challenged my attention.  I did not hear him speak, but watched
+him going about with a silk hat, much too large, pushed back on
+his head; his sharp eyes peering into everything, curious about
+everything.  'Here,' said I to myself, 'is a countryman who has
+got away from home, and intends to see all that is going on'--such
+an alert, interested air!  That evening a friend came to me and in
+a voice full of awe and enthusiasm said, 'Emerson is in town!' Then
+I knew who the alert, sharp-eyed stranger was.  We went to the
+meeting and met our hero, and the next day walked and talked with
+him.  He seemed glad to get away from those old fogies and talk with
+us young men.  I carried his valise to the boat-landing--I was in the
+seventh heaven of delight."
+
+"I saw him several years later," he continued, "soon after
+'Wake-Robin' was published; he mentioned it and said: 'Capital
+title, capital!'  I don't suppose he had read much besides
+the title."
+
+"The last time I saw him," he said with a sigh, "was at Holmes's
+seventieth-birthday breakfast, in Boston.  But then his mind was
+like a splendid bridge with one span missing; he had--what is it you
+doctors call it?--/aphasia/, yes, that is it--he had to grope for his
+words.  But what a serene, godlike air! He was like a plucked eagle
+tarrying in the midst of a group of lesser birds.  He would sweep
+the assembly with that searching glance, as much as to say, 'What
+is all this buzzing and chirping about?'  Holmes was as brilliant
+and scintillating as ever; sparks of wit would greet every newcomer,
+flying out as the sparks fly from that log.  Whittier was there,
+too, looking nervous and uneasy and very much out of his element.
+But he stood next to Emerson, prompting his memory and supplying the
+words his voice refused to utter.  When I was presented, Emerson
+said in a slow, questioning way, 'Burroughs--Burroughs?' 'Why, thee
+knows /him/,' said Whittier, jogging his memory with some further
+explanation; but I doubt if he then remembered anything about me."
+
+It was not such a leap from the New England writers to Whitman as
+one might imagine.  Mr. Burroughs spoke of Emerson's prompt and
+generous indorsement of the first edition of "Leaves of Grass": "I
+give you joy of your free, brave thought.  I have great joy in it."
+This and much else Emerson had written in a letter to Whitman.  "It
+is the charter of an emperor!"  Dana had said when Whitman showed
+him the letter.  The poet's head was undoubtedly a little turned
+by praise from such a source, and much to Emerson's annoyance, the
+letter was published in the next edition of the "Leaves."  Still
+Emerson and Whitman remained friends to the last.
+
+"Whitman was a child of the sea," said Mr. Burroughs; "nurtured
+by the sea, cradled by the sea; he gave one the same sense of
+invigoration and of illimitableness that we get from the sea. He
+never looked so much at home as when on the shore--his gray clothes,
+gray hair, and far-seeing blue-gray eyes blending with the
+surroundings.  And his thoughts--the same broad sweep, the elemental
+force and grandeur and all-embracingness of the impartial sea!"
+
+"Whitman never hurried," Mr. Burroughs continued; "he always seemed
+to have infinite time at his disposal."  It brought Whitman very
+near to hear Mr. Burroughs say, "He used to take Sunday breakfasts
+with us in Washington.  Mrs. Burroughs makes capital pancakes, and
+Walt was very fond of them; but he was always late to breakfast.
+The coffee would boil over, the griddle would smoke, car after car
+would go jingling by, and no Walt.  Sometimes it got to be a little
+trying to have domestic arrangements so interfered with; but a car
+would stop at last, Walt would roll off it, and saunter up to the
+door--cheery, vigorous, serene, putting every one in good humor. And
+how he ate! He radiated health and hopefulness.  This is what made
+his work among the sick soldiers in Washington of such inestimable
+value.  Every one that came into personal relations with him felt
+his rare compelling charm."
+
+It was all very well, this talk about the poets, but climbing
+"break-neck stairs" on our way thither had given the guest an
+appetite, and the host as well; and these appetites had to be
+appeased by something less transcendental than a feast of reason.
+Scarcely interrupting his engaging monologue, Mr. Burroughs went
+about his preparations for dinner, doing things deftly and quietly,
+all unconscious that there was anything peculiar in this sight to
+the spectator.  Potatoes and onions were brought in with the earth
+still on them, their bed was made under the ashes, and we sat
+down to more talk.  After a while he took a chicken from the
+market-basket, spread it on a toaster, and broiled it over the
+coals; he put the dishes on the hearth to warm, washed the celery,
+parched some grated corn over the coals while the chicken was
+broiling, talking the while of Tolstoy and of Maeterlinck, of
+orioles and vireos, of whatever we happened to touch upon. He
+avowed that he was envious of Maeterlinck on account of his poetic
+"Life of the Bee."  "I ought to have written that," he said; "I know
+the bee well enough, but I could never do anything so exquisite."
+
+Parts of Maeterlinck's "Treasures of the Humble," and "Wisdom and
+Destiny," he "couldn't stand."  I timorously mentioned his chapter
+on "Silence."
+
+"'Silence'? Oh, yes; silence is very well--some kinds of it; but
+/why make such a noise about silence/?" he asked with a twinkle in
+his eyes.
+
+When the chicken was nearly ready, I moved toward the dining-table,
+on which some dishes were piled. As though in answer to my thought,
+he said:
+
+"Yes, if there's anything you can do there, you may." So I began
+arranging the table.
+
+"Where are /my/ knife and fork?" "In the cupboard," he answered
+without ceremony.
+
+We brought the good things from the hearth, hot and delicious, and
+sat down to a dinner that would have done credit to an Adirondack
+guide,--and when one has said this, what more need one say?
+
+In helping myself to the celery I took an outside piece.  Mine host
+reached over and, putting a big white centre of celery on my plate,
+said: "What's the use taking the outside of things when one can
+have the heart?"  This is typical of John Burroughs's life as well
+as his art--he has let extraneous things, conventionalities, and
+non-essentials go; has gone to the heart of things. It is this that
+has made his work so vital.
+
+As we arose from the table, I began picking up the dishes.
+
+"You are going to help, are you?"
+
+"Of course," I replied; "where is your dish-cloth? "--a natural
+question, as any woman will agree, but what a consternation it
+evoked!  A just perceptible delay, a fumbling among pots and pans,
+and he came toward me with a most apologetic air, and with the
+sorriest-looking rag I had ever seen--its narrow circumference
+encircling a very big hole.
+
+"Is /that/ the best dish-cloth you have?" I asked.
+
+For answer he held it up in front of his face, but the most of it
+being hole, it did not hide the eyes that twinkled so merrily that
+my housewifely reproof was effectually silenced. I took the sorry
+remnant and began washing the dishes, mentally resolving, and
+carrying out my resolution the next day, to send him a respectable
+dish-cloth.  Prosaic, if you will, but does not his own Emerson
+say something about giving--
+
+          "to barrows, trays, and pans,
+          Grace and glimmer of romance"?
+
+And what graces a dish-pan better than a clean, whole,
+self-respecting dish-cloth?
+
+So there we stood, John Burroughs and his humble reader, washing and
+wiping dishes, and weighing Amiel and Schopenhauer in the balance at
+the same time; and a very novel and amusing experience it was.  Yet
+it did not seem so strange after all, but almost as though it had
+happened before.  Silly Sally purred beseechingly as she followed
+her master about the room and out to the wood-pile, reminding him
+that she liked chicken bones.
+
+While putting the bread in the large tin box that stood on the
+stair-landing, I had some difficulty with the clasp.  "Never mind
+that," said Mr. Burroughs, as he scraped the potato skins into the
+fire; "a Vassar girl sat down on that box last summer, and it's
+never been the same since."
+
+The work finished, there was more talk before the fire.  It was here
+that the author told his guest about Anne Gilchrist, the talented,
+noble-hearted Englishwoman, whose ready acceptance of Whitman's
+message bore fruit in her penetrating criticism of Whitman, a
+criticism which stands to-day unrivaled by anything that has been
+written concerning the Good Gray Poet.
+
+Like most of Mr. Burroughs' readers, I cherish his poem "Waiting,"
+and, like most of them, I told him so on seeing him seated before
+the fire with folded hands and face serene, a living embodiment of
+the faith and trust expressed in those familiar lines.  It would
+seem natural that he should write such a poem after the heat of the
+day, after his ripe experience, after success had come to him; it is
+the lesson we expect one to learn on reaching his age, and learning
+how futile is the fret and urge of life, how infinitely better is
+the attitude of trust that what is our own will gravitate to us in
+obedience to eternal laws. But I there learned that he had written
+the poem when a young man, life all before him, his prospects in a
+dubious and chaotic condition, his aspirations seeming likely to
+come to naught.
+
+"I have lived to prove it true," he said,--"that which I but vaguely
+divined when I wrote the lines.  Our lives are all so fearfully
+and wonderfully shot through with the very warp and woof of the
+universe, past, present, and to come!  No doubt at all that our
+own--that which our souls crave and need--does gravitate toward us,
+or we toward it.  'Waiting' has been successful," he added, "not
+on account of its poetic merit, but for some other merit or quality.
+It puts in simple and happy form some common religious aspirations,
+without using the religious jargon.  People write me from all
+parts of the country that they treasure it in their hearts; that
+it steadies their hand at the helm; that it is full of consolation
+for them.  It is because it is poetry allied with religion that
+it has this effect; poetry alone would not do this; neither would
+a prose expression of the same religious aspirations do it, for
+we often outgrow the religious views and feelings of the past.
+The religious thrill, the sense of the Infinite, the awe and
+majesty of the universe, are no doubt permanent in the race, but
+the expression of these feelings in creeds and forms addressed to
+the understanding, or exposed to the analysis of the understanding,
+is as transient and flitting as the leaves of the trees.  My little
+poem is vague enough to escape the reason, sincere enough to go to
+the heart, and poetic enough to stir the imagination."
+
+The power of accurate observation, of dispassionate analysis, of
+keen discrimination and insight that we his readers are familiar
+with in his writings about nature, books, men, and life in general,
+is here seen to extend to self-analysis as well,--a rare gift; a
+power that makes his opinions carry conviction.  We feel he is not
+intent on upholding any theory, but only on seeing things as they
+are, and reporting them as they are.
+
+A steady rain had set in early in the afternoon, effectually
+drowning my hopes of a longer wood-land walk that day, but I
+was then, and many a time since then have been, well content
+that it was so.  I learned less of woodland lore, but more of
+the woodland philosopher.
+
+In quiet converse passed the hours of that memorable day in
+the humble retreat on the wooded hills,--
+
+          "Far from the clank of the world,"--
+
+and in the company of the poet-naturalist.  So cordial had my host
+been, so gracious the admission to his home and hospitality, that I
+left the little refuge with a feeling of enrichment I shall cherish
+while life lasts.  I had sought out a favorite author; I had gained
+a friend.
+
+
+
+AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
+
+
+[In response to my request, Mr. Burroughs began in 1903 to write
+for me a series of letters, autobiographical in character.  It
+is from them, for the most part, helped out by interviews to
+fill in the gaps, that I have compiled this part of the book.
+The letters were not written continuously; begun in 1903, they
+suffered a long interruption, were resumed in 1906, again in 1907,
+and lastly in 1912.  The reader will, I trust, pardon any repetition
+noted, an occasional return to a subject previously touched upon
+being unavoidable because of the long intervals between some of
+the letters.
+
+It seems to me that these letters picture our author more faithfully
+than could any portrait drawn by another.  Thomas Bailey Aldrich
+has said that no man has ever yet succeeded in painting an honest
+portrait of himself in an autobiography, however sedulously he may
+have set about it; that in spite of his candid purpose he omits
+necessary touches and adds superfluous ones; that at times he cannot
+help draping his thought, and that, of course, the least shred
+of drapery is a disguise.  But, Aldrich to the contrary
+notwithstanding, I believe Mr. Burroughs has pictured himself
+and his environment in these pages with the same fidelity with
+which he has interpreted nature.  He is so used to "straight seeing
+and straight thinking" that these gifts do not desert him when his
+observation is turned upon himself.  He seems to be a shining
+example of the exception that proves the rule.  Besides, when
+Aldrich pronounced that dictum, Mr. Burroughs had not produced
+these sketches.
+
+This record was not written with the intention of its being
+published as it stood, but merely to acquaint me with the facts
+and with the author's feelings concerning them, in case I should
+some day undertake his biography.  But it seems to me that just
+because it was so written, it has a value which would be considerably
+lessened were it to be worked over into a more finished form.  I have
+been willing to sacrifice the more purely literary value which would
+undoubtedly grace the record, were the author to revise it, that I
+may retain its homely, unstudied human value.
+
+I have arranged the autobiographical material under three
+headings:  Ancestry and Family Life, Childhood and Youth, and
+Self-Analysis.--C. B.]
+
+
+
+ANCESTRY AND FAMILY LIFE
+
+
+I am, as you know, the son of a farmer.  My father was the son of
+a farmer, as was his father, and his.  There is no break, so far
+as I know, in the line of farmers back into the seventeenth century.
+There was a Rev. George Burroughs who was hanged (in 1692) for a
+witch in Salem.  He was a Harvard graduate.  I know of no other
+Harvard graduate by our name until Julian [Mr. Burroughs's son]
+graduated in 1901 from Harvard.  My father's cousin, the Rev.
+John C. Burroughs, the first president of Chicago University,
+was graduated from Yale sometime in the early forties.
+
+The first John Burroughs of whom I have any trace came from the West
+Indies, and settled in Stratford, Connecticut, where he married
+in 1694.  He had ten children, of whom the seventh was John, born
+in August, 1705.  My descent does not come from this John, but from
+his eldest brother, Stephen, who was born at Stratford in February,
+1695.  Stephen had eight children, and here another John turns
+up--his last child, born in 1745.  His third child, Stephen Burroughs
+(born in 1729), was a shipbuilder and became a noted mathematician
+and astronomer, and lived at Bridgeport, Connecticut.  My descent
+is through Stephen's seventh child, Ephraim, born in 1740.
+
+Ephraim, my great-grandfather, also had a large family, six sons
+and several daughters, of which my grandfather Eden was one.  He
+was born in Stratford, about 1770.  My great-grandfather Ephraim
+left Stratford near the beginning of the Revolution and came into
+New York State, first into Dutchess County, when Grandfather was a
+small boy, and finally settled in what is now the town of Stamford,
+Delaware County, where he died in 1818.  He is buried in a field
+between Hobart and Stamford.
+
+My grandfather Eden married Rachael Avery, and shortly afterward
+moved over the mountain to the town of Roxbury, cutting a road
+through the woods and bringing his wife and all their goods and
+chattels on a sled drawn by a yoke of oxen. This must have been
+not far from the year 1795. He cleared the land and built a log
+house with a black-ash bark roof, and a great stone chimney, and
+a floor of hewn logs.  Grandmother said it was the happiest day of
+her life when she found herself the mistress of this little house
+in the woods.  Great-grandmother Avery lived with them later.  She
+had a petulant disposition. One day when reproved for something,
+she went off and hid herself in the bushes and sulked--a family
+trait; I'm a little that way, I guess.
+
+Grandfather Burroughs was religious,--an Old-School Baptist,--a
+thoughtful, quiet, exemplary man who read his Bible much.  He was of
+spare build, serious, thrifty after the manner of pioneers, and a
+kind husband and father.  He died, probably of apoplexy, when I was
+four years old. I can dimly remember him.  He was about seventy-two.
+
+Grandmother Burroughs had sandy hair and a freckled face, and from
+her my father and his sister Abby got their red hair.  From this
+source I doubtless get some of my Celtic blood.  Grand-mother
+Burroughs had nine children; the earliest ones died in infancy;
+their graves are on the hill in the old burying-ground.  Two boys
+and five girls survived--Phoebe, Betsy, Mary, Abby, Olly, Chauncey
+(my father), and Hiram.
+
+I do not remember Grandmother at all.  She died, I think, in
+1838, of consumption; she was in the seventies.  Father said her
+last words were, "Chauncey, I have but a little while to live."
+Her daughter Oily and also my sister Oily died of consumption.
+Grandmother used to work with Grandfather in the fields, and help
+make sugar.  I have heard them tell how in 1812 they raised wheat
+which sold for $2.50 a bushel--a great thing.
+
+Father told me of his uncle, Chauncey Avery, brother of Grandmother
+Burroughs, who, with his wife and seven children, was drowned near
+Shandaken, by a flood in the Esopus Creek, in April, 1814, or 1816.
+The creek rose rapidly in the night; retreat was cut off in the
+morning.  They got on the roof and held family prayers.  Uncle
+Chauncey tried to fell a tree and make a bridge, but the water
+drove him away.  The house was finally carried away with most of
+the family in it.  The father swam to a stump with one boy on his
+back and stood there till the water carried away the stump, then
+tried to swim with the boy for shore, but the driftwood soon
+engulfed him and all was over.  Two of the bodies were never
+found.  Their bones doubtless rest somewhere in the still waters
+of the lower Esopus.
+
+
+[Here follow details concerning one paternal and one maternal aunt,
+which, though picturesque, would better be omitted.  It is to be
+noted, however, that in this simple homely narrative of his
+ancestors (which, by the way, gives a vivid picture of the early
+pioneer days) and later in his own personal history, there is no
+attempt to conceal or gloss over weaknesses or shortcomings; all
+is set down with engaging candor.--C. B.]
+
+
+Father's sister Abby married a maternal cousin, John Kelly.  He was
+of a scholarly turn.  He worked for Father the year I was born, and
+I was named after him.  I visited him in Pennsylvania in 1873, and
+while there, when he was talking with me about the men of our family
+named John Burroughs, he said, "One was a minister in the West, one
+was Uncle Hiram's son, you are the third, and there is still another
+I have heard of,--a writer."  And I was silly enough not to tell him
+that I was that one.  After I reached home, some of my people sent
+him "Winter Sunshine," and when he found that I was its author, he
+wrote that he "set great store by it."  I don't know why I should
+have been so reticent about my books--they were a foreign thing, I
+suppose; it was not natural to speak of them among my kinsfolk.
+
+
+[In this connection let me quote from an early letter of Mr.
+Burroughs to me.  It was written in 1901 after the death of
+his favorite sister: "She was very dear to me, and I had no
+better friend.  More than the rest of my people she aspired
+to understand and appreciate me, and with a measure of success.
+My family are plain, unlettered farmer folk, and the world in
+which you and I live iss a sealed book to them.  The have never
+read my books.  What they value in me is what I have in common
+with them, which is, no doubt, the larger part of me.  But I
+love them all just the same.  They are a part of father and
+mother, of the old home, and of my youthful days."--C. B.]
+
+
+Mother's father. Grandfather Kelly, was a soldier of 1776, of
+Irish descent, born in Connecticut, I think.  His name was Edmund
+Kelly.  He went into the war as a boy and saw Washington and
+La Fayette.  He was at Valley Forge during that terrible winter
+the army spent there.  One day Washington gave the order to the
+soldiers to dress-parade for inspection; some had good clothes,
+some scarcely any, and no shoes.  He made all the well-dressed
+men go and cut wood for the rest, and excused the others.
+
+Grandfather was a small man with a big head and quite pronounced
+Irish features.  He was a dreamer.  He was not a good provider;
+Grandmother did most of the providing.  He wore a military coat
+with brass buttons, and red-top boots.  He believed in spooks and
+witches, and used to tell us spook stories till our hair would
+stand on end.
+
+He was an expert trout fisherman.  Early in the morning I would dig
+worms for bait, and we would go fishing over in West Settlement,
+or in Montgomery Hollow.  I went fishing with him when he was past
+eighty.  He would steal along the streams and "snake" out the
+trout, walking as briskly as I do now. From him I get my dreamy,
+lazy, shirking ways.
+
+In 1848 he and Grandmother came to live near us.  He had a severe
+fit of illness that year.  I remember we caught a fat coon for him.
+He was fond of game.  I was there one morning when they entertained
+a colored minister overnight, probably a fugitive slave.  He
+prayed--how lustily he prayed!
+
+I have heard Grandfather tell how, when he was a boy in Connecticut,
+he once put his hand in a bluebird's nest and felt, as he said,
+"something comical"; he drew out his hand, which was followed by the
+head and neck of a black snake; he took to his heels, and the black
+snake after him. (I rather think that's a myth.)  He said his uncle,
+who was ploughing, came after the black snake with a whip, and the
+snake slunk away.  He thought he remembered that.  It may be a black
+snake might pursue one, but I doubt it.
+
+
+[Mr. Burroughs's ingrained tendency to question reports of improbable
+things in nature shows even in these reminiscences of his grandfather.
+His instinct for the truth is always on the qui vive.--C. B.]
+
+
+Grandmother Kelly lived to be past eighty.  She was a big woman--
+thrifty and domestic--big enough to take "Granther" up in her arms
+and walk off with him.  She did more to bring up her family than he
+did; was a practical housewife, and prolific.  She had ten children
+and made every one of them toe the mark.  I don't know whether she
+ever took "Granther" across her knee or not, but he probably deserved
+it.  She was quite uneducated.  Her maiden name was Lavinia Minot.
+I don't know where her people came from, or whether she had any
+brothers and sisters.  They lived in Red Kill mostly, in the eastern
+part of the town of Roxbury, and also over on the edge of Greene
+County.  I remember, when Grandfather used to tell stories of cruelty
+in the army, and of the hardships of the soldiers, she would wriggle
+and get very angry.  All her children were large.  They were as
+follows:  Sukie, Ezekiel, Charles, Martin, Edmund, William, Thomas,
+Hannah, Abby, and Amy (my mother).  Aunt Sukie was a short, chubby
+woman, always laughing.  Uncle Charles was a man of strong Irish
+features, like Grandfather.  He was a farmer who lived in Genesee
+County.  Uncle Martin was a farmer of fair intelligence; Ezekiel was
+lower in the scale than the others; was intemperate, and after losing
+his farm became a day-laborer.  He would carry a gin-bottle into the
+fields, and would mow the stones as readily as he would the grass--
+and I had to turn the grindstone to sharpen his scythe.  Uncle Edmund
+was a farmer and a pettifogger.  Uncle William died comparatively
+young; he had nurseries near Rochester.  Uncle Thomas was a farmer,
+slow and canny, with a quiet, dry humor.  Aunt Hannah married Robert
+Avery, who drank a good deal; I can't remember anything about her.
+Aunt Abby was large and thrifty; she married John Jenkins, and had a
+large family. . . . Amy, my mother, was her mother's tenth child.
+
+Mother was born in Rensselaer County near Albany, in 1808.  Her
+father moved to Delaware County when she was a child, driving there
+with an ox-team.  Mother "worked out" in her early teens.  She was
+seventeen or eighteen when she married, February, 1827.
+
+Father and Mother first went to keeping house on Grandfather
+Burroughs's old place--not in the log house, but in the frame house
+of which you saw the foundations. Brother Hiram was born there.
+
+
+[Mr. Burroughs's last walk with his father was to the crumbling
+foundations of this house.  I have heard him tell how his father
+stood and pointed out the location of the various rooms--the room
+where they slept the first night they went there; the one where
+the eldest child was born; that in which his mother died.  I stood
+(one August day in 1902) with Mr. Burroughs on the still  remaining
+joists of his grandfather's house--grass-grown, and with the debris
+of stones and beams mingling with weeds and bushes.  He pointed out
+to me, as his father had done for him, the location of the various
+rooms, and mused upon the scenes enacted there; he showed where
+the paths led to the barn and to the spring, and seemed to take
+a melancholy interest in picturing the lives of his parents and
+grandparents.  A sudden burst of gladness from a song sparrow, and
+his musings gave way to attentive pleasure, and the sunlit Present
+claimed him instead of the shadowy Past.  He was soon rejoicing
+in the discovery of a junco's nest near the foundations of the
+old house.--C.B.]
+
+
+My father, Chauncey Burroughs, was born December 20, 1803.  He
+received a fair schooling for those times--the three R's--and
+taught school one or two winters.  His reading was the Bible and
+hymn-book, his weekly secular paper, and a monthly religious paper.
+
+He used to say that as a boy he was a very mean one, saucy,
+quarrelsome, and wicked, liked horse-racing and card-playing--both
+alike disreputable in those times.  In early manhood he "experienced
+religion" and joined the Old-School Baptist Church, of which his
+parents were members, and then all his bad habits seem to have
+been discarded.  He stopped swearing and Sabbath-breaking, and
+other forms of wickedness, and became an exemplary member of the
+community.  He was a man of unimpeachable veracity; bigoted and
+intolerant in his religious and political views, but a good
+neighbor, a kind father, a worthy citizen, a fond husband, and
+a consistent member of his church.  He improved his farm, paid
+his debts, and kept his faith.  He had no sentiment about things
+and was quite unconscious of the beauties of nature over which we
+make such an ado.  "The primrose by the river's brim" would not
+have been seen by him at all.  This is true of most farmers; the
+plough and the hoe and the scythe do not develop their aesthetic
+sensibilities; then, too, in the old religious view the beauties
+of this world were vain and foolish.
+
+I have said that my father had strong religious feeling.  He took
+"The Signs of the Times" for over forty years, reading all those
+experiences with the deepest emotion.  I remember when a mere lad
+hearing him pray in the hog-pen.  It was a time of unusual religious
+excitement with him, no doubt; I heard, and ran away, knowing it was
+not for me to hear.
+
+Father had red hair, and a ruddy, freckled face.  He was
+tender-hearted and tearful, but with blustering ways and a harsh,
+strident voice.  Easily moved to emotion, he was as transparent as a
+child, with a child's lack of self-consciousness.  Unsophisticated,
+he had no art to conceal anything, no guile, and, as Mother used to
+say, no manners.  "All I ever had," Father would rejoin, "for I've
+never used any of them."  I doubt if he ever said "Thank you" in his
+life; I certainly never heard him.  He had nothing to conceal, and
+could not understand that others might have.   I have heard him ask
+people what certain things cost, men their politics, women their ages,
+with the utmost ingenuousness.  One day when he and I were in
+Poughkeepsie, we met a strange lad on the street with very red hair,
+and Father said to him, "I can remember when my hair was as red as
+yours."  The boy stared at him and passed on.
+
+Although Father lacked delicacy, he did not lack candor or
+directness. He would tell a joke on himself with the same glee
+that he would on any one else. . . . I have heard him tell how,
+in 1844, at the time of the "anti-renters," when he saw the posse
+coming, he ran over the hill to Uncle Daniel's and crawled under
+the bed, but left his feet sticking out, and there they found him.
+He had not offended, or dressed as an Indian, but had sympathized
+with the offenders.
+
+He made a great deal of noise about the farm, sending his voice
+over the hills (we could hear him calling us to dinner when we
+were working on the "Rundle Place," half a mile away), shouting at
+the cows, the pigs, the sheep, or calling the dog, with needless
+expenditure of vocal power at all times and seasons.  The neighbors
+knew when Father was at home; so did the cattle in the remotest
+field.  His bark was always to be dreaded more than his bite.
+His threats of punishment were loud and severe, but the punishment
+rarely came.  Never but once did he take a gad to me, and then the
+sound was more than the substance.  I deserved more than I got:  I
+had let a cow run through the tall grass in the meadow when I might
+easily have "headed her off," as I was told to do.  Father used to
+say "No," to our requests for favors (such as a day off to go
+fishing or hunting) with strong emphasis, and then yield to our
+persistent coaxing.
+
+One day I was going to town and asked him for money to buy an
+algebra.  "What is an algebra?"  He had never heard of an algebra,
+and couldn't see why I needed one; he refused the money, though I
+coaxed and Mother pleaded with him.  I had left the house and had
+got as far as the big hill up there by the pennyroyal rock, when he
+halloed to me that I might get the algebra--Mother had evidently
+been instrumental in bringing him to terms.  But my blood was up by
+this time, and as I trudged along to the village I determined to
+wait until I could earn the money myself for the algebra, and some
+other books I coveted.  I boiled sap and made maple-sugar, and the
+books were all the sweeter by reason of the maple-sugar money.
+
+When I wanted help, as I did two or three times later, on a pinch.
+Father refused me; and, as it turned out, I was the only one of his
+children that could or would help him when the pinch came--a curious
+retribution, but one that gave me pleasure and him no pain.  I was
+better unhelped, as it proved, and better for all I could help him.
+But he was a loving father all the same. He couldn't understand my
+needs, but love outweighs understanding.
+
+He did not like my tendency to books; he was afraid, as I learned
+later, that I would become a Methodist minister--his pet aversion.
+He never had much faith in me--less than in any of his children; he
+doubted if I would ever amount to anything.  He saw that I was an
+odd one, and had tendencies and tastes that he did not sympathize
+with.  He never alluded to my literary work; apparently left it out
+of his estimate of me.  My aims and aspirations were a sealed book
+to him, as his peculiar religious experiences were to me, yet I
+reckon it was the same leaven working in us both.
+
+I remember, on my return from Dr. Holmes's seventieth birthday
+breakfast, in 1879, a remark of father's.  He had overheard me
+telling sister Abigail about the breakfast, and he declared: "I
+had rather go to hear old Elder Jim Mead preach two hours, if he
+was living, than attend all the fancy parties in the world."  He
+said he had heard him preach when he did not know whether he was
+in the body or out of the body.  The elder undoubtedly had a strong
+natural eloquence.
+
+Although Father never spoke to me of my writings, Abigail once told
+me that when she showed him a magazine with some article of mine in,
+and accompanied by a photograph of me, he looked at it a long time;
+he said nothing, but his eyes filled with tears.
+
+He went to school to the father of Jay Gould, John Gould--the first
+child born in the town of Roxbury (about 1780 or 1790).
+
+He married Amy Kelly, my mother, in 1827.  He was six years her
+senior.  She lived over in Red Kill where he had taught school,
+and was one of his pupils.  I have often heard him say: "I rode
+your Uncle Martin's old sorrel mare over to her folks' when I went
+courting her."  When he would be affectionate toward her before
+others, Mother would say, "Now, Chauncey, don't be foolish."
+
+Father bought the farm of 'Riah Bartram's mother, and moved on it
+in 1827.  In a house that stood where the Old Home does now, I was
+born, April 3, 1837.  It was a frame house with three or four rooms
+below and one room "done off" above, and a big chamber.  I was the
+fifth son and the seventh child of my parents.
+
+[Illustration: Birthplace of John Burroughs, Roxbury, New York.
+From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott]
+
+Mother was in her twenty-ninth year when she was carrying me.
+She had already borne four boys and two girls; her health was
+good and her life, like that of all farmers' wives in that section,
+was a laborious one.  I can see her going about her work--milking,
+butter-making, washing, cooking, berry-picking, sugar-making,
+sewing, knitting, mending, and the thousand duties that fell to her
+lot and filled her days.  Both she and Father were up at daylight in
+summer, and before daylight in winter.  Sometimes she had help in
+the kitchen, but oftener she did not.  The work that housewives did
+in those times seems incredible.  They made their own soap, sugar,
+cheese, dipped or moulded their candles, spun the flax and wool and
+wove it into cloth, made carpets, knit the socks and mittens and
+"comforts" for the family, dried apples, pumpkins, and berries,
+and made the preserves and pickles for home use.
+
+Mother went about all these duties with cheerfulness and alacrity.
+She more than kept up her end of the farm work.  She was more
+strenuous than father.  How many hours she sat up mending and
+patching our clothes, while we were sleeping!  Rainy days meant
+no let-up in her work, as they did in Father's.
+
+The first suit of clothes I remember having, she cut and made.
+Then the quilts and coverlids she pieced and quilted!  We used, too,
+in my boyhood to make over two tons of butter annually, the care of
+which devolved mainly upon her, from the skimming of the pans to the
+packing of the butter in the tubs and firkins, though the churning
+was commonly done by a sheep or a dog.  We made our own cheese,
+also.  As a boy I used to help do the wheying, and I took toll out
+of the sweet curd.  One morning I ate so much of the curd that I
+was completely cloyed, and could eat none after that.
+
+I can remember Mother's loom pounding away hour after hour in the
+chamber of an outbuilding where she was weaving a carpet, or cloth.
+I used to help do some of the quilling--running the yarn or linen
+thread upon spools to be used in the shuttles.  The distaff, the
+quill-wheel, the spinning-wheel, the reel, were very familiar to me
+as a boy; so was the crackle, the swingle, the hetchel, for Father
+grew flax which Mother spun into thread and wove into cloth for our
+shirts and summer trousers, and for towels and sheets.  Wearing
+those shirts, when new, made a boy's skin pretty red.  I dare say
+they were quite equal to a hair shirt to do penance in; and wiping
+on a new home-made linen towel suggested wiping on a brier bush.
+Dear me! how long it has been since I have seen any tow, or heard
+a loom or a spinning-wheel, or seen a boy breaking in his new
+flax-made shirt!  No one sees these things any more.
+
+Mother had but little schooling; she learned to read, but not to
+write or cipher; hence, books and such interests took none of her
+time.  She was one of those uneducated countrywomen of strong
+natural traits and wholesome instincts, devoted to her children; she
+bore ten, and nursed them all--an heroic worker, a helpful neighbor,
+and a provident housewife, with the virtues that belonged to so many
+farmers' wives in those days, and which we are all glad to be able
+to enumerate in our mothers.
+
+She had not a large frame, but was stout; had brown hair and blue
+eyes, a fine strong brow, and a straight nose with a strong bridge
+to it.  She was a woman of great emotional capacity, who felt more
+than she thought.  She scolded a good deal, but was not especially
+quick-tempered.  She was an Old-School Baptist, as was Father.
+
+She was not of a vivacious or sunny disposition--always a little
+in shadow, as it seems to me now, given to brooding and to dwelling
+upon the more serious aspects of life.  How little she knew of
+all that has been done and thought in the world! and yet the
+burden of it all was, in a way, laid upon her.  The seriousness
+of Revolutionary times, out of which came her father and mother,
+was no doubt reflected in her own serious disposition.  As I have
+said, her happiness was always shaded, never in a strong light; and
+the sadness which motherhood, and the care of a large family, and a
+yearning heart beget was upon her.  I see myself in her perpetually.
+A longing which nothing can satisfy I share with her.  Whatever is
+most valuable in my books comes from her--the background of feeling,
+of pity, of love comes from her.
+
+She was of a very different temperament from Father--much more
+self-conscious, of a more breeding, inarticulate nature.  She was
+richly endowed with all the womanly instincts and affections. She
+had a decided preference for Abigail and me among her children,
+wanted me to go to school, and was always interceding with Father
+to get me books.  She never read one of my books.  She died in 1880,
+at the age of seventy-three.  I had published four of my books then.
+
+She had had a stroke of apoplexy in the fall of 1879, but lived till
+December of the following year, dying on father's seventy-seventh
+birthday.  (He lived four years more.)  We could understand but
+little of what she said after she was taken ill.  She used to repeat
+a line from an old hymn--"Only a veil between."
+
+She thought a good deal of some verses I wrote--"My Brother's
+Farm"--and had them framed.  (You have seen them in the parlor at
+the Old Home.  I wrote them in Washington the fall that you were
+born.  I was sick and forlorn at the time.)
+
+I owe to Mother my temperament, my love of nature, my brooding,
+introspective habit of mind--all those things which in a literary
+man help to give atmosphere to his work.  In her line were dreamers
+and fishermen and hunters.  One of her uncles lived alone in a little
+house in the woods.  His hut was doubtless the original Slabsides.
+Grandfather Kelly was a lover of solitude, as all dreamers are, and
+Mother's happiest days, I think, were those spent in the fields after
+berries.  The Celtic element, which I get mostly from her side, has
+no doubt played an important part in my life. My idealism, my romantic
+tendencies, are largely her gift.
+
+On my father's side I find no fishermen or hermits or dreamers.  I
+find a marked religious strain, more active and outspoken than on
+Mother's.  The religion of the Kellys was, for the most part, of the
+silent, meditative kind, but there are preachers and teachers and
+scholars on Father's side--one of them, Stephen Burroughs (b. 1765),
+a renegade preacher.  Doubtless most of my own intellectual impetus
+comes from this side of the family.  There are also cousins and
+second cousins on this side who became preachers, and some who
+became physicians, but I recall none on the Kelly side.
+
+In size and physical make-up I am much like my father.  I have my
+father's foot, and I detect many of his ways in my own.  My loud and
+harmless barking, when I am angered, I get from him.  The Kellys are
+more apt to bite.  I see myself, too, in my brothers, in their looks
+and especially in their weaknesses.  Take from me my special
+intellectual equipment, and I am in all else one of them.
+
+
+[Speaking of their characteristics as a family, Mr. Burroughs says
+that they have absolute inability to harbor resentment (a Celtic
+trait); that they never have "cheek" to ask enough for what they
+have to sell, lack decision, and are easily turned from their
+purpose.  Commenting on this, he has often said: "We are weak as
+men--do not make ourselves felt in the community. But this very
+weakness is a help to me as a writer upon Nature.  I don't stand in
+my own light.  I get very close to bird and beast.  My thin skin
+lets the shy and delicate influences pass.  I can surrender myself
+to Nature without effort.  I am like her. . . . That which hinders
+me with men, makes me strong with impersonal Nature, and admits me
+to her influences. . . . I am lacking in moral fibre, but am tender
+and sympathetic."]
+
+
+To see Mr. Burroughs stand and fondly gaze upon the fruitful,
+well-cultivated fields that his father had cared for so many years,
+to hear him say that the hills are like father and mother to him,
+was to realize how strong is the filial instinct in him--that and
+the home feeling.  As he stood on the crest of the big hill by the
+pennyroyal rock, looking down on the peaceful homestead in the
+soft light of a midsummer afternoon, his eye roamed fondly over
+the scene:--
+
+"How fertile and fruitful it is now, but how lonely and bleak the
+old place looked in that winter landscape the night I drove up from
+the station in the moonlight after hearing of Father's death!  There
+was a light in the window, but I knew Father would not meet me at
+the door this time--beleaguering winter without, and Death within!
+
+"Father and Mother!  I think of them with inexpressible love and
+yearning, wrapped in their last eternal sleep.  They had, for them,
+the true religion, the religion of serious, simple, hard-working.
+God-fearing lives.  To believe as they did, to sit in their pews, is
+impossible to me--the Time-Spirit has decreed otherwise; but all I
+am or can be or achieve is to emulate their virtues--my soul can be
+saved only by a like truthfulness and sincerity."
+
+
+The following data concerning his brothers and sisters were given
+me by Mr. Burroughs in conversation:--
+
+Hiram, born in 1827, was an unpractical man and a dreamer; he was
+a bee-keeper.  He showed great aptitude in the use of tools, could
+make axe-handles, neck-yokes, and the various things used about
+the farm, and was especially skilled in building stone walls.
+But he could not elbow his way in a crowd, could not make farming
+pay, and was always pushed to the wall.  He cared nothing for
+books, and although he studied grammar when a boy, and could
+parse, he never could write a grammatical sentence.  He died at
+the age of seventy-five.
+
+Olly Ann was about two years younger than Hiram.  Mr. Burroughs
+remembers her as a frail, pretty girl, with dark-brown eyes, a high
+forehead, and a wasp-like waist.  She had a fair education for her
+time, married and had two children, and died in early womanhood of
+phthisis.
+
+Wilson was a farmer, thrifty and economical.  He married but had no
+children.  He was evidently somewhat neurotic; as a child, even when
+well, he would groan and moan in his sleep, and he died, at the age
+of twenty-eight, after a short illness, of a delirious fever.
+
+Curtis also was a farmer, but lacked judgment; could not look ahead;
+thought if he gave his note a debt was canceled, and went on piling
+up other indebtedness.  He had a very meagre schooling, but was apt
+at witty remarks.  He was temperate; was much given to reading "The
+Signs of the Times," like his father before him.  He married and had
+five children.  For many years previous to his death he lived at the
+homestead, dying there in his eightieth year, in the summer of 1912.
+Two of his unmarried children still live at the Old Home,--of all
+places on the earth the one toward which Mr. Burroughs turns with
+the most yearning fondness.
+
+Edmund died in infancy.
+
+Jane, a tender-hearted, old-fashioned woman, who cried and fretted
+easily, and worried over trifles, was a good housekeeper, and a
+fond mother--a fat, dumpy little woman with a doleful voice.  She
+was always urging her brother not to puzzle his head about writing;
+writing and thinking, she said, were "bad for the head."  When
+he would go away on a journey of only a hundred miles, she would
+worry incessantly lest something happen to him.  She married and
+had five daughters.  Her death occurred in May, 1912, at the age
+of seventy-seven.  "Poor Jane!" said Mr. Burroughs one day, when
+referring to her protests against his writing; "I fear she never
+read a dozen printed words of mine--or shall I say 'lucky Jane'?"
+
+John, born in 1837, was always "an odd one."  (One is reminded
+of what William R. Thayer said of the Franklin family:  "Among
+the seventeen Franklin children one was a Benjamin, and the
+rest nobodies.")
+
+Eden was born in 1839.  Frail most of his life, in later years he
+has become robust, and now (1913) is the only surviving member of
+the family besides Mr. Burroughs.  He is cheery and loquacious,
+methodical and orderly, and very punctilious in dress.  (One day, in
+the summer of 1912, when he was calling at "Woodchuck Lodge,"--the
+summer home where Mr. Burroughs has lived of late years, near the
+old place where he was born,--this brother recounted some of their
+youthful exploits, especially the one which yielded the material for
+the essay "A White Day and a Red Fox."  "I shot the fox and got five
+dollars for it," said Mr. Eden Burroughs, "and John wrote a piece
+about it, and got seventy-five.")
+
+Abigail, the favorite sister of our author, appreciated her
+brother's books and his ideals more than any other member of the
+family.  She married and had two children.  At the time of her
+death, in 1901, of typhoid fever (at the age of fifty-eight) the
+band of brothers and sisters had been unbroken by death for more
+than thirty-seven years.  Her loss was a severe blow to her brother.
+He had always shared his windfalls with her; she had read some of
+his essays, and used to talk with him about his aspirations,
+encouraging him timidly, before he had gained recognition.
+
+Eveline died at the age of five years.
+
+
+The death of his brother Hiram, in 1904, made the past bleed
+afresh for Mr. Burroughs.  "He was next to Father and Mother in my
+affections," he wrote. "Oh! if I had only done more for him--this
+is my constant thought.  If I could only have another chance!  How
+generous death makes us!  Go, then, and make up by doing more for
+the living."
+
+As I walked with him about the Old Home, he said, "I can see Hiram
+in everything here; in the trees he planted and grafted, in these
+stone walls he built, in this land he so industriously cultivated
+during the years he had the farm."
+
+So large a place in his affections did this brother hold, and yet
+how wide apart were these two in their real lives!  I know of no
+one who has pictured the pathos of lives so near and yet so far
+apart as has George Eliot when she says:  "Family likeness has
+often a deep sadness in it.  Nature, that great tragic dramatist,
+knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler
+web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion, and ties us by our
+heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every moment.  We hear
+a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the thoughts we
+despise; we see eyes--ah! so like our mother's--averted from us in
+cold alienation."
+
+We cannot tell why one boy in a family turns out a genius, while
+the others stay in the ancestral ruts and lead humdrum, placid
+lives, any more than we can tell why one group of the hepaticas we
+gather in the April woods has the gift of fragrance, while those
+of a sister group in the same vicinity are scentless.  A caprice of
+fate, surely, that "mate and mate beget such different issues."
+
+"Hiram was with me at Slabsides," said Mr. Burroughs, "much of the
+time when I was writing the Whitman book, but never referred to it
+in any way.  When it came from the press, I said to him, 'Hiram,
+here is the book you have heard me speak about as having cost me
+nearly four years' work, and which I rewrote four times.'"
+
+"'That's the book, is it?' he replied, showing no curiosity about it,
+or desire to look into it, but kept drumming on the table--a habit
+of his that was very annoying to me at times, but of which he was
+not aware.  When 'A Year in the Fields' came out, he looked at some
+of the pictures, but that was all."
+
+There is something very pathetic in all this--these two brothers
+living in that isolated cabin in the woods, knit together by the
+ties of kinship, having in common a deep and yearning love for
+each other, and for the Old Home in the Catskills,--their daily
+down-sittings and up-risings outwardly the same, yet so alienated
+in what makes up one's real existence.  The one, the elder, intent
+on his bees, his thoughts by day revolving about his hives, or
+concerned with the weather and the daily happenings; at night, as
+he idly drums with his fingers, dreaming of the old days on the
+farm--of how he used to dig out rocks to build the fences, of the
+sugar-making, of cradling the oats in July; while the other--ah!
+the other, of what was he not thinking!--of the little world of the
+hives (his thoughts yielding the exquisite "Idyl of the Honey-Bee"),
+of boyhood days upon the farm, of the wild life around his cabin, of
+the universe, and of the soul of the poet Whitman, that then much
+misunderstood man, than whom no one so much as he has helped us to
+appreciate.  Going out and in, attending to his homely tasks (for
+these brothers did their own housework), the younger brother was
+all the time thinking of that great soul, of all that association
+with him had meant to him, and of all that Whitman would mean to
+America, to the world, as poet, prophet, seer--thinking how out of
+his knowledge of Whitman as poet and person he could cull and sift
+and gather together an adequate and worthy estimate of one whom his
+soul loved as Jonathan loved David!
+
+The mystery of personality--how shall one fathom it?  I asked myself
+this one rainy afternoon, as I sat in the Burroughs homestead and
+looked from one brother to another, the two so alike and yet so
+unlike.  The one a simple farmer whose interests are circumscribed
+by the hills which surround the farm on which as children they were
+reared; the other, whose interests in the early years were seemingly
+just as circumscribed, but who felt that nameless something--that
+push from within--which first found its outlet in a deeper interest
+in the life about him than his brothers ever knew; and who later
+felt the magic of the world of books; and, still later, the need of
+expression, an expression which finally showed itself in a masterly
+interpretation of country life and experiences.  The same heredity
+here, the same environment, the same opportunities--yet how different
+the result!  The farmer has tended and gathered many a crop from the
+old place since they were boys, but has been blind and deaf to all
+that has there yielded such a harvest to the other.  That other,
+a plain, unassuming man, "standing at ease in nature," has become
+a household word because of all that he has contributed to our
+intellectual and emotional life.
+
+A man who as a lad had roamed the Roxbury hills with John Burroughs
+and his brothers, and had known the boy John as something of a
+dreamer, and thought of him in later years as perhaps of less account
+than his brothers (since they had settled down, owned land, and were
+leading industrious lives), was traveling in Europe in the eighties.
+On the top of a stage-coach in the Scottish Highlands he sat next a
+scholarly-looking man whose garb, he thought, betokened a priest.
+From some question which the traveler put, the Englishman learned
+that the stranger was from America.  Immediately he showed a lively
+interest. "From America! Do you, then, know John Burroughs?"
+
+Imagine the surprise of the Delaware County farmer at being
+questioned about his schoolmate, the dreamer, who, to be sure,
+"took to books"; but what was he that this Englishman should
+inquire about him as the one man in America he was eager to learn
+about!  Doubtless Mr. Burroughs was the one literary man the
+Delaware County farmer did know, though his knowledge was on the
+personal and not on the literary side. And imagine the surprise of
+the priest (if priest it was) to find that he had actually lighted
+upon a schoolmate of the author!--C. B.]
+
+
+
+CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
+
+
+I seem to have been a healthy, active child, very impressionable,
+and with more interests and a keener enjoyment of things than most
+farm boys have.  I was fond of the girls back as early as I can
+remember, and had my sweethearts at a very early age. . . .
+
+I learned my letters at school, when I was five or six, in the
+old-fashioned way by being called up to the teacher several times
+a day and naming the letters as he pointed at them where they stood
+in a perpendicular column in Cobb's Spelling-Book.  The vowels and
+consonants stood in separate columns, and had to be learned one by
+one, by continued repetition.  It took me a long time, I remember,
+to distinguish /b/ from /d/, and /c/ from /e/.  When and how I learned to
+read I do not remember.  I recall Cobb's Second Reader, and later
+Olney's Geography, and then Dayballs Arithmetic.
+
+I went to school summers till I was old enough to help on the farm,
+say at the age of eleven or twelve, when my schooling was confined
+to the winters.
+
+[Illustration: The Old Schoolhouse, Roxbury, New York.  From a
+photograph by M.H. Fanning]
+
+As a boy, the only farm work that appealed to me was sugar-making in
+the maple woods in spring.  This I thoroughly enjoyed.  It brought
+me near to wild nature and was freer from routine than other farm
+work.  Then I soon managed to gather a little harvest of my own from
+the sugar bush.  I used to anticipate the general tapping by a
+few days or a week, and tap a few trees on my own account along
+the sunny border of the Woods, and boil the sap down on the kitchen
+stove (to the disgust of the womenfolks), selling the sugar in the
+village.  I think the first money  I ever earned came to me in this
+way.  My first algebra and first grammar I bought with some of this
+precious money.  When I appeared in the village with my basket of
+small cakes of early sugar, how my customers would hail me and call
+after me!  No one else made such white sugar, or got it to market so
+early.  One season, I remember, I got twelve silver quarters for
+sugar, and I carried them in my pockets for weeks, jingling them in
+the face of my envious schoolmates, and at intervals feasting my own
+eyes upon them.  I fear if I could ever again get hold of such money
+as that was I should become a miser.
+
+Hoeing corn, weeding the garden, and picking stone was drudgery,
+and haying and harvesting I liked best when they were a good way
+off; picking up potatoes worried me, but gathering apples suited
+my hands and my fancy better, and knocking "Juno's cushions" in
+the spring meadows with my long-handled knocker, about the time
+the first swallow was heard laughing overhead, was real fun.  I
+always wanted some element of play in my work; buckling down to
+any sort of routine always galled me, and does yet.  The work must
+be a kind of adventure, and permit of sallies into free fields.
+Hence the most acceptable work for me was to be sent strawberrying
+or raspberrying by Mother; but the real fun was to go fishing up
+Montgomery Hollow, or over on Rose's Brook, this necessitating a
+long tramp, and begetting a hunger in a few hours that made a piece
+of rye bread the most delectable thing in the world; yet a pure
+delight that never sated.
+
+Mother used to bake her bread in the large old-fashioned brick oven,
+and once or twice a week we boys had to procure oven wood.
+
+"You must get me oven wood this morning," she would say; "I am going
+to bake today."  Then we would scurry around for dry, light, quick
+wood--pieces of old boxes and boards, and dry limbs.  "One more
+armful," she would often say, when we were inclined to quit too
+soon.  In a half-hour or so, the wood would be reduced to ashes,
+and the oven properly heated.  I can see Mother yet as she would
+open the oven door and feel the air inside with her hand.  "Run,
+quick, and get me a few more sticks--it is not quite hot enough."
+When it was ready, the coals and ashes were raked out, and in went
+the bread, six or seven big loaves of rye, with usually two of
+wheat.  The wheat was for company.
+
+When we would come in at dinner- or supper-time and see wheat bread
+on the table we would ask: "Who's in the other room?"  Maybe the
+answer would be, "Your Uncle Martin and Aunt Virey."  How glad I
+would be!  I always liked to see company.  Well, the living was
+better, and then, company brought a new element into the day; it
+gave a little tinge of romance to things.  To wake up in the morning
+and think that Uncle Martin and Aunt Virey were there, or Uncle
+Edmund and Aunt Saliny, quickened the pulse a little.  Or, when
+any of my cousins came,--boys near my own age,--what joy filled
+the days!  And when they went, how lonesome I would be! how forlorn
+all things looked till the second or third day!  I early developed
+a love of comrades, and was always fond of company--and am yet, as
+the records of Slabsides show.
+
+
+I was quite a hunter in my youth, as most farm boys are, but I
+never brought home much game--a gray squirrel, a partridge, or a
+wild pigeon occasionally.  I think with longing and delight of
+the myriads of wild pigeons that used to come every two or three
+years--covering the sky for a day or two, and making the naked
+spring woods gay and festive with their soft voices and fluttering
+blue wings.  I have seen thousands of them go through a beech wood,
+like a blue wave, picking up the sprouting beechnuts.  Those in the
+rear would be constantly flying over those in front, so that the
+effect was that of a vast billow of mingled white and blue and
+brown, rustling and murmuring as it went.  One spring afternoon vast
+flocks of them were passing south over our farm for hours, when some
+of them began to pour down in the beech woods on the hill by the
+roadside.  A part of nearly every flock that streamed by would split
+off and, with a downward wheel and rush, join those in the wood.
+Presently I seized the old musket and ran out in the road, and then
+crept up behind the wall, till only the width of the road separated
+me from the swarms of fluttering pigeons.  The air and the woods
+were literally blue with them, and the ground seemed a yard deep
+with them.  I pointed my gun across the wall at the surging masses,
+and then sat there spellbound.  The sound of their wings and voices
+filled my ears, and their numbers more than filled my eyes.  Why
+I did not shoot was never very clear to me.  Maybe I thought the
+world was all turning to pigeons, as they still came pouring down
+from the heavens, and I did not want to break the spell.  There I
+sat waiting, waiting, with my eye looking along the gun-barrel,
+till, suddenly, the mass rose like an explosion, and with a rush
+and a roar they were gone.  Then I came to my senses and with keen
+mortification realized what an opportunity I had let slip.  Such a
+chance never came again, though the last great flight of pigeons did
+not take place till 1875.
+
+When I was about ten or twelve, a spell was put upon me by a red fox
+in a similar way.  The baying of a hound upon the mountain had drawn
+me there, armed with the same old musket.  It was a chilly day in
+early December.  I took up my stand in the woods near what I thought
+might be the runway, and waited.  After a while I stood the butt of
+my gun upon the ground, and held the barrel with my hand.  Presently
+I heard a rustle in the leaves, and there came a superb fox loping
+along past me, not fifty feet away.  He was evidently not aware of
+my presence, and, as for me, I was aware of his presence alone.  I
+forgot that I had a gun, that here was the game I was in quest of,
+and that now was my chance to add to my store of silver quarters.
+As the unsuspecting fox disappeared over a knoll, again I came to
+my senses, and brought my gun to my shoulder; but it was too late,
+the game had gone.  I returned home full of excitement at what I
+had seen, and gave as the excuse why I did not shoot, that I had my
+mitten on, and could not reach the trigger of my gun.  It is true I
+had my mitten on, but there was a mitten, or something, on my wits
+also.  It was years before I heard the last of that mitten; when I
+failed at anything they said, "John had his mitten on, I guess."
+
+I remember that I had a sort of cosmogony of my own when I was a
+mere boy.  I used to speculate as to what the world was made of.
+Partly closing my eyes, I could see what appeared to be little
+crooked chains of fine bubbles floating in the air, and I concluded
+that that was the stuff the world was made of.  And the philosophers
+have not yet arrived at a much more satisfactory explanation.
+
+In thinking of my childhood and youth I try to define to myself
+wherein I differed from my brothers and from other boys in the
+neighborhood, or wherein I showed any indication of the future
+bent of my mind.  I see that I was more curious and alert than most
+boys, and had more interests outside my special duties as a farm
+boy.  I knew pretty well the ways of the wild bees and hornets when
+I was only a small lad.  I knew the different bumblebees, and had
+made a collection of their combs and honey before I had entered my
+teens.  I had watched the little frogs, the hylas, and had captured
+them and held them till they piped sitting in my hand.  I had
+watched the leaf-cutters and followed them to their nests in an old
+rail, or under a stone.  I see that I early had an interest in the
+wild life about me that my brothers did not have.  I was a natural
+observer from childhood, had a quick, sure eye and ear, and an
+eager curiosity.  I loved to roam the hills and woods and prowl
+along the streams, just to come in contact with the wild and the
+adventurous.  I was not sent to Sunday-school, but was allowed
+to spend the day as I saw fit, provided I did not carry a gun or
+a fishing-rod.  Indeed, the foundation of my knowledge of the
+ways of the wild creatures was laid when I was a farm boy, quite
+unconscious of the natural-history value of my observations.
+
+What, or who, as I grew up, gave my mind its final push in this
+direction would not be easy to name.  It is quite certain that I
+got it through literature, and more especially through the works
+of Audubon, when I was twenty-five or twenty-six years of age.
+
+The sentiment of nature is so full and winsome in the best modern
+literature that I was no doubt greatly influenced by it.  I was
+early drawn to Wordsworth and to our own Emerson and Thoreau,
+and to the nature articles in the "Atlantic Monthly," and my
+natural-history tastes were stimulated by them.
+
+I have a suspicion that "nature-study" as now followed in the
+schools--or shall I say in the colleges?--this classroom peeping
+and prying into the mechanism of life, dissecting, probing,
+tabulating, void of free observation, and shut away from the open
+air--would have cured me of my love of nature.  For love is the main
+thing, the prime thing, and to train the eye and ear and acquaint
+one with the spirit of the great-out-of-doors, rather than a lot
+of minute facts about nature, is, or should be, the object of
+nature-study.  Who cares about the anatomy of the frog?  But to
+know the live frog--his place in the season and the landscape,
+and his life-history--is something.  If I wanted to instill the love
+of nature into a child's heart, I should do it, in the first place,
+through country life, and, in the next place, through the best
+literature, rather than through classroom investigations, or through
+books of facts about the mere mechanics of nature.  Biology is all
+right for the few who wish to specialize in that branch, but for the
+mass of pupils, it is a waste of time.  Love of nature cannot be
+commanded or taught, but in some minds it can be stimulated.
+
+
+Sweet were the days of my youth!  How I love to recall them and
+dwell upon them!--a world apart, separated from the present by a
+gulf like that of sidereal space.  The old farm bending over the
+hills and dipping down into the valleys, the woods, the streams,
+the springs, the mountains, and Father and Mother under whose wings
+I was so protected, and all my brothers and sisters-how precious
+the thought of them all!  Can the old farm ever mean to future boys
+what it meant to me, and enter so deeply into their lives?  No doubt
+it can, hard as it is to believe it.  The "Bundle place," the "barn
+on the hill," the "Deacon woods," the clover meadow, the "turn in
+the road," the burying-ground, the sheep-lot, the bush-lot, the
+sumac-lot, the "new-barn meadow," the "old-barn meadow," and so on
+through the list--each field and section of the farm had to me an
+atmosphere and association of its own.  The long, smooth, broad
+hill--a sort of thigh of the mountain (Old Clump) upon the lower
+edge of which the house is planted--shut off the west and southwest
+winds; its fields were all amenable to the plough, yielding good
+crops of oats, rye, buckwheat, potatoes, or, when in grass, yielding
+good pasture, divided east and west by parallel stone walls; this
+hill, or lower slope of the mountain, was one of the principal
+features of the farm.  It was steep, but it was smooth; it was
+broad-backed and fertile; its soil was made up mainly of decomposed
+old red sandstone.  How many times have I seen its different
+sections grow ruddy under the side-hill plough! One of my earliest
+recollections of my father is seeing him, when I was a child of
+three or four, striding across the middle side-hill lot with a bag
+slung across his breast, scattering the seed-grain.
+
+How often at early nightfall, while the west was yet glowing, have I
+seen the grazing cattle silhouetted against the sky.  In the winter
+the northwest winds would sweep the snow clean from the other side,
+and bring it over to our side and leave it in a long, huge drift
+that buried the fences and gave the hill an extra full-breasted
+appearance.  The breast of the old hill would be padded with ten or
+fifteen feet of snow.  This drift would often last till May.  I have
+seen it stop the plough.  I remember once carrying a jug of water up
+to Brother Curtis when his plough was within a few feet of the snow.
+Woodchucks would sometimes feel the spring through this thick
+coverlid of snow and bore up through it to the sunlight.  I think
+the woodchuck's alarm clock always goes off before April is done,
+and he comes forth, apparently not to break his long fast, but to
+find his mate.
+
+I remember working in oats in the middle side-hill lot one September
+during the early years of the Civil War, when Hiram was talking
+of enlisting as a drummer, and when Father and Mother were much
+worried about it.  I carried together the sheaves, putting fifteen
+in a "shock."
+
+I have heard my father tell of a curious incident that once befell
+his hired man and himself when they were drawing in oats on a sled
+from the first side-hill lot.  They had on a load, and the hired man
+had thrust his fork into the upper sides of it and was bringing his
+weight to bear against its tendency to capsize.  But gravity got the
+better of them and over went the load; the hired man (Rueb Dart)
+clung to his fork, and swung over the load through the air,
+alighting on his feet none the worse for the adventure.
+
+The spring that supplies the house and the dairy with water comes
+from the middle side-hill lot, some forty or fifty rods from the
+house, and is now brought down in pipes; in my time, in pump-logs.
+It was always an event when the old logs had to be taken up and new
+ones put down.  I saw the logs renewed twice in my time; once poplar
+logs were used, and once hemlock, both rather short-lived.  A man
+from a neighboring town used to come with his long auger and bore
+the logs--a spectacle I was never tired of looking at.
+
+Then the sap bush in the groin of the hill, and but a few minutes'
+walk from the house, what a feature that was!  In winter and in
+summer, what delightful associations I have with it!  I know each
+of its great sugar maples as I know my friends or the members of
+the family.  Each has a character of its own, and in sap-producing
+capacity they differ greatly.  A fringe of the great trees stood out
+in the open fields; these were the earliest to run.
+
+In early March we used to begin to make ready for sugar-making
+by overhauling the sap "spiles," resharpening the old ones, and
+making new ones.  The old-fashioned awkward sap-gouge was used in
+tapping in those days, and the "spiles" or spouts were split out
+of basswood blocks with this gouge, and then sharpened so as to
+fit the half-round gash which the gouge made in the tree.  The
+dairy milk-pans were used to catch the sap, and huge iron kettles
+to boil it down in.
+
+When the day came to tap the bush, the caldrons, the hogsheads,
+and the two hundred or more pans with the bundles of spiles were
+put upon the sled and drawn by the oxen up to the boiling-place in
+the sap bush.  Father and Brother Hiram did the tapping, using an
+axe to cut the gash in the tree, and to drive in the gouge below it
+to make a place for the spile, while one of my younger brothers and
+I carried the pans and placed them in position.
+
+It was always a glad time with me; the early birds were singing and
+calling, the snowbanks were melting, the fields were getting bare,
+the roads drying, and spring tokens were on every hand.  We gathered
+the sap by hand in those days, two pails and a neck-yoke.  It was
+sturdy work.  We would usually begin about three or four o'clock,
+and by five have the one hundred and fifty pailfuls of sap in the
+hogsheads.  When the sap ran all night, we would begin the gathering
+in the morning.  The syruping-off usually took place at the end of
+the second day's boiling, when two or three hundred pailfuls of sap
+had been reduced to four or five of syrup.  In the March or April
+twilight, or maybe after dark, we would carry those heavy pails of
+syrup down to the house, where the liquid was strained while still
+hot.  The reduction of it to sugar was done upon the kitchen stove,
+from three hundred to five hundred pounds being about the average
+annual yield.
+
+The bright warm days at the boiling-place I love best to remember;
+the robins running about over the bare ground or caroling from the
+treetops, the nuthatches calling, the crows walking about the brown
+fields, the bluebirds flitting here and there, the cows lowing or
+restless in the barnyard.
+
+
+When I think of the storied lands across the Atlantic,--England,
+France, Germany, Italy, so rich in historical associations, steeped
+in legend and poetry, the very look of the fields redolent of the
+past,--and then turn to my own native hills, how poor and barren
+they seem!--not one touch anywhere of that which makes the charm
+of the Old World--no architecture, no great names; in fact, no
+past.  They look naked and prosy, yet how I love them and cling
+to them!  They are written over with the lives of the first
+settlers that cleared the fields and built the stone walls--simple,
+common-place lives, worthy and interesting, but without the appeal
+of heroism or adventure.
+
+The land here is old, geologically, dating back to the Devonian Age,
+the soil in many places of decomposed old red sandstone; but it is
+new in human history, having been settled only about one hundred
+and fifty years.
+
+Time has worn down the hills and mountains so that all the outlines
+of the country are gentle and flowing.  The valleys are long, open,
+and wide; the hills broad and smooth, no angles or abruptness, or
+sharp contrasts anywhere.  Hence it is not what is called a
+picturesque land--full of bits of scenery that make the artist's
+fingers itch.  The landscape has great repose and gentleness, so
+far as long, sweeping lines and broad, smooth slopes can give this
+impression.  It is a land which has never suffered violence at
+the hands of the interior terrestrial forces; nothing is broken
+or twisted or contorted or thrust out or up abruptly.  The strata
+are all horizontal, and the steepest mountain-slopes clothed with
+soil that nourishes large forest growths.
+
+
+I stayed at home, working on the farm in summer and going to school
+in winter, till I was seventeen.  From the time I was fourteen I
+had had a desire to go away to school.  I had a craving for knowledge
+which my brothers did not share.  One fall when I was about fifteen I
+had the promise from Father that I might go to school at the Academy
+in the village that winter.  But I did not go.  Then the next fall
+I had the promise of going to the Academy at Harpersfield, where
+one of the neighbor's boys, Dick Van Dyke, went.  How I dreamed of
+Harpersfield!  That fall I did my first ploughing, stimulated to
+it by the promise of Harpersfield.  It was in September, in the lot
+above the sugar  bush--cross-ploughing, to prepare the ground for
+rye.  How many days I ploughed, I do not remember; but Harpersfield
+was the lure at the end of each furrow, I remember that.  To this day
+I cannot hear the name without seeing a momentary glow upon my mental
+horizon--a finger of enchantment is for an instant laid upon me.
+
+But I did not go to Harpersfield.  When the time drew near for
+me to go, Father found himself too poor, or the expense looked
+too big--none of the other boys had had such privileges, and why
+should I?  So I swallowed my disappointment and attended the home
+district school for another winter.  Yet I am not sure but I went
+to Harpersfield after all.  The desire, the yearning to go, the
+effort to make myself worthy to go, the mental awakening, and the
+high dreams, were the main matter.  I doubt if the reality would
+have given me anything more valuable than these things.  The
+aspiration for knowledge opens the doors of the mind and makes
+ready for her coming.
+
+These were my first and last days at the plough, and they made
+that field memorable to me.  I never cross it now but I see myself
+there--a callow youth being jerked by the plough-handles but with my
+head in a cloud of alluring day-dreams.  This, I think, was in the
+fall of 1853.  I went to school that winter with a view to leaving
+home in the spring to try my luck at school-teaching in an adjoining
+county.  Many Roxbury boys had made their first start in the world
+by going to Ulster County to teach a country school.  I would do the
+same.  So, late in March, 1854, about the end of the sugar season, I
+set out for Olive, Ulster County.  An old neighbor, Dr. Hull, lived
+there, and I would seek him.
+
+There was only a stage-line at that time connecting the two counties,
+and that passed twelve miles from my home.  My plan was to cross the
+mountain into Red Kill to Uncle Martin Kelly's, pass the night there,
+and in the morning go to Clovesville, three miles distant, and take
+the stage.  How well I remember that walk across the mountain in
+a snow-squall through which the sun shone dimly, a black oilcloth
+satchel in my hand, and in my heart vague yearnings and forebodings!
+I had but a few dollars in my pocket, probably six or seven, most of
+which I had earned by selling maple sugar.  Father was willing I
+should go, though my help was needed on the farm.
+
+Well, I traversed the eight miles to my uncle's in good time, and
+in the morning he drove me down to the turnpike to take the stage.
+I remember well my anxious and agitated state of mind while waiting
+at the hotel for the arrival of the stage.  I had never ridden in
+one, I am not sure that I had even seen one, and I did not know just
+what was expected of me, or just how I should deport myself.  An
+untraveled farm boy at seventeen is such a vague creature anyway,
+and I was, in addition, such a bundle of sensibilities, timidities,
+and embarrassments as few farm boys are.  I paid my fare at the
+hotel at the rate of a sixpence a mile for about thirty-two miles,
+and when the stage came, saw my name entered upon the "waybill,"
+and got aboard with a beating heart.
+
+Of that first ride of my life in a public conveyance, I remember
+little.  The stage was one of those old-fashioned rocking Concord
+coaches, drawn by four horses.  We soon left the snow-clad hills of
+Delaware County behind, and dropped down into the milder climate of
+Ulster, where no snow was to be seen.  About three in the afternoon
+the stage put me down at Terry's Tavern on the "plank-road" in
+Olive.  I inquired the way to Dr. Hull's and found the walk of about
+a mile an agreeable change.  The doctor and his wife welcomed me
+cordially.  They were old friends of my family.  I spent a day with
+them, riding about with the doctor on his visits to patients, and
+making inquiries for a school in want of a teacher.  On the third
+day we heard of a vacancy in a district in the west end of the town,
+seven or eight miles distant, called Tongore.  Hither I walked one
+day, saw the trustees, and made my application.  I suspect my youth
+and general greenness caused them to hesitate; they would consider
+and let me know inside of a week.  So, in a day or two, hearing of
+no other vacancies, I returned home the same way I had come.  It was
+the first day of April when I made the return trip.  I remember this
+because at one of the hotels where we changed horses I saw a copper
+cent lying upon the floor, and, stooping to pick it up, found it
+nailed fast.  The bartender and two or three other spectators had a
+quiet chuckle at my expense.  Before the week was out a letter came
+from the Tongore trustees saying I could have the school; wages, ten
+dollars the first month, and, if I proved satisfactory, eleven for
+the other five months, and "board around."
+
+I remember the handwriting of that letter as if I had received it
+but yesterday. "Come at your earliest opportunity."  How vividly I
+recall the round hand in which those words were written!  I replied
+that I would be on hand the next week, ready to open school on
+Monday, the 11th.
+
+Again I took the stage, my father driving me twelve miles to
+Dimmock's Corners to meet it, a trip which he made with me many
+times in after years.  Mother always getting up and preparing our
+breakfast long before daylight.  We were always in a more or less
+anxious frame of mind upon the road lest we be too late for the
+stage, but only once during the many trips did we miss it.  On that
+occasion it had passed a few minutes before we arrived, but, knowing
+it stopped for breakfast at Griffin's Corners, four or five miles
+beyond, I hastened on afoot, running most of the way, and arrived
+in sight of it just as the driver had let off the first crack from
+his whip to start his reluctant horses.  My shouting was quickly
+passed to him by the onlookers, he pulled up, and I won the race
+quite out of breath.
+
+On the present occasion we were in ample time, and my journey ended
+at Shokan, from which place I walked the few miles to Tongore, in
+the late April afternoon.  The little frogs were piping, and I
+remember how homesick the familiar spring sound made me.  As I
+walked along the road near sundown with this sound in my ears, I
+saw coming toward me a man with a gait as familiar as was the piping
+of the frogs.  He turned out to be our neighbor Warren Scudder, and
+how delighted I was to see him in that lonesome land!  He had sold
+a yoke of oxen down there and had been down to deliver them.  The
+home ties pulled very strongly at sight of him.  Warren's three
+boys, Reub and Jack and Smith, were our nearest boy neighbors.  His
+father, old Deacon Scudder, was one of the notable characters of the
+town.  Warren himself had had some varied experiences.  He was one
+of the leaders in the anti-rent war of ten years before.  Indeed,
+he was chief of the band of "Indians" that shot Steel, the sheriff,
+at Andes, and it was charged that the bullet from his pistol was
+the one that did the fatal work.  At any rate, he had had to flee
+the country, escaping concealed in a peddler's cart, while close
+pressed by the posse.  He went South and was absent several years.
+After the excitement of the murder and the struggle between the two
+factions had died down, he returned and was not molested.  And here
+he was in the April twilight, on my path to Tongore, and the sight
+of him cheered my heart.
+
+
+I began my school Monday morning, April the 11th, 1854, and continued
+it for six months, teaching the common branches to twenty or thirty
+pupils from the ages of six to twelve or thirteen.  I can distinctly
+recall the faces of many of those boys and girls to this day--Jane
+North, a slender, clean-cut girl of ten or eleven; Elizabeth
+McClelland, a fat, freckled girl of twelve; Alice Twilliger, a
+thin, talkative girl with a bulging forehead.  Two or three of
+the boys became soldiers in the Civil War, and fell in the battle
+of Gettysburg.
+
+[In April, 1912, Mr. Burroughs received the following:  "Hearty
+congratulations upon your seventy-fifth birthday, from your old
+Tongore pupil of many years ago.
+                                                      R--B--."]
+
+I "boarded round," going home with the children as they invited
+me.  I was always put in the spare room, and usually treated to
+warm biscuit and pie for supper.  A few families were very poor,
+and there I was lucky to get bread and potatoes.  In one house I
+remember the bedstead was very shaky, and in the middle of the
+night, as I turned over, it began to sway and lurch, and presently
+all went down in a heap.  But I clung to the wreck till morning,
+and said nothing about it then.
+
+I remember that a notable eclipse of the sun occurred that spring
+on the 26th of May, when the farmers were planting their corn.
+
+What books I read that summer I cannot recall.  Yes, I recall
+one--"The Complete Letter-Writer," which I bought of a peddler,
+and upon which I modeled many of my letters to various persons,
+among others to a Roxbury girl for whom I had a mild fancy.  My
+first letter to a girl I wrote to her, and a ridiculously stiff,
+formal, and awkward letter it was, I assure you.  I am positive
+I addressed her as "Dear Madam," and started off with some sentence
+from "The Complete Letter-Writer," so impressed was I that there
+was a best way to do this thing, and that the book pointed it out.
+Mary's reply was, "To my absent, but not forgotten friend," and was
+simple and natural as girls' letters usually are.  My Grandfather
+Kelly died that season, and I recall that I wrote a letter of
+condolence to my people, modeled upon one in the book. How absurd
+and stilted and unreal it must have sounded to them!
+
+
+Oh, how crude and callow and obtuse I was at that time, full of
+vague and tremulous aspirations and awakenings, but undisciplined,
+uninformed, with many inherited incapacities and obstacles to weigh
+me down.  I was extremely bashful, had no social aptitude, and was
+likely to stutter when anxious or embarrassed, yet I seem to have
+made a good impression.  I was much liked in school and out, and
+was fairly happy.  I seem to see sunshine over all when I look back
+there.  But it was a long summer to me.  I had never been from home
+more than a day or two at a time before, and I became very homesick.
+Oh, to walk in the orchard back of the house, or along the road, or
+to see the old hills again--what a Joy it would have been!  But I
+stuck it out till my term ended in October, and then went home,
+taking a young fellow from the district (a brother of some girls
+I fancied) with me.  I took back nearly all my wages, over fifty
+dollars, and with this I planned to pay my way at Hedding Literary
+Institute, in the adjoining county of Greene, during the coming
+winter term.
+
+I left home for the school late in November, riding the thirty miles
+with Father, atop a load of butter.  It was the time of year when
+the farmers took their butter to Catskill.  Father usually made two
+trips.  This was the first one of the season, and I accompanied him
+as far as Ashland, where the Institute was located.
+
+I remained at school there three months, the length of the winter
+term, and studied fairly hard.  I had a room by myself and enjoyed
+the life with the two hundred or more boys and girls of my own age.
+I studied algebra, geometry, chemistry, French, and logic, wrote
+compositions, and declaimed in the chapel, as the rules required.
+It was at this time that I first read Milton.  We had to parse in
+"Paradise Lost," and I recall how I was shocked and astonished by
+that celestial warfare.  I told one of my classmates that I did not
+believe a word of it.  Among my teachers was a young, delicate,
+wide-eyed man who in later life became well known as Bishop Hurst,
+of the Methodist Church.  He heard our small class in logic at seven
+o'clock in the morning, in a room that was never quite warmed by
+the newly kindled fire.  I don't know how I came to study logic
+(Whately's).  I had never heard of such a study before; maybe that
+is why I chose it.  I got little out of it.  What an absurd study,
+taught, as it was, as an aid to argumentation!--like teaching a man
+to walk by explaining to him the mechanism of walking.  The analysis
+of one sound argument, or of one weak one, in terms of common sense,
+is worth any amount of such stuff.  But it was of a piece with
+grammar and rhetoric as then taught--all preposterous studies viewed
+as helps toward correct writing and speaking.  Think of our parsing
+Milton as an aid to mastering the English language!
+
+I remember I stood fairly high in composition--only one boy in the
+school ahead of me, and that was Herman Coons, to whom I became much
+attached, and who became a Methodist minister.  He went home with me
+during the holiday vacation.  After leaving school we corresponded
+for several years, and then lost track of each other.  I do not know
+that there is one of my school-mates of that time now living.  I
+know of none that became eminent in any field.  One of the boys was
+fatally injured that winter while coasting.  I remember sitting up
+with him many nights and ministering to him.  He died in a few weeks.
+
+It was an event when Father and Mother came to visit me for a few
+hours, and Mother brought me some mince pies.  What feasts two or
+three other boys and I had in my room over those home-made pies!
+
+Toward spring we had a public debate in the chapel, and I was chosen
+as one of the disputants.  We debated the question of the Crimean
+War, which was on then.  I was on the side of England and France
+against Russia.  Our side won.  I think I spoke very well.  I
+remember that I got much of my ammunition from a paper in "Harper's
+Magazine," probably by Dr. Osgood.  It seems my fellow on the
+affirmative had got much of his ammunition from the same source,
+and, as I spoke first, there was not much powder left for him, and
+he was greatly embarrassed.
+
+What insignificant things one remembers in a world of small events!
+I recall how one morning when we had all gathered in chapel for
+prayers, none of the professors appeared on the platform but our
+French teacher, and, as praying for us was not one of his duties,
+he hurried off to find some one to perform that function, while we
+all sat and giggled.
+
+
+In the spring of 1855, with eight or ten dollars in my pocket which
+Father had advanced me, I made my first visit to New York by steamer
+from Catskill, on my way to New Jersey in quest of a position as
+school-teacher.  Three of our neighborhood boys were then teaching
+in or near Plainfield, and I sought them out, having my first ride
+on the cars on that trip from Jersey City.  As I sat there in my
+seat waiting for the train to start, I remember I actually wondered
+if the starting would be so sudden as to jerk my hat off!
+
+I was too late to find a vacancy in any of the schools in the districts
+I visited.  On one occasion I walked from Somerville twelve miles to a
+village where there was a vacancy, but the trustees, after looking me
+over, concluded I was too young and inexperienced for their large
+school.  That night the occultation of Venus by the moon took place.
+I remember gazing at it long and long.
+
+On my return in May I stopped in New York and spent a day prowling
+about the second-hand bookstalls, and spent so much of my money
+for books that I had only enough left to carry me to Griffin's
+Corners, twelve miles from home.  I bought Locke's "Essay on the
+Human Understanding," Dr. Johnson's works, Saint-Pierre's "Studies
+of Nature," and Dick's works and others.  Dick was a Scottish
+philosopher whose two big fat volumes held something that caught
+my mind as I dipped into them.  But I got little from him and soon
+laid him aside.  On this and other trips to New York I was always
+drawn by the second-hand bookstalls.  How I hovered about them,
+how good the books looked, how I wanted them all!  To this day,
+when I am passing them, the spirit of those days lays its hand
+upon me, and I have to pause a few moments and, half-dreaming,
+half-longing, run over the titles.  Nearly all my copies of the
+English classics I have picked up at these curbstone stalls.  How
+much more they mean to me than new books of later years!  Here,
+for instance, are two volumes of Dr. Johnson's works in good leather
+binding, library style, which I have carried with me from one place
+to another for over fifty years, and which in my youth I read and
+reread, and the style of which I tried to imitate before I was
+twenty.  When I dip into "The Rambler" and "The Idler" now how dry
+and stilted and artificial their balanced sentences seem! yet I
+treasure them for what they once were to me.  In my first essay
+in the "Atlantic," forty-six years ago [in 1860], I said that
+Johnson's periods acted like a lever of the third kind, and that
+the power applied always exceeded the weight raised; and this
+comparison seems to hit the mark very well.  I did not read
+Boswell's Life of him till much later.  In his conversation
+Johnson got the fulcrum in the right place.
+
+
+I reached home on the twentieth of May with an empty pocket and
+an empty stomach, but with a bagful of books.  I remember the day
+because the grass was green, but the air was full of those great
+"goose-feather" flakes of snow which sometimes fall in late May.
+
+I stayed home that summer of '55 and worked on the farm, and
+pored over my books when I had a chance.  I must have found
+Locke's "Essay" pretty tough reading, but I remember buckling
+to it, getting right down on "all fours," as one has to, to
+follow Locke.
+
+I think it was that summer that I read my first novel, "Charlotte
+Temple," and was fairly intoxicated with it.  It let loose a flood
+of emotion in me.  I remember finishing it one morning and then
+going out to work in the hay-field, and how the homely and familiar
+scenes fairly revolted me.  I dare say the story took away my taste
+for Locke and Johnson for a while.
+
+In early September I again turned my face Jerseyward in quest of a
+school, but stopped on my way in Olive to visit friends in Tongore.
+The school there, since I had left it, had fared badly.  One of
+the teachers the boys had turned out of doors, and the others had
+"failed to give satisfaction"; so I was urged to take the school
+again.  The trustees offered to double my wages--twenty-two dollars
+a month. After some hesitation I gave up the Jersey scheme and
+accepted the trustees' offer.
+
+
+It was during that second term of teaching at Tongore that I first
+met Ursula North, who later became my wife.  Her uncle was one of
+the trustees of the school, and I presume it was this connection
+that brought her to the place and led to our meeting.
+
+If I had gone on to Jersey in that fall of '55, my life might have
+been very different in many ways.  I might have married some other
+girl, might have had a large family of children, and the whole
+course of my life might have been greatly changed.  It frightens
+me now to think that I might have missed the Washington life, and
+Whitman, . . . and much else that has counted for so much with me.
+What I might have gained is, in the scale, like imponderable air.
+
+I read my Johnson and Locke that winter and tried to write a little
+in the Johnsonese buckram style.  The young man to-day, under the
+same conditions, would probably spend his evenings reading novels
+or the magazines.  I spent mine poring over "The Rambler."
+
+
+In April I closed the school and went home, again taking a young
+fellow with me.  I was then practically engaged to Ursula North,
+and I wrote her a poem on reaching home.  About the middle of
+April I left home for Cooperstown Seminary.  I rode to Moresville
+with Jim Bouton, and as the road between there and Stamford was
+so blocked with snowdrifts that the stage could not run, I was
+compelled to walk the eight miles, leaving my trunk behind.  From
+Stamford I reached Cooperstown after an all-night ride by stage.
+
+My summer at Cooperstown was an enjoyable and a profitable one.
+I studied Latin, French, English literature, algebra, and geometry.
+If I remember correctly, I stood first in composition over the
+whole school.  I joined the Websterian Society and frequently
+debated, and was one of the three or four orators chosen by the
+school to "orate" in a grove on the shore of the lake, on the
+Fourth of July.  I held forth in the true spread-eagle style.
+
+I entered into the sports of the school, ball-playing and rowing
+on the lake, with the zest of youth.
+
+One significant thing I remember: I was always on the lookout for
+books of essays.  It was at this time that I took my first bite
+into Emerson, and it was like tasting a green apple--not that he
+was unripe, but I wasn't ripe for him.  But a year later I tasted
+him again, and said, "Why, this tastes good"; and took a bigger
+bite; then soon devoured everything of his I could find.
+
+I say I was early on the lockout for books of essays, and I wanted
+the essay to begin, not in a casual way by some remark in the first
+person, but by the annunciation of some general truth, as most of
+Dr. Johnson's did.  I think I bought Dick's works on the strength
+of his opening sentence--"Man is a compound being."
+
+As one's mind develops, how many changes in taste he passes
+through!  About the time of which I am now writing, Pope was my
+favorite poet.  His wit and common sense appealed to me.  Young's
+"Night Thoughts" also struck me as very grand.  Whipple seemed to
+me a much greater writer than Emerson.  Shakespeare I did not come
+to appreciate till years later, and Chaucer and Spenser I have
+never learned to care for.
+
+I am sure the growth of my literary taste has been along the right
+lines--from the formal and the complex, to the simple and direct.
+Now, the less the page seems written, that is, the more natural and
+instinctive it is, other things being equal, the more it pleases
+me.  I would have the author take no thought of his style, as such;
+yet if his sentences are clothed like the lilies of the field, so
+much the better.  Unconscious beauty that flows inevitably and
+spontaneously out of the subject, or out of the writer's mind,
+how it takes us!
+
+My own first attempts at writing were, of course, crude enough. It
+took me a long time to put aside all affectation and make-believe,
+if I have ever quite succeeded in doing it, and get down to what I
+really saw and felt.  But I think now I can tell dead wood in my
+writing when I see it--tell when I fumble in my mind, or when my
+sentences glance off and fail to reach the quick.
+
+
+[In August, 1902, Mr. Burroughs wrote me of a visit to Cooperstown,
+after all these years: "I found Cooperstown not much changed.  The
+lake and the hills were, of course, the same as I had known them
+forty-six years ago, and the main street seemed but little altered.
+Of the old seminary only the foundations were standing, and the
+trees had so grown about it that I hardly knew the place.  I again
+dipped my oar in the lake, again stood beside Cooper's grave, and
+threaded some of the streets I had known so well.  I wished I could
+have been alone there. . . . I wanted to muse and dream, and invoke
+the spirit of other days, but the spirits would not rise in the
+presence of strangers.  I could not quite get a glimpse of the
+world as it appeared to me in those callow days.  It was here that
+I saw my first live author (spoken of in my 'Egotistical Chapter')
+and first dipped into Emerson."
+
+After leaving the Seminary at Cooperstown in July of 1856, the
+young student worked on the home farm in the Catskills until fall,
+when he began teaching school at Buffalo Grove, Illinois, where he
+taught until the following spring, returning East to marry, as he
+says, "the girl I left behind me."
+
+He then taught in various schools in New York and New Jersey, until
+the fall of 1863.  As a rule, in the summer he worked on the home
+farm.
+
+During this period he was reading much, and trying his hand at
+writing.  There was a short intermission in his teaching, when he
+invested his earnings in a patent buckle, and for a brief period he
+had dreams of wealth.  But the buckle project failed, the dreams
+vanished, and he began to read medicine, and resumed his teaching.
+
+From 1859 to 1862 he was writing much, on philosophical subjects
+mainly.  It was in 1863 that he first became interested in the
+birds.--C. B.]
+
+
+Ever since the time when in my boyhood I saw the strange bird
+in the woods of which I have told you, the thought had frequently
+occurred to me, "I shall know the birds some day." But nothing came
+of the thought and wish till the spring of '63, when I was teaching
+school near West Point.  In the library of the Military Academy,
+which I frequently visited of a Saturday, I chanced upon the works
+of Audubon.  I took fire at once.  It was like bringing together
+fire and powder!  I was ripe for the adventure; I had leisure, I
+was in a good bird country, and I had Audubon to stimulate me, as
+well as a collection of mounted birds belonging to the Academy
+for reference.  How eagerly and joyously I took up the study! It
+fitted in so well with my country tastes and breeding; it turned my
+enthusiasm as a sportsman into a new channel; it gave to my walks a
+new delight; it made me look upon every grove and wood as a new
+storehouse of possible treasures.  I could go fishing or camping
+or picknicking now with my resources for enjoyment doubled.  That
+first hooded warbler that I discovered and identified in a near-by
+bushy field one Sunday morning--shall I ever forget the thrill of
+delight it gave me?  And when in August I went with three friends
+into the Adirondacks, no day or place or detention came amiss to
+me; new birds were calling and flitting on every hand; a new world
+was opened to me in the midst of the old.
+
+At once I was moved to write about the birds, and I began my first
+paper, "The Return of the Birds," that fall, and finished it in
+Washington, whither I went in October, and where I lived for ten
+years.  Writing about the birds and always treating them in
+connection with the season and their environment, was, while I was
+a government clerk, a kind of vacation.  It enabled me to live over
+again my days amid the sweet rural things and influences.  The
+paper just referred to is, as you may see, mainly written out of my
+memories as a farm boy.  The enthusiasm which Audubon had begotten
+in me quickened and gave value to all my youthful experiences and
+observations of the birds.
+
+
+[This brings us to the time when our subject is fairly launched on
+early manhood. He has regular employment--a clerkship in the office
+of the Comptroller of the Currency, which, if not especially
+congenial in itself, affords him leisure to do the things he most
+wishes to do.  He is even now growing in strength and efficiency
+as an essayist.--C. B.]
+
+
+
+SELF-ANALYSIS
+
+
+March, 1909
+
+My Dear Friend,--
+
+You once asked me how, considering my antecedents and youthful
+environment, I accounted for myself; what sent me to Nature, and
+to writing about her, and to literature generally.  I wish I could
+answer you satisfactorily, but I fear I cannot. I do not know,
+myself; I can only guess at it.
+
+I have always looked upon myself as a kind of sport; I came out
+of the air quite as much as out of my family.  All my weaknesses
+and insufficiencies--and there are a lot of them--are inherited,
+but of my intellectual qualities, there is not much trace in my
+immediate forbears.  No scholars or thinkers or lovers of books,
+or men of intellectual pursuits for several generations back of
+me--all obscure farmers or laborers in humble fields, rather
+grave, religiously inclined men, I gather, sober, industrious, good
+citizens, good neighbors, correct livers, but with no very shining
+qualities.  My four brothers were of this stamp--home-bodies,
+rather timid, non-aggressive men, somewhat below the average in
+those qualities and powers that insure worldly success--the kind
+of men that are so often crowded to the wall. I can see myself
+in some of them, especially in Hiram, who had daydreams, who
+was always going West, but never went; who always wanted some
+plaything--fancy sheep or pigs or poultry; who was a great lover
+of bees and always kept them; who was curious about strange lands,
+but who lost heart and hope as soon as he got beyond the sight of
+his native hills; and who usually got cheated in every bargain he
+made.  Perhaps it is because I see myself in him that Hiram always
+seemed nearer to me than any of the rest.  I have at times his
+vagueness, his indefiniteness, his irresolution, and his want of
+spirit when imposed upon.
+
+Poor Hiram! One fall in his simplicity he took his fancy Cotswold
+sheep to the State Fair at Syracuse, never dreaming but that a
+farmer entirely outside of all the rings and cliques, and quite
+unknown, could get the prize if his stock was the best.  I can
+see him now, hanging about the sheep-pens, homesick, insignificant,
+unnoticed, living on cake and pie, and wondering why a prize label
+was not put upon his sheep.  Poor Hiram! Well, he marched up the
+hill with his sheep, and then he marched down again, a sadder and,
+I hope, a wiser man.
+
+Once he ordered a fancy rifle, costing upwards of a hundred
+dollars, of a gunsmith in Utica.  When the rifle came, it did
+not suit him, was not according to specifications; so he sent it
+back. Not long after that the man failed and no rifle came, and
+the money was not returned.  Then Hiram concluded to make a journey
+out there.  I was at home at the time, and can see him yet as he
+started off along the road that June day, off for Utica on foot.
+Again he marched up the hill, and then marched down, and no rifle
+or money ever came.
+
+For years he had the Western fever, and kept his valise under his
+bed packed ready for the trip.  Once he actually started and got
+as far as White Pigeon, Michigan.  There his courage gave out, and
+he came back.  Still he kept his valise packed, but the end of his
+life's journey came before he was ready to go West again.
+
+Hiram, as you know, came to live with me at Slabsides during
+the last years of his life.  He had made a failure of it on the
+old farm, after I had helped him purchase it; nearly everything
+had gone wrong, indoors and out; and he was compelled to give it
+up.  So he brought his forty or more skips of bees to West Park
+and lived with me, devoting himself, not very successfully, to
+bee-culture.  He loved to "fuss" with bees.  I think the money he
+got for his honey looked a little more precious to him than other
+money, just as the silver quarters I used to get when a boy for the
+maple sugar I made had a charm and a value no quarters have ever
+had in my eyes since.
+
+That thing in Hiram that was so appealed to by his bee-culture, and
+by any fancy strain of sheep or poultry, is strong in me, too, and
+has played an important part in my life.  If I had not taken it out
+in running after wild nature and writing about it I should probably
+have been a bee-man, or a fancy-stock farmer.  As it is, I have
+always been a bee-lover, and have usually kept several swarms.
+Ordinary farming is prosy and tiresome compared with bee-farming.
+Combined with poultry-raising, it always had special attractions
+for me.  When I was a farm boy of twelve or thirteen years, one
+of our neighbors had a breed of chickens with large topknots that
+filled my eye completely.  My brother and I used to hang around the
+Chase henyard for hours, admiring and longing for those chickens.
+The impression those fowls made upon me seems as vivid to-day as it
+was when first made.  The topknot was the extra touch--the touch of
+poetry that I have always looked for in things, and that Hiram, in
+his way, craved and sought for, too.
+
+There was something, too, in my maternal grandfather that probably
+foreshadowed the nature-lover and nature-writer.  In him it took
+the form of a love of angling, and a love for the Bible.  He went
+from the Book to the stream, and from the stream to the Book,
+with great regularity.  I do not remember that he ever read the
+newspapers, or any other books than the Bible and the hymn-book.
+When he was over eighty years, old he would woo the trout-streams
+with great success, and between times would pore over the Book
+till his eyes were dim.  I do not think he ever joined the church,
+or ever made an open profession of religion, as was the wont in
+those days; but he had the religious nature which he nursed upon
+the Bible.  When a mere boy, as I have before told you, he was a
+soldier under Washington, and when the War of 1812 broke out, and
+one of his sons was drafted, he was accepted and went in his stead.
+The half-wild, adventurous life of the soldier suited him better
+than the humdrum of the farm.  From him, as I have said, I get the
+dash of Celtic blood in my veins--that almost feminine sensibility
+and tinge of melancholy that, I think, shows in all my books.
+That emotional Celt, ineffectual in some ways, full of longings
+and impossible dreams, of quick and noisy anger, temporizing,
+revolutionary, mystical, bold in words, timid in action--surely
+that man is in me, and surely he comes from my revolutionary
+ancestor, Grandfather Kelly.
+
+I think of the Burroughs branch of my ancestry as rather retiring,
+peace-loving, solitude-loving men--men not strongly sketched in
+on the canvas of life, not self-assertive, never roistering or
+uproarious--law-abiding, and church-going.  I gather this
+impression from many sources, and think it is a correct one.
+
+
+Oh, the old farm days! how the fragrance of them still lingers
+in my heart! the spring with its farm, the returning birds, and
+the full, lucid trout-streams; the summer with its wild berries,
+its haying, its cool, fragrant woods; the fall with its nuts, its
+game, its apple-gathering, its holidays; the winter with its
+school, its sport on ice and snow, its apple-bins in the cellar,
+its long nights by the fireside, its voice of fox-bounds on the
+mountains, its sound of flails in the barn--how much I still dream
+about these things!
+
+But I am slow in keeping my promise to try to account for myself.
+Yet all these things are a part of my antecedents; they entered
+into my very blood--father and mother and brothers and sisters,
+and the homely life of the farm, all entered into and became a
+part of that which I am.
+
+I am certain, as I have told you before, that I derived more from
+my mother than from my father.  I have more of her disposition--her
+yearning, breeding nature, her subdued and neutral tones, her
+curiosity, her love of animals, and of wild nature generally.
+Father was neither a hunter nor a fisherman, and, I think, was
+rarely conscious of the beauty of nature around him.  The texture
+of his nature was much less fine than that of Mother's, and he was
+a much easier problem to read; he was as transparent as glass.
+Mother had more of the stuff of poetry in her soul, and a deeper,
+if more obscure, background to her nature.  That which makes a
+man a hunter or a fisherman simply sent her forth in quest of
+wild berries.  What a berry-picker she was!  How she would work
+to get the churning out of the way so she could go out to the
+berry lot!  It seemed to heal and refresh her to go forth in the
+hill meadows for strawberries, or in the old bushy bark-peelings
+for raspberries.  The last work she did in the world was to gather
+a pail of blackberries as she returned one September afternoon from
+a visit to my sister's, less than a mile away.
+
+I am as fond of going forth for berries as my mother was, even to
+this day.  Every June I must still make one or two excursions to
+distant fields for wild strawberries, or along the borders of the
+woods for black raspberries, and I never go without thinking of
+Mother.  You could not see all that I bring home with me in my
+pail on such occasions; if you could, you would see the traces
+of daisies and buttercups and bobolinks, and the blue skies, with
+thoughts of Mother and the Old Home, that date from my youth.  I
+usually eat some of the berries in bread and milk, as I was wont to
+do in the old days, and am, for the moment, as near a boy again as
+it is possible for me to be.
+
+[Illustration: One of Mr. Burroughs's Favorite Seats, Roxbury,
+New York.  From a photograph by Clifton Johnson]
+
+No doubt my life as a farm boy has had much to do with my
+subsequent love of nature, and my feeling of kinship with all
+rural things.  I feel at home with them; they are bone of my bone
+and flesh of my flesh.  It seems to me a man who was not born and
+reared in the country can hardly get Nature into his blood, and
+establish such intimate and affectionate relations with her, as
+can the born countryman.  We are so susceptible and so plastic in
+youth; we take things so seriously; they enter into and color and
+feed the very currents of our being.  As a child I think I must
+have been more than usually fluid and impressionable, and that my
+affiliations with open-air life and objects were very hearty and
+thorough.  As I grow old I am experiencing what, I suppose, all
+men experience, more or less; my subsequent days slough off, or
+fade away, more and more, leaving only the days of my youth as a
+real and lasting possession.
+
+
+When I began, in my twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year, to write
+about the birds, I found that I had only to unpack the memories of
+the farm boy within me to get at the main things about the common
+ones.  I had unconsciously absorbed the knowledge that gave the life
+and warmth to my page.  Take that farm boy out of my books, out of
+all the pages in which he is latent as well as visibly active, and
+you have robbed them of something vital and fundamental, you have
+taken from the soil much of its fertility.  At least, so it seems
+to me, though in this business of self-analysis I know one may easily
+go far astray.  It is probably quite impossible correctly to weigh
+and appraise the many and complex influences and elements that have
+entered into one's life.
+
+When I look back to that twilight of early youth, to that half-mythical
+borderland of the age of six or seven years, or even earlier, I can
+see but few things that, in the light of my subsequent life, have
+much significance.  One is the impression made upon me by a redbird
+which the "hired girl" brought in from the woodpile, one day with a
+pail of chips.  She had found the bird lying dead upon the ground.
+That vivid bit of color in the form of a bird has never faded from my
+mind, though I could not have been more than three or four years old.
+
+Another bird incident, equally vivid, I have related in "Wake-Robin,"
+in the chapter called "The Invitation,"--the vision of the small
+bluish bird with a white spot on its wing, one Sunday when I was
+six or seven years old, while roaming with my brothers in the
+"Deacon woods" near home.  The memory of that bird stuck to me
+as a glimpse of a world of birds that I knew not of.
+
+Still another bird incident that is stamped upon my memory must
+have occurred about the same time.  Some of my brothers and an
+older boy neighbor and I were walking along a road in the woods
+when a brown bird flew down from a bush upon the ground in front
+of us.  "A brown thrasher," the older boy said. It was doubtless
+either the veery, or the hermit thrush, and this was my first clear
+view of it.  Thus it appears that birds stuck to me, impressed me
+from the first.  Very early in my life the coming of the bluebird,
+the phoebe, the song sparrow, and the robin, in the spring, were
+events that stirred my emotions, and gave a new color to the day.
+When I had found a bluebird's nest in the cavity of a stump or a
+tree, I used to try to capture the mother bird by approaching
+silently and clapping my hand over the hole; in this I sometimes
+succeeded, though, of course, I never harmed the bird.  I used to
+capture song sparrows in a similar way, by clapping my hat over
+the nest in the side of the bank along the road.
+
+I can see that I was early drawn to other forms of wild life, for
+I distinctly remember when a small urchin prying into the private
+affairs of the "peepers" in the marshes in early spring, sitting
+still a long time on a log in their midst, trying to spy out and
+catch them in the act of peeping.  And this I succeeded in doing,
+discovering one piping from the top of a bulrush, to which he clung
+like a sailor to a mast; I finally allayed the fears of one I had
+captured till he sat in the palm of my hand and piped--a feat I
+have never been able to repeat since.
+
+I studied the ways of the bumblebees also, and had names of my
+own for all the different kinds.  One summer I made it a point
+to collect bumblebee honey, and I must have gathered a couple of
+pounds.  I found it very palatable, though the combs were often
+infested with parasites.  The small red-banded bumblebees that
+lived in large colonies in holes in the ground afforded me the
+largest yields.  A large bee, with a broad light-yellow band,
+was the ugliest customer to deal with.  It was a fighter and
+would stick to its enemy like grim death, following me across
+the meadow and often getting in my hair, and a few times up my
+trousers leg, where I had it at as great a disadvantage as it
+had me.  It could stab, and I could pinch, and one blow followed
+the other pretty rapidly.
+
+
+As a child I was always looked upon and spoken of as an "odd one"
+in the family, even by my parents.  Strangers, and relatives from
+a distance, visiting at the house, would say, after looking us all
+over, "That is not your boy," referring to me, "who is he?"  And I
+am sure I used to look the embarrassment I felt at not being as the
+others were.  I did not want to be set apart from them or regarded
+as an outsider.  As this was before the days of photography, there
+are no pictures of us as children, so I can form no opinion of how
+I differed in my looks from the others.  I remember hearing my
+parents say that I showed more of the Kelly--Mother's family.
+
+I early "took to larnin'," as Father used to say, differing from
+my brothers and sisters in this respect. I quickly and easily
+distanced them all in the ordinary studies.  I had gone through
+Dayball's Arithmetic while two of my older brothers were yet in
+addition.  "Larnin'" came very hard to all of them except to Hiram
+and me, and Hiram did not have an easy time of it, though he got
+through his Dayball, and studied Greenleaf's Grammar.
+
+There was a library of a couple of dozen of volumes in the district,
+and I used to take home books from it.  They were usually books
+of travel or of adventure.  I remember one, especially, a great
+favorite, "Murphy, the Indian Killer."  I must have read this book
+several times.  Novels, or nature books, or natural-history books,
+were unknown in that library.  I remember the "Life of Washington,"
+and I am quite certain that it was a passage in this book that made
+a lasting impression upon me when I was not more than six or seven
+years old.  I remember the impression, though I do not recall the
+substance of the passage.  The incident occurred one Sunday in
+summer when Hiram and a cousin of ours and I were playing through
+the house, I carrying this book in my hand.  From time to time I
+would stop and read this passage aloud, and I can remember, as if
+it were but yesterday, that I was so moved by it, so swept away by
+its eloquence, that, for a moment, I was utterly oblivious to
+everything around me.  I was lifted out of myself, caught up in
+a cloud of feeling, and wafted I know not whither.  My companions,
+being much older than I was, regarded not my reading.
+
+These exalted emotional states, similar to that just described,
+used occasionally to come to me under other conditions about this
+time, or later.  I recall one such, one summer morning when I was
+walking on the top of a stone wall that ran across the summit of
+one of those broad-backed hills which you yourself know.  I had in
+my hand a bit of a root of a tree that was shaped much like a
+pistol.  As I walked along the toppling stones, I flourished this,
+and called and shouted and exulted and let my enthusiasm have free
+swing.  It was a moment of supreme happiness. I was literally
+intoxicated; with what I do not know.  I only remember that life
+seemed amazingly beautiful--I was on the crest of some curious
+wave of emotion, and my soul sparkled and flashed in the sunlight.
+I have haunted that old stone wall many times since that day, but
+I have never been able again to experience that thrill of joy and
+triumph.  The cup of life does not spontaneously bead and sparkle
+in this way except in youth, and probably with many people it does
+not even then.  But I know from what you have told me that you have
+had the experience.  When one is trying to cipher out his past, and
+separate the factors that have played an important part in his
+life, such incidents, slight though they are, are significant.
+
+The day-dreams I used to indulge in when twelve or thirteen, while
+at work about the farm, boiling sap in the spring woods, driving
+the cows to pasture, or hoeing corn,--dreams of great wealth and
+splendor, of dress and equipage,--were also significant, but not
+prophetic.  Probably what started these golden dreams was an
+itinerant quack phrenologist who passed the night at our house when
+I was a lad of eight or nine.  He examined the heads of all of us;
+when he struck mine, he grew enthusiastic.  "This is the head for
+you," he said; "this boy is going to be rich, very rich"; and much
+more to that effect.  Riches was the one thing that appealed to
+country people in those times; it was what all were after, and what
+few had.  Hence the confident prophesy of the old quack made an
+impression, and when I began to indulge in day-dreams I was, no
+doubt, influenced by it.  But, as you know, it did not come true,
+except in a very limited sense.  Instead of returning to the Old
+Home in a fine equipage, and shining with gold,--the observed of
+all observers, and the envy of all enviers,--as I had dreamed, and
+as had been foretold, I came back heavy-hearted, not indeed poor,
+but far from rich, walked up from the station through the mud and
+snow unnoticed, and took upon myself the debts against the old
+farm, and so provided that it be kept in the family.  It was not
+an impressive home-coming; it was to assume burdens rather than
+to receive congratulations; it was to bow my head rather than to
+lift it up.  Out of the golden dreams of youth had come cares and
+responsibilities.  But doubtless it was best so.  The love that
+brought me back to the old home year after year, that made me
+willing to serve my family, and that invested my native hills
+with such a charm, was the best kind of riches after all.
+
+
+As a youth I never went to Sunday-school, and I was not often
+seen inside the church.  My Sundays were spent rather roaming
+in the woods and fields, or climbing to "Old Clump," or, in summer,
+following the streams and swimming in the pools.  Occasionally I
+went fishing, though this was to incur parental displeasure--unless
+I brought home some fine trout, in which case the displeasure was
+much tempered.  I think this Sunday-school in the woods and fields
+was, in my case, best.  It has always seemed, and still seems, as
+if I could be a little more intimate with Nature on Sunday than
+on a week-day; our relations were and are more ideal, a different
+spirit is abroad, the spirit of holiday and not of work, and I
+could in youth, and can now, abandon myself to the wild life about
+me more fully and more joyously on that day than on any other.
+
+The memory of my youthful Sundays is fragrant with wintergreens,
+black birch, and crinkle-root, to say nothing of the harvest apples
+that grew in our neighbor's orchard; and the memory of my Sundays
+in later years is fragrant with arbutus, and the showy orchid, and
+wild strawberries, and touched with the sanctity of woodland walks
+and hilltops.  What day can compare with a Sunday to go to the
+waterfalls, or to "Piney Ridge," or to "Columbine Ledge," or to
+stroll along "Snake Lane"?  What sweet peace and repose is over
+all!  The snakes in Snake Lane are as free from venom as are
+grasshoppers, and the grasshoppers themselves fiddle and dance as
+at no other time.  Cherish your Sundays.  I think you will read a
+little deeper in "Nature's infinite book of secrecy" on Sunday than
+on Monday.  I once began an essay the subject of which was Sunday,
+but never finished it.  I must send you the fragment.
+
+
+But I have not yet solved my equation--what sent me to nature?
+What made me take an intellectual interest in outdoor things?
+The precise value of the /x/ is hard to find.  My reading, no doubt,
+had much to do with it.  This intellectual and emotional interest
+in nature is in the air in our time, and has been more or less for
+the past fifty years.  I early read Wordsworth, and Emerson and
+Tennyson and Whitman, and Saint-Pierre's "Studies of Nature," as
+I have before told you.  But the previous question is, why the
+nature poets and nature books appealed to me.  One cannot corner
+this unknown quantity.  I suppose I was simply made that way--the
+love of nature was born in me.  I suppose Emerson influenced me
+most, beginning when I was about nineteen; I had read Pope and
+Thomson and Young and parts of Shakespeare before that, but they
+did not kindle this love of nature in me.  Emerson did.  Though
+he did not directly treat of outdoor themes, yet his spirit seemed
+to blend with Nature, and to reveal the ideal and spiritual values
+in her works.  I think it was this, or something like it, that
+stimulated me and made bird and tree and sky and flower full of
+a new interest.  It is not nature for its own sake that has mainly
+drawn me; had it been so, I should have turned out a strict man of
+science; but nature for the soul's sake--the inward world of ideals
+and emotions. It is this that allies me to the poets; while it is
+my interest in the mere fact that allies me to the men of science.
+
+I do not read Emerson much now, except to try to get myself
+back into the atmosphere of that foreworld when a paradox, or a
+startling affirmation, dissolved or put to flight a vast array of
+commonplace facts.  What a bold front he did put on in the presence
+of the tyrannies of life!  He stimulated us by a kind of heavenly
+bragging and saintly flouting of humdrum that ceases to impress us
+as we grow old.  Do we outgrow him?--or do we fall away from him?
+I cannot bear to hear Emerson spoken of as a back-number, and I
+should like to believe that the young men of to-day find in him
+what I found in him fifty years ago, when he seemed to whet my
+appetite for high ideals by referring to that hunger that could
+"eat the solar system like gingercake."  But I suspect they do not.
+The world is too much with us. We are prone to hitch our wagon to
+a star in a way, or in a spirit, that does not sanctify the wagon,
+but debases the star.  Emerson is perhaps too exceptional to take
+his place among the small band of the really first-class writers of
+the world.  Shear him of his paradoxes, of his surprises, of his
+sudden inversions, of his taking sallies in the face of the common
+reason, and appraise him for his real mastery over the elements of
+life and of the mind, as we do Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Carlyle,
+and he will be found wanting.  And yet, let me quickly add, there
+is something more precious and divine about him than about any
+or all the others.  He prepares the way for a greater than he,
+prepares the mind to accept the new man, the new thought, as none
+other does.
+
+
+But how slow I am in getting at my point!  Emerson took me captive.
+For a time I lived and moved and had my intellectual being in him.
+I think I have always had a pretty soft shell, so to speak, hardly
+enough lime and grit in it, and at times I am aware that such is
+the fact to this day.  Well, Emerson found my intellectual shell
+very plastic; I took the form of his mould at once, and could not
+get away from him; and, what is more, did not want to get away
+from him, did not see the need of getting away from him.  Nature
+herself seemed to speak through him.  An intense individuality that
+possesses the quality of lovableness is apt to impose itself upon
+us in this way.  It was under this spell, as you know, that I wrote
+"Expression," of which I have told you.  The "Atlantic," by the
+way, had from the first number been a sort of university to me.
+It had done much to stimulate and to shape my literary tastes and
+ambitions.  I was so eager for it that when I expected it in the
+mail I used to run on my way to the post office for it.  So, with
+fear and trembling, I sent that essay to its editor.  Lowell told
+a Harvard student who was an old schoolmate of mine that when he
+read the paper he thought some young fellow was trying to palm off
+an early essay of Emerson's upon him as his own, and that he looked
+through the "Dial" and other publications in the expectation of
+finding it.  Not succeeding in doing so, he concluded the young
+man had written it himself.  It was published in November, 1860,
+and as the contributors' names were not given at that time, it was
+ascribed to Emerson by the newspaper reviewers of that number.  It
+went into Poole's Index as by Emerson, and later. Professor Hill
+
+
+[Some years ago I took it upon myself to let Professor Hill know
+the real author of "Expression." He appeared grateful, though some
+what chagrined, and said the error should be corrected in the next
+edition.  Mr. Burroughs smiled indulgently when he learned of my
+zeal in the matter: "Emerson's back is broad; he could have afforded
+to continue to shoulder my early blunders," he said.  C. B.]
+
+
+of Harvard, quoted a line from it in a footnote in his "Rhetoric,"
+and credited it to Emerson. So I had deceived the very elect.
+The essay had some merit, but it reeked with the Emersonian spirit
+and manner.  When I came to view it through the perspective of
+print, I quickly saw that this kind of thing would not do for me.
+I must get on ground of my own.  I must get this Emersonian musk
+out of my garments at all hazards.  I concluded to bury my garments
+in the earth, as it were, and see what my native soil would do
+toward drawing it out. So I took to writing on all manner of rural
+themes--sugar-making, cows, haying, stone walls.  These, no doubt,
+helped to draw out the rank suggestion of Emerson.  I wrote about
+things of which I knew, and was, therefore, bound to be more
+sincere with myself than in writing upon the Emersonian themes.
+When a man tells what he knows, what he has seen or felt, he
+is pretty sure to be himself.  When I wrote upon more purely
+intellectual themes, as I did about this time for the "Leader,"
+the Emersonian influence was more potent, though less so than
+in the first "Atlantic" essay.
+
+Any man progresses in the formation of a style of his own in
+proportion as he gets down to his own real thoughts and feelings,
+and ceases to echo the thoughts and moods of another.  Only thus
+can he be sincere; and sincerity is the main secret of style.
+What I wrote from "the push of reading," as Whitman calls it, was
+largely an artificial product; I had not made it my own; but when
+I wrote of country scenes and experiences, I touched the quick of
+my mind, and it was more easy to be real and natural.
+
+I also wrote in 1860 or 1861 a number of things for the "Saturday
+Press" which exhaled the Emersonian perfume.  If you will look them
+over, you will see how my mind was working in the leading-strings
+of Analogy--often a forced and unreal Analogy.
+
+
+December, 1907
+
+My Dear Friend,--
+
+You ask me to tell you more about myself, my life, how it has been
+with me, etc.  It is an inviting subject.  How an old man likes to
+run on about himself!
+
+I see that my life has been more of a holiday than most persons',
+much more than was my father's or his father's.  I have picnicked
+all along the way.  I have on the whole been gay and satisfied.  I
+have had no great crosses or burdens to bear; no great afflictions,
+except such as must come to all who live; neither poverty, nor
+riches.  I have had uniform good health, true friends, and some
+congenial companions.  I have done, for the most part, what I
+wanted to do.  Some drudgery I have had, that is, in uncongenial
+work on the farm, in teaching, in clerking, and in bank-examining;
+but amid all these things I have kept an outlook, an open door, as
+it were, out into the free fields of nature, and a buoyant feeling
+that I would soon be there.
+
+My farm life as a boy was at least a half-holiday.  The fishing,
+the hunting, the berrying, the Sundays on the hills or in the
+woods, the sugar-making, the apple-gathering--all had a holiday
+character.  But the hoeing corn, and picking up potatoes, and
+cleaning the cow stables, had little of this character.  I have
+never been a cog in the wheel of any great concern.  I have never
+had to sink or lose my individuality.  I have been under no exacting
+master or tyrant. . . . I have never been a slave to any bad
+habit, as smoking, drinking, over-feeding.  I have had no social
+or political ambitions; society has not curtailed my freedom or
+dictated my dress or habits.  Neither has any religious order or
+any clique.  I have had no axe to grind.  I have gone with such
+men and women as I liked, irrespective of any badge of wealth or
+reputation or social prestige that they might wear.  I have looked
+for simple pleasures everywhere, and have found them.  I have not
+sought for costly pleasures, and do not want them--pleasures that
+cost money, or health, or time. The great things, the precious
+things of my life, have been without money and without price,
+as common as the air.
+
+Life has laid no urgent mission upon me.  My gait has been a
+leisurely one.  I am not bragging of it; I am only stating a
+fact. I have never felt called upon to reform the world.  I
+have doubtless been culpably indifferent to its troubles and
+perplexities, and sins and sufferings.  I lend a hand occasionally
+here and there in my own neighborhood, but I trouble myself very
+little about my neighbors--their salvation or their damnation.
+I go my own way and do my own work.
+
+I have loved nature, I have loved the animals, I have loved my
+fellow-men.  I have made my own whatever was fair and of good
+report.  I have loved the thoughts of the great thinkers and
+the poems of the great poets, and the devout lines of the great
+religious souls.  I have not looked afar off for my joy and
+entertainment, but in things near at hand, that all may have
+on equal terms.  I have been a loving and dutiful son, and a
+loving and dutiful father, and a good neighbor.  I have got much
+satisfaction out of life; it has been worth while.
+
+I have not been a burden-bearer; for shame be it said, perhaps,
+when there are so many burdens to be borne by some one.  I have
+borne those that came in my way, or that circumstances put upon
+me, and have at least pulled my own weight.  I have had my share
+of the holiday spirit; I have had a social holiday, a moral
+holiday, a business holiday.  I have gone a-fishing while others
+were struggling and groaning and losing their souls in the great
+social or political or business maelstrom.  I know, too, I have
+gone a-fishing while others have labored in the slums and given
+their lives to the betterment of their fellows.  But I have been
+a good fisherman, and I should have made a poor missionary, or
+reformer, or leader of any crusade against sin and crime.  I am
+not a fighter, I dislike any sort of contest, or squabble, or
+competition, or storm.  My strength is in my calm, my serenity,
+my sunshine.  In excitement I lose my head, and my heels, too. I
+cannot carry any citadel by storm.  I lack the audacity and spirit
+of the stormer.  I must reduce it slowly or steal it quietly.
+I lack moral courage, though I have plenty of physical and
+intellectual courage.  I could champion Walt Whitman when nearly
+every contemporaneous critic and poet were crying him down, but
+I utterly lack the moral courage to put in print what he dared to.
+I have wielded the "big stick" against the nature-fakers, but I am
+very uncomfortable under any sort of blame or accusation.  It is
+so much easier for me to say yes than no.  My moral fibre is soft
+compared to my intellectual.  I am a poor preacher, an awkward
+moralizer.  A moral statement does not interest me unless it can
+be backed up by natural truth; it must have intellectual value.
+The religious dogmas interest me if I can find a scientific basis
+for them, otherwise not at all.
+
+I shall shock you by telling you I am not much of a patriot.  I
+have but little national pride.  If we went to war with a foreign
+power to-morrow, my sympathies would be with the foreigner if
+I thought him in the right.  I could gladly see our navy knocked
+to pieces by Japan, for instance, if we were in the wrong.  I
+have absolutely no state pride, any more than I have county or
+town pride, or neighborhood pride.  But I make it up in family
+or tribal affection.
+
+I am too much preoccupied, too much at home with myself, to feel
+any interest in many things that interest my fellows.  I have
+aimed to live a sane, normal, healthy life; or, rather, I have an
+instinct for such a life.  I love life, as such, and I am quickly
+conscious of anything that threatens to check its even flow.  I
+want a full measure of it, and I want it as I do my spring water,
+clear and sweet and from the original sources.  Hence I have always
+chafed in cities, I must live in the country.  Life in the cities
+is like the water there--a long way from the original sources, and
+more or less tainted by artificial conditions.
+
+The current of the lives of many persons, I think, is like a muddy
+stream.  They lack the instinct for health, and hence do not know
+when the vital current is foul.  They are never really well.  They
+do not look out for personal inward sanitation.  Smokers, drinkers,
+coffee-tipplers, gluttonous eaters, diners-out, are likely to lose
+the sense of perfect health, of a clear, pure life-current, of
+which I am thinking.  The dew on the grass, the bloom on the grape,
+the sheen on the plumage, are suggestions of the health that is
+within the reach of most of us.
+
+The least cloud or film in my mental skies mars or stops my work.
+I write with my body quite as much as with my mind.  How persons
+whose bread of life is heavy, so to speak,--no lightness or buoyancy
+or airiness at all,--can make good literature is a mystery to me;
+or those who stimulate themselves with drugs or alcohol or coffee.
+I would live so that I could get tipsy on a glass of water, or find
+a spur in a whiff of morning air.
+
+Such as my books are, the bloom of my life is in them; no morbidity,
+or discontent, or ill health, or angry passion, has gone to their
+making.  The iridescence of a bird's plumage, we are told, is not
+something extraneous; it is a prismatic effect.  So the color in my
+books is not paint; it is health.  It is probably nothing to brag
+of; much greater books have been the work of confirmed invalids.
+All I can say is that the minds of these inspired invalids have
+not seemed to sustain so close a relation to their bodies as my
+mind does to my body.  Their powers seem to have been more purely
+psychic.  Look at Stevenson--almost bedridden all his life, yet
+behold the felicity of his work!  How completely his mind must have
+been emancipated from the infirmities of his body!  It is clearly
+not thus with me.  My mind is like a flame that depends entirely
+upon the good combustion going on in the body. Hence, I can never
+write in the afternoon, because this combustion is poorest then.
+
+Life has been to me simply an opportunity to learn and enjoy, and,
+through my books, to share my enjoyment with others.  I have had no
+other ambition.  I have thirsted to know things, and to make the
+most of them.  The universe is to me a grand spectacle that fills me
+with awe and wonder and joy, and with intense curiosity.  I have had
+no such religious burden to bear as my fathers did--the conviction
+of sin, the struggle, the agony, the despair of a soul that fears
+it is lost.  The fear of hell has never troubled me.  Of sin in the
+theological sense, the imputed sin of Adam's transgression, which so
+worried the old people, I have not had a moment's concern.  That I
+have given my heart to Nature instead of to God, as these same old
+people would have said, has never cast a shadow over my mind or
+conscience--as if God would not get all that belonged to Him, and
+as if love of his works were not love of Him! I have acquiesced in
+things as they are, and have got all the satisfaction out of them
+that I could.
+
+Over my personal sins and shortcomings, I have not been as much
+troubled as I should; none of us are.  We do not see them in relief
+as others do; they are like the color of our eyes, or our hair, or
+the shapes of our noses.
+
+I do not know that it is true that my moral fibre is actually weak.
+If I may draw a figure from geology, it is probably true that my
+moral qualities are the softer rock in the strata that make up my
+being--the easiest worn away.  I see that I carry the instinct of
+the naturalist into all my activities.  If a thing is natural,
+sane, wholesome, that is enough. Whether or not it is conventionally
+correct, or square with the popular conception of morality, does not
+matter to me.
+
+I undoubtedly lack the heroic fibre.  My edge is much easier turned
+than was that, say, of Thoreau.  Austerity would ill become me.  You
+would see through the disguise. Yes, there is much soft rock in my
+make-up.  Is that why I shrink from the wear and tear of the world?
+
+The religious storm and upheaval that I used to hear so much of
+in my youth is impossible with me.  I am liable to deep-seated
+enthusiasms; but to nothing like a revolution in my inward life,
+nothing sudden, nothing violent.  I can't say that there has been
+any abandonment of my opinions on important subjects; there has
+been new growth and evolution, I hope.  The emphasis of life shifts,
+now here, now there; it is up hill and down dale, but there is
+no change of direction. . . . Certain deep-seated tendencies and
+instincts have borne me on.  I have gravitated naturally to the
+things that were mine.
+
+I could not make anything I chose of myself; I could only be what I
+am.  In my youth I once "went forward" at a "protracted meeting,"
+but nothing came of it.  The change in me that I was told would
+happen did not happen, and I never went again.  My nature was too
+equable, too self-poised, to be suddenly overturned and broken up.
+
+I am not a bit gregarious.  I cannot herd with other men and be
+"Hail, fellow, well met!" with them as I wish I could.  I am much
+more at home with women; we seem to understand one another better.
+Put me with a lot of men, and we naturally separate as oil and water
+separate.  On shipboard it is rarely that any of the men take to
+me, or I to them--I do not smoke or drink or tell stories, or talk
+business or politics, and the men have little use for me.  On my
+last voyage across the Atlantic, the only man who seemed to notice
+me, or to whom I felt drawn at all, was a Catholic priest.  Real
+countrymen, trappers, hunters, and farmers, I seem to draw near to.
+On the Harriman Alaskan Expedition the two men I felt most at home
+with were Fred Dellenbaugh, the artist and explorer, and Captain
+Kelly, the guide.  Can you understand this?  Do you see why men
+do not, as a rule, care for me, and why women do?
+
+I accuse myself of want of sociability.  Probably I am too
+thin-skinned.  A little more of the pachyderm would help me in
+this respect.
+
+Some day I will give you more self-analysis and self-criticism.
+
+
+I am what you might call an extemporaneous writer--I write without
+any previous study or preparation, save in so far as my actual
+life from day to day has prepared me for it.  I do not work up
+my subject, or outline it, or sketch it in the rough.  When I
+sit down to write upon any theme, like that of my "Cosmopolitan"
+article last April ["What Life Means to Me," 1906], or of my
+various papers on animal intelligence, I do not know what I have
+to say on the subject till I delve into my mind and see what I
+find there.  The writing is like fishing or hunting, or sifting
+the sand for gold--I am never sure of what I shall find.  All I
+want is a certain feeling, a bit of leaven, which I seem to refer
+to some place in my chest--not my heart, but to a point above that
+and nearer the centre of the chest--the place that always glows or
+suffuses when one thinks of any joy or good tidings that is coming
+his way.  It is a kind of hunger for that subject; it warms me a
+little to think of it, a pleasant thrill runs through me; or it
+is something like a lover's feeling for his sweetheart--I long to
+be alone with it, and to give myself to it.  I am sure I shall
+have a good time.  Hence, my writing is the measure of my life.
+I can write only about what I have previously felt and lived.  I
+have no legerdemain to invoke things out of the air, or to make a
+dry branch bud and blossom before the eyes.  I must look into my
+heart and write, or remain dumb.  Robert Louis Stevenson said one
+should be able to write eloquently on a broomstick, and so he could.
+Stevenson had the true literary legerdemain; he was master of the
+art of writing; he could invest a broomstick with charm; if it
+remained a broomstick, it was one on which the witches might carry
+you through the air at night.  Stevenson had no burden of meaning
+to deliver to the world; his subject never compelled him to write;
+but he certainly could invest common things and thoughts with rare
+grace and charm.  I wish I had more of this gift, this facility
+of pen, apart from any personal interest in the subject.  I could
+not grow eloquent over a broomstick, unless it was the stick of
+the broom that used to stand in the corner behind the door in the
+old kitchen at home--the broom with which Mother used to sweep the
+floor, and sweep off the doorstones, glancing up to the fields and
+hills as she finished and turned to go in; the broom with which we
+used to sweep the snow from our boots and trouser-legs when we came
+from school or from doing the chores in winter.  Here would be a
+personal appeal that would probably find me more inevitably than
+it would Stevenson.
+
+I have never been in the habit of doing a thing, of taking a walk,
+or making an excursion, for the purpose of writing it up.  Hence,
+when magazine editors have asked me to go South or to California,
+or here or there, to write the text to go with the pictures their
+artist would make, I have felt constrained to refuse.  The thought
+that I was expected to write something would have burdened me and
+stood in the way of my enjoyment, and unless there is enjoyment,
+there is no writing with me.
+
+I was once tempted into making an excursion for one of the magazines
+to a delightful place along the Jersey coast in company with an
+artist, and a memorable day it was, too, with plenty of natural and
+of human interest, but nothing came of it--my perverse pen would not
+do what it was expected to do; it was no longer a free pen.
+
+When I began observing the birds, nothing was further from my
+thoughts than writing them up.  I watched them and ran after them
+because I loved them and was happy with them in the fields and
+woods; the writing came as an afterthought, and as a desire to share
+my enjoyment with others.  Hence, I have never carried a notebook,
+or collected data about nature in my rambles and excursions.  What
+was mine, what I saw with love and emotion, has always fused with
+my mind, so that in the heat of writing it came back to me
+spontaneously.  What I have lived, I never lose.
+
+My trip to Alaska came near being spoiled because I was expected
+to write it up, and actually did so from day to day, before fusion
+and absorption had really taken place.   Hence my readers complain
+that they do not find me in that narrative, do not find my stamp
+or quality as in my other writings.  And well they may say it.
+I am conscious that I am not there as in the others; the fruit
+was plucked before it had ripened; or, to use my favorite analogy,
+the bee did not carry the nectar long enough to transform it into
+honey. Had I experienced a more free and disinterested intercourse
+with Alaskan nature, with all the pores of my mind open, the result
+would certainly have been different.  I might then, after the
+experience had lain and ripened in my mind for a year or two, and
+become my own, have got myself into it.
+
+When I went to the Yellowstone National Park with President
+Roosevelt, I waited over three years before writing up the trip.
+I recall the President's asking me at the time if I took notes.
+I said, "No; everything that interests me will stick to me like
+a burr."  And I may say here that I have put nothing in my writings
+at any time that did not interest me.  I have aimed in this to
+please myself alone.  I believe it to be true at all times that
+what does not interest the writer will not interest his reader.
+
+From the impromptu character of my writings come both their merits
+and their defects--their fresh, unstudied character, and their want
+of thoroughness and reference-book authority.  I cannot, either in
+my writing or in my reading, tolerate any delay, any flagging of
+the interest, any beating about the bush, even if there is a bird
+in it. The thought, the description, must move right along, and I
+am impatient of all footnotes and quotations and asides.
+
+A writer may easily take too much thought about his style, until
+it obtrudes itself upon the reader's attention.  I would have my
+sentences appear as if they had never taken a moment's thought of
+themselves, nor stood before the study looking-glass an instant. In
+fact, the less a book appears written, the more like a spontaneous
+product it is, the better I like it.  This is not a justification of
+carelessness or haste; it is a plea for directness, vitality,
+motion.  Those writers who are like still-water fishermen, whose
+great virtues are patience and a tireless arm, never appealed to
+me any more than such fishing ever did.  I want something more like
+a mountain brook--motion, variety, and the furthest possible remove
+from stagnation.
+
+Indeed, where can you find a better symbol of good style in
+literature than a mountain brook after it is well launched towards
+the lowlands--not too hurried, and not too loitering--limpid,
+musical, but not noisy, full but not turbid, sparkling but not
+frothy, every shallow quickly compensated for by a deep reach
+of thought; the calm, lucid pools of meaning alternating with
+the passages of rapid description, of moving eloquence or gay
+comment--flowing, caressing, battling, as the need may be,
+loitering at this point, hurrying at that, drawing together
+here, opening out there--freshness, variety, lucidity, power.
+
+
+[We wish that, like the brook, our self-analyst would "go on
+forever"; but his stream of thought met some obstacle when he
+had written thus far, and I have never been able to induce it
+to resume its flow.  I have, there-fore, selected a bit of
+self-analysis from Mr. Burroughs's diary of December, 1884,
+with which to close this subject.  C.B.]
+
+
+I have had to accomplish in myself the work of several generations.
+None of my ancestors were men or women of culture; they knew
+nothing of books.  I have had to begin at the stump, and to rise
+from crude things.  I have felt the disadvantages which I have
+labored under, as well as the advantages.  The advantages are, that
+things were not hackneyed with me, curiosity was not blunted, my
+faculties were fresh and eager--a kind of virgin soil that gives
+whatever charm and spontaneity my books possess, also whatever of
+seriousness and religiousness. The disadvantages are an inaptitude
+for scholarly things, a want of the steadiness and clearness of
+the tone of letters, the need of a great deal of experimenting, a
+certain thickness and indistinctness of accent.  The farmer and
+laborer in me, many generations old, is a little embarrassed in the
+company of scholars; has to make a great effort to remember his
+learned manners and terms.
+
+The unliterary basis is the best to start from; it is the virgin
+soil of the wilderness; but it is a good way to the college and
+the library, and much work must be done. I am near to nature and
+can write upon these themes with ease and success; this is my
+proper field, as I well know.  But bookish themes--how I flounder
+about amid them, and have to work and delve long to get down to
+the real truth about them in my mind!
+
+In writing upon Emerson, or Arnold, or Carlyle, I have to begin, as
+it were, and clear the soil, build a log hut, and so work up to the
+point of view that is not provincial, but more or less metropolitan.
+
+My best gift as a writer is my gift for truth; I have a thoroughly
+honest mind, and know the truth when I see it. My humility, or
+modesty, or want of self-assertion, call it what you please, is
+also a help in bringing me to the truth.  I am not likely to stand
+in my own light; nor to mistake my own wants and whims for the
+decrees of the Eternal.  At least, if I make the mistake to-day,
+I shall see my error to-morrow.
+
+
+[The discerning reader can hardly fail to trace in the foregoing
+unvarnished account of our subject's ancestry and environment many
+of the factors which have contributed to the unique success he has
+attained as a writer.  Nor can he fail to trace a certain likeness,
+of which our author seems unconscious, to his father.  To his mother
+he has credited most of his gifts as a writer, but to that childlike
+unselfconsciousness which he describes in his father, we are
+doubtless largely indebted for the candid self-analysis here given.
+
+But few writers could compass such a thing, yet he has done it
+simply and naturally, as he would write on any other topic in
+which he was genuinely interested.  To be naked and unashamed is
+a condition lost by most of us long ago, but retained by a few who
+still have many of the traits of the natural man.  C.B.]
+
+
+
+THE EARLY WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+
+I once asked Mr. Burroughs about his early writings, his beginnings.
+He replied, "They were small potatoes and few in a hill, although
+at the time I evidently thought I was growing some big ones.  I had
+yet to learn, as every young writer has to learn, that big words do
+not necessarily mean big thoughts."  Later he sent me these maiden
+efforts, with an account of when and where they appeared.
+
+These early articles show that Mr. Burroughs was a born essayist.
+They all took the essay form.  In his reading, as he has said,
+any book of essays was pretty sure to arrest his attention. He
+seems early to have developed a hunger for the pure stuff of
+literature--something that would feed his intellect at the same
+time that it appealed to his aesthetic sense.  Concerning his first
+essays, he wrote me:--
+
+
+The only significant thing about my first essays, written between
+the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, is their serious trend of
+thought; but the character of my early reading was serious and
+philosophical.  Locke and Johnson and Saint-Pierre and the others
+no doubt left their marks upon me.  I diligently held my mind down
+to the grindstone of Locke's philosophy, and no doubt my mind was
+made brighter and sharper by the process.  Out of Saint-Pierre's
+"Studies of Nature," a work I had never before heard of, I got
+something, though it would be hard for me to say just what.  The
+work is a curious blending of such science as there was in his
+time, with sentiment and fancy, and enlivened by a bright French
+mind.  I still look through it with interest, and find that it has
+a certain power of suggestion for me yet.
+
+
+He confessed that he was somewhat imposed upon by Dr. Johnson's
+high-sounding platitudes. "A beginner," he said, "is very apt to
+feel that if he is going to write, the thing to do is to write,
+and get as far from the easy conversational manner as possible.
+Let your utterances be measured and stately."  At first he tried
+to imitate Johnson, but soon gave that up.  He was less drawn to
+Addison and Lamb at the time, because they were less formal, and
+seemingly less profound; and was slow in perceiving that the art
+of good writing is the art of bringing one's mind and soul face
+to face with that of the reader.  How different that early attitude
+from the penetrating criticism running through his "Literary
+Values"; how different his stilted beginnings from his own limpid
+prose as we know it, to read which is to forget that one is reading!
+
+
+Mr. Burroughs's very first appearance in print was in a paper in
+Delaware County, New York,--the Bloomfield "Mirror,"--on May 18,
+1856.  The article--"Vagaries vs. Spiritualism"--purports to be
+written by "Philomath," of Roxbury, New York, who is none other
+than John Burroughs, at the age of nineteen.  It starts out showing
+impatience at the unreasoning credulity of the superstitious
+mind, and continues in a mildly derisive strain for about a column,
+foreshadowing the controversial spirit which Mr. Burroughs displayed
+many years later in taking to task the natural-history romancers.
+The production was evidently provoked by a too credulous writer
+on spiritualism in a previous issue of the "Mirror."  I will quote
+its first paragraph:--
+
+
+Mr. Mirror,--Notwithstanding the general diffusion of knowledge
+in the nineteenth century, it is a lamentable fact that some minds
+are so obscured by ignorance, or so blinded by superstition, as to
+rely with implicit confidence upon the validity of opinions which
+have no foundation in nature, or no support by the deductions of
+reason.  But truth and error have always been at variance, and the
+audacity of the contest has kept pace with the growing vigor of the
+contending parties.  Some straightforward, conscientious persons,
+whose intentions are undoubtedly commendable, are so infatuated by
+the sophistical theories of the spiritualist, or so tossed about on
+the waves of public opinion, that they lose sight of truth and good
+sense, and, like the philosopher who looked higher than was wise in
+his stargazing, tumble into a ditch.
+
+
+In 1859 or 1860, Mr. Burroughs began to contribute to the columns
+of the "Saturday Press," an organ of the literary bohemians in
+New York, edited by Henry Clapp.  These were fragmentary things
+of a philosophical cast, and were grouped under the absurd title
+"Fragments from the Table of an Intellectual Epicure," by "All
+Souls."  There were about sixty of these fragments.  I have
+examined most of them; some are fanciful and far-fetched; some are
+apt and felicitous; but all foreshadow the independent thinker and
+observer, and show that this "Intellectual Epicure" was feeding on
+strong meat and assimilating it.
+
+I assume that it will interest the reader who knows Mr. Burroughs
+only as the practiced writer of the past fifty years to see some of
+his first sallies into literature, to trace the unlikeness to his
+present style, and the resemblances here and there.  Accordingly I
+subjoin some extracts by "All Souls" from the time-stained pages of
+the New York "Saturday Press" of 1859 and 1860:--
+
+
+A principle of absolute truth, pointed with fact and feathered with
+fancy, and shot from the bow-string of a master intellect, is one
+of the most potent things under the sun.  It sings like a bird of
+peace to those who are not the object of its aim, but woe, woe to
+him who is the butt of such terrible archery!
+
+
+For a thing to appear heavy to us, it is necessary that we have
+heft to balance against it; to appear strong, it is necessary that
+we have strength; to appear great, it is necessary that we have
+an idea of greatness.  We must have a standard to measure by, and
+that standard must be in ourselves.  An ignorant peasant cannot
+know that Bacon is so wise.  To duly appreciate genius, you must
+have genius; a pigmy cannot measure the strength of a giant.  The
+faculty that reads and admires, is the green undeveloped state of
+the faculty that writes and creates.
+
+A book, a principle, an individual, a landscape, or any object in
+nature, to be understood and appreciated, must answer to something
+within us; appreciation is the first step toward interpreting a
+revelation.
+
+To feel terribly beaten is a good sign; the more resources a man
+is conscious of, the deeper he will feel his defeat.  But to feel
+unusually elated at a victory indicates that our strength did not
+warrant it, that we had gone beyond our resources.  The boy who
+went crowing all day through the streets, on having killed a
+squirrel with a stone, showed plainly enough that it was not
+a general average of his throwing, and that he was not in the
+habit of doing so well; while the rifleman picks the hawk from the
+distant tree without remark or comment, and feels vexed if he miss.
+
+The style of some authors, like the manners of some men, is so
+naked, so artificial, has so little character at the bottom of it,
+that it is constantly intruding itself upon your notice, and seems
+to lie there like a huge marble counter from behind which they vend
+only pins and needles; whereas the true function of style is as
+a means and not as an end--to concentrate the attention upon the
+thought which it bears, and not upon itself--to be so apt, natural,
+and easy, and so in keeping with the character of the author, that,
+like the comb in the hive, it shall seem the result of that which
+it contains, and to exist for /its/ sake alone.
+
+
+It is interesting to note, in these and other extracts, how the
+young writer is constantly tracing the analogy between the facts
+of everyday life about him, and moral and intellectual truths.
+A little later he began to knit these fragments together into
+essays, and to send the essays to the "Saturday Press" under
+such titles as "Deep," and "A Thought on Culture."  There is a
+good deal of stating the same thing in diverse ways.  The writer
+seems to be led on and on to seek analogies which, for the most
+part, are felicitous; occasionally crudities and unnecessarily
+homely comparisons betray his unformed taste.  The first three
+paragraphs of "Deep" give a fair sample of the essay:--
+
+
+Deep authors? Yes, reader, I like deep authors, that is, authors
+of great penetration, reach, and compass of thought; but I must not
+be bored with a sense of depth--must not be required to strain my
+mental vision to see into the bottom of a well; the fountain must
+flow out at the surface, though it come from the centre of the
+globe.  Then I can fill my cup without any artificial aid, or
+any painful effort.
+
+What we call depth in a book is often obscurity; and an author
+whose meaning is got at only by severe mental exertion, and a
+straining of the mind's eye, is generally weak in the backbone
+of him.  Occasionally it is the dullness of the reader, but oftener
+the obtuseness of the writer.
+
+A strong vigorous writer is not obscure--at any rate, not habitually
+so; never leaves his reader in doubt, or compels him to mount the
+lever and help to raise his burden; but clutches it in his mighty
+grasp and hurls it into the air, so that it is not only unencumbered
+by the soil that gave it birth, but is wholly detached and relieved,
+and set off against the clear blue of his imagination.  His thought
+is not like a rock propped up but still sod-bound, but is like a
+rock held aloft, or built into a buttress, with definite shape and
+outline.
+
+
+Let me next quote from "A Thought on Culture," which appeared in
+the same publication a little later, and which is the first to
+bear his signature:--
+
+
+In the conduct of life a man should not show his knowledge, but his
+wisdom; not his money--that were vulgar and foolish--but the result
+of it--independence, courage, culture, generosity, manliness, and
+that noble, humane, courteous air which wealth always brings to the
+right sort of a man.
+
+A display of mere knowledge, under most circumstances, is pedantry;
+an exercise of wisdom is always godlike.  We cannot pardon the absence
+of knowledge, but itself must be hid. We can use a thing without
+absolutely showing it, we can be reasonable without boring people
+with our logic, and speak correctly without parsing our sentences.
+
+The end of knowledge is not that a man may appear learned, any
+more than the end of eating is that a man may seem to have a full
+stomach; but the end of it is that a man may be wise, see and
+understand things as they are; be able to adjust himself to the
+universe in which he is placed, and judge and reason with the
+celerity of instinct, and that without any conscious exercise of
+his knowledge.  When we feel the food we have eaten, something is
+wrong; so when a man is forever conscious of his learning, he has
+not digested it, and it is an encumbrance. . . .
+
+
+The evolution of this author in his use of titles is interesting.
+Compare the crudity of "Vagaries vs. Spiritualism," and "Deep," for
+example, with those he selects when he begins to publish his books.
+"Wake-Robin," "Winter Sunshine," "Locusts and Wild Honey," "Leaf
+and Tendril,"--how much they connote!  Then how felicitous are the
+titles of most of his essays! "Birch Browsings," "The Snow-Walkers,"
+"Mellow England," "Our Rural Divinity" (the cow), "The Flight of
+the Eagle" (for one of his early essays on Whitman), "A Bunch of
+Herbs," "A Pinch of Salt," "The Divine Soil," "The Long Road" (on
+evolution)--these and many others will occur to the reader.
+
+Following "A Thought on Culture" was a short essay on poetry, the
+drift of which is that poetry as contrasted with science must give
+us things, not as they are in themselves, but as they stand related
+to our experience. Our young writer is more at his ease now:--
+
+
+Science, of course, is literal, as it ought to be, but science is
+not life; science takes no note of this finer self, this duplicate
+on a higher scale.  Science never laughs or cries, or whistles or
+sings, or falls in love, or sees aught but the coherent reality.
+It says a soap bubble is a soap bubble--a drop of water impregnated
+with oleate of potash or soda, and inflated with common air; but
+life says it is a crystal sphere, dipped in the rainbow, buoyant as
+hope, sensitive as the eye, with a power to make children dance for
+joy, and to bring youth into the look of the old. . . .
+
+Who in his youth ever saw the swallow of natural history to be the
+twittering, joyous bird that built mud nests beneath his father's
+shed, and in the empty odorous barn?--that snapped the insects that
+flew up in his way when returning at twilight from the upland farm;
+and that filled his memory with such visions of summer when he
+first caught its note on some bright May morning, flying up the
+southern valley?  Describe water, or a tree, in the language of
+exact science, or as they really are in and of themselves, and
+what person, schooled only in nature, would recognize them?  Things
+must be given as they seem, as they stand represented in the mind.
+Objects arrange themselves in our memory, not according to the
+will, or any real quality in themselves, but as they affect our
+lives and stand to us in our unconscious moments.  The hills we
+have dwelt among, the rocks and trees we have looked upon in all
+moods and feelings, that stood to us as the shore to the sea, and
+received a thousand impresses of what we lived and suffered, have
+significance to us that is not accounted for by anything we can
+see or feel in them.
+
+
+Here we see the youth of twenty-three setting forth a truth which
+he has sedulously followed in his own writing about nature, the
+following of which accounts so largely for the wide appeal his
+works have made.
+
+Some time in 1860, Mr. Burroughs began to send essays to the New
+York "Leader," a weekly paper, the organ of Tammany Hall at that
+time.  His first article was made up of three short essays--"World
+Growth," "New Ideas," and "Theory and Practice."  Here beyond
+question is the writer we know:
+
+
+The ideas that indicate the approach of a new era in history come
+like bluebirds in the spring, if you have ever noticed how that is.
+The bird at first seems a mere wandering voice in the air; you hear
+its carol on some bright morning in March, but are uncertain of
+its course or origin; it seems to come from some source you cannot
+divine; it falls like a drop of rain when no cloud is visible; you
+look and listen, but to no purpose.  The weather changes, and it is
+not till a number of days that you hear the note again, or, maybe,
+see the bird darting from a stake in the fence, or flitting from one
+mullein-stalk to another.  Its notes now become daily more frequent;
+the birds multiply; they sing less in the air and more when at rest;
+and their music is louder and more continuous, but less sweet and
+plaintive.  Their boldness increases and soon you see them flitting
+with a saucy and inquiring air about barns and outbuildings,
+peeping into dove-cota and stable windows, and prospecting for a
+place to nest.  They wage war against robins, pick quarrels with
+swallows, and would forcibly appropriate their mud houses, seeming
+to doubt the right of every other bird to exist but themselves.
+But soon, as the season advances, domestic instincts predominate;
+they subside quietly into their natural places, and become peaceful
+members of the family of birds.
+
+So the thoughts that indicate the approach of a new era in history
+at first seem to be mere disembodied, impersonal voices somewhere
+in the air; sweet and plaintive, half-sung and half-cried by some
+obscure and unknown poet. We know not whence they come, nor whither
+they tend.  It is not a matter of sight or experience. They do
+not attach themselves to any person or place, and their longitude
+and latitude cannot be computed.  But presently they become
+individualized and centre in some Erasmus, or obscure thinker,
+and from a voice in the air, become a living force on the earth.
+They multiply and seem contagious, and assume a thousand new forms.
+They grow quarrelsome and demonstrative, impudent and conceited,
+crowd themselves in where they have no right, and would fain
+demolish or appropriate every institution and appointment of
+society.  But after a time they settle into their proper relations,
+incorporate themselves in the world, and become new sources of power
+and progress in history.
+
+
+This quotation is especially significant, as it shows the writer's
+already keen observation of the birds, and his cleverness in
+appropriating these facts of nature to his philosophical purpose.
+How neatly it is done!  Readers of "Wake-Robin" will recognize a
+part of it in the matchless description of the bluebird which is
+found in the initial essay of that book.
+
+In 1860, in the "Leader," there also appeared a long essay by Mr.
+Burroughs, "On Indirections." This has the most unity and flow of
+thought of any thus far.  It is so good I should like to quote it
+all.  Here are the opening paragraphs:--
+
+
+The South American Indian who discovered the silver mines of Potosi
+by the turning up of a bush at the roots, which he had caught hold
+of to aid his ascent while pursuing a deer up a steep hill,
+represents very well how far intention and will are concerned in
+the grand results that flow from men's lives.  Every schoolboy
+knows that many of the most valuable discoveries in science and art
+were accidental, or a kind of necessity, and sprang from causes that
+had no place in the forethought of the discoverer.  The ostrich lays
+its eggs in the sand, and the sun hatches them; so man puts forth an
+effort and higher powers second him, and he finds himself the source
+of events that he had never conceived or meditated.  Things are
+so intimately connected and so interdependent, the near and the
+remote are so closely related, and all parts of the universe are so
+mutually sympathetic, that it is impossible to tell what momentous
+secrets may lurk under the most trifling facts, or what grand and
+beautiful results may be attained through low and unimportant means.
+It seems that Nature delights in surprise, and in underlying our
+careless existences with plans that are evermore to disclose
+themselves to us and stimulate us to new enterprise and research.
+The simplest act of life may discover a chain of cause and effect
+that binds together the most remote parts of the system.  We are
+often nearest to truth in some unexpected moment, and may stumble
+upon that while in a careless mood which has eluded our most
+vigilant and untiring efforts.  Men have seen deepest and farthest
+when they opened their eyes without any special aim, and a word or
+two carelessly dropped by a companion has revealed to me a truth
+that weeks of study had failed to compass. . . .
+
+Nature will not be come at directly, but indirectly; all her ways
+are retiring and elusive, and she is more apt to reveal herself
+to her quiet, unobtrusive lover, than to her formal, ceremonious
+suitor.  A man who goes out to admire the sunset, or to catch the
+spirit of field and grove, will very likely come back disappointed.
+A bird seldom sings when watched, and Nature is no coquette, and
+will not ogle and attitudinize when stared at.  The farmer and
+traveler drink deepest of this cup, because it is always a surprise
+and comes without forethought or preparation.  No insulation or
+entanglement takes place, and the soothing, medicinal influence
+of the fields and the wood takes possession of us as quietly as a
+dream, and before we know it we are living the life of the grass
+and the trees.
+
+
+How unconsciously here he describes his own intercourse with
+Nature!  And what an unusual production for a youth of twenty-three
+of such meagre educational advantages!
+
+In 1862, in an essay on "Some of the Ways of Power," which appeared
+in the "Leader," he celebrated the beauty and completeness of
+nature's inexorable laws:--
+
+
+There is an evident earnestness and seriousness in the meaning of
+things, and the laws that traverse nature and our own being are
+as fixed and inexorable, though, maybe, less instantaneous and
+immediate in their operation, as the principle of gravitation,
+and are as little disposed to pardon the violator or adjourn the
+day of adjudication.
+
+There seems to be this terrible alternative put to every man on
+entering the world, /conquer or be conquered/.  It is what the waves
+say to the swimmer, "Use me or drown"; what gravity says to the
+babe, "Use me or fall"; what the winds say to the sailor, "Use me
+or be wrecked"; what the passions say to every one of us, "Drive
+or be driven."  Time in its dealings with us says plainly enough,
+"Here I am, your master or your servant."  If we fail to make a
+good use of time, time will not fail to make a bad use of us. The
+miser does not use his money, so his money uses him; men do not
+govern their ambition, and so are governed by it. . . .
+
+These considerations are valuable chiefly for their analogical
+import.  They indicate a larger truth.  Man grows by conquering
+his limitations--by subduing new territory and occupying it.  He
+commences life on a very small capital; his force yet lies outside
+of him, scattered up and down in the world like his wealth--in
+rocks, in trees, in storms and flood, in dangers, in difficulties,
+in hardships,--in short, in whatever opposes his progress and puts
+on a threatening front.  The first difficulty overcome, the first
+victory gained, is so much added to his side of the scale--so much
+reinforcement of pure power.
+
+
+I have said elsewhere that Mr. Burroughs has written himself into
+his books.  We see him doing this in these early years; he was an
+earnest student of life at an age when most young men would have
+been far less seriously occupied.  Difficulties and hardships were
+roundabout him, his force was, indeed, "scattered up and down in
+the world, in rocks and trees," in birds and flowers, and from
+these sources he was even then wresting the beginnings of his
+successful career.
+
+It was in November, 1860, when twenty-three years of age, that he
+made his first appearance in the pages of the "Atlantic Monthly,"
+in the essay "Expression," comments upon which by its author I have
+already quoted.  At that time he was under the Emersonian spell
+of which he speaks in his autobiographical sketch.  Other readers
+and lovers of Emerson had had similar experiences.  Brownlee Brown,
+an "Atlantic" contributor (of "Genius" and "The Ideal Tendency,"
+especially), was a "sort of refined and spiritualized Emerson,
+without the grip and gristle of the master, but very pleasing
+and suggestive," Mr. Burroughs says.  The younger writer made
+a pilgrimage to the home of Brownlee Brown in the fall of 1862,
+having been much attracted to him by the above-named essays.  He
+found him in a field gathering turnips.  They had much interesting
+talk, and some correspondence thereafter.  Mr. Brown admitted that
+his mind had been fertilized by the Emersonian pollen, and declared
+he could write in no other way.
+
+Concerning his own imitation of Emerson, Mr. Burroughs says:--
+
+
+It was by no means a conscious imitation. Had I tried to imitate
+him, probably the spurious character of my essay would have
+deceived no one.  It was one of those unconscious imitations that
+so often give an impression of genuineness. . . . When I began to
+realize how deeply Emerson had set his stamp upon me, I said to
+myself: "This will never do. I must resist this influence.  If
+I would be a true disciple of Emerson, I must be myself and not
+another.  I must brace myself by his spirit, and not go tricked
+out in his manner, and his spirit was /'Never imitate.'/"
+
+
+It was this resolution, as he has before told us, that turned
+him to writing on outdoor subjects.
+
+In rereading "Expression" recently, I was struck, not so much by
+its Emersonian manner, as by its Bergsonian ideas.  I had heard Mr.
+Burroughs, when he came under the spell of Bergson in the summer of
+1911, say that the reason he was so moved by the French philosopher
+was doubtless because he found in him so many of his own ideas; and
+it was with keen pleasure that I came upon these forerunners of
+Bergson written before Bergson was born.
+
+At the time when Mr. Burroughs was dropping the Emersonian manner,
+and while his style was in the transition stage, he wrote an essay
+on "Analogy," and sent it also to the "Atlantic," receiving quite a
+damper on his enthusiasm when Lowell, the editor, returned it.  But
+he sent it to the old "Knickerbocker Magazine," where it appeared in
+1862.  Many years later he rewrote it, and it was accepted by Horace
+Scudder, then the "Atlantic's" editor; in 1902, after rewriting it
+the second time, he published it in "Literary Values."
+
+
+Because of the deep significance of them at this time in the career
+of Mr. Burroughs, I shall quote the following letters received by
+him from David A. Wasson, a Unitarian clergyman of Massachusetts,
+and a contributor to the early numbers of the "Atlantic."  Their
+encouragement, their candor, their penetration, and their prescience
+entitle them to a high place in an attempt to trace the evolution
+of our author.  One readily divines how much such appreciation and
+criticism meant to the youthful essayist.
+
+
+Groveland, Mass., May 21, 1860
+
+Mr. Burroughs,--
+
+My Dear Sir,--Let me tell you at the outset that I have for five
+years suffered from a spinal hurt, from which I am now slowly
+recovering, but am still unable to walk more than a quarter of
+a mile or to write without much pain.  I have all the will in
+the world to serve you, but, as you will perceive, must use much
+brevity in writing.
+
+"Expression" I do not remember,--probably did not read,--for I
+read no periodical literature--not even the "Atlantic," which is
+the best periodical I know--unless my attention is very especially
+called to it, and often, to tell the truth, do not heed the call
+when it is given.  Where I am at present I have not access to back
+numbers of the "Atlantic," but shall have soon.  The essay that
+you sent me I read carefully twice, but unfortunately left it in
+Boston, where it reached me.  I can therefore only speak of it
+generally.  It certainly shows in you, if my judgment may be
+trusted, unusual gifts of pure intellect--unusual, I mean,
+among scholars and literary men; and the literary execution is
+creditable, though by no means of the same grade with the mental
+power evinced.  You must become a fine literary worker to be equal
+to the demands of such an intellect as yours.  For the deeper the
+thought, the more difficult to give it a clear and attractive
+expression.  You can write so as to command attention.  I am sure
+you can.  Will you?  that is the only question.  Can you work and
+wait long enough?  Have you the requisite patience and persistency?
+If you have, there is undoubtedly an honorable future before you.
+
+But I will not conceal from you that I think you too young to have
+written "numerous essays" of the class you attempt, or to publish
+a book consisting of such.  No other kind of writing requires such
+mental maturity; stories may be written at any age, though good
+ones are seldom written early.  Even poems and works of art have
+been produced by some Raphael or Milton at a comparatively early
+season of life, and have not given shame to the author at a later
+age; though this is the exception, not the rule.  But the purely
+reflective essay belongs emphatically to maturer life.  Your
+twenty-four years have evidently been worth more to you than the
+longest life to most men; but my judgment is that you should give
+your genius more time yet, and should wait upon it with more labor.
+This is my frank counsel.  I will respect you so much as to offer
+it without disguise.  Let me fortify it by an example or two.  Mr.
+Emerson published nothing, I think, until he was past thirty, and
+his brother Charles, now dead, who was considered almost superior
+to him, maintained that it is almost a sin to go into print sooner.
+Yet both these had all possible educational advantages, and were
+familiar with the best books and the best results of American
+culture from infancy almost.  I myself printed nothing--saving some
+poetical indiscretions--until I was twenty-seven, and this was only
+a criticism on Dr. Isaac Barrow--not a subject, you see, that made
+great demands upon me.  Two years later an article on Lord Bacon,
+for which I had been indirectly preparing more than two years, and
+directly at least one; and even then I would say little respecting
+his philosophy, and confined myself chiefly to a portraiture of his
+character as a man.  At thirty-two years of age I sent to press an
+essay similar in character to those I write now--and am at present
+a little ashamed of it.  I am now thirty-nine years old, and all
+that I have ever put in print would not make more than one hundred
+and thirty or one hundred and forty pages in the "Atlantic."
+Upon reflection, however, I will say two hundred pages, including
+pamphlet publications.  I would have it less rather than more. But
+for this illness it would have been even less, for this has led me
+to postpone larger enterprises, which would have gone to press much
+later, and prepare shorter articles for the "Atlantic."  Yet my
+literary interest began at a very early age.
+
+In writing essays such as it seems to me you have a genius for,
+I require:--
+
+1. That one should get the range--the largest /range/--of the laws
+he sets forth.  This is the /sine qua num/.  Every primary law goes
+through heaven and earth.  Go with it. This is the business and
+privilege of intellect.
+
+2. When one comes to writing, let his discourse have a beginning
+and an end.  Do not let the end of his essay be merely the end of
+his sheet, or the place where he took a notion to stop writing,
+but let it be necessary.  Each paragraph, too, should represent
+a distinct advance, a clear step, in the exposition of his thought.
+I spare no labor in securing this, and reckon no labor lost that
+brings me toward this mark.  I reckon my work ill done if a single
+paragraph, yes, or a single sentence, can be transposed without
+injuring the whole.
+
+3. Vivid expression must be sought, must be labored for unsparingly.
+This you, from your position, will find it somewhat hard to attain,
+unless you have peculiar aptitude for it.  Expression in the country
+is far less vivacious than in cities.
+
+I have spoken frankly; now you must decide for yourself.  You have
+mental power enough; if you have accessory qualities (which I think
+you must possess), you cannot fail to make your mark.
+
+The brevity that I promised you will not find in this letter, but
+you will find haste enough to make up for the lack of it.
+
+If now, after the foregoing, you feel any inclination to send me
+the essay on "Analogy" (capital subject), pray do so. I will read
+it, and if I have anything to say about it, will speak as frankly
+as above.
+
+I shall be in this place--Groveland, Mass.--about three weeks;
+after that in Worcester a short while.
+
+Very truly yours,
+
+DAVID A. WASSON.
+
+
+Groveland, Mass., June 18, 1862.
+
+Mr. Burroughs,--
+
+My Dear Sir,--
+I am sorry to have detained your MS. so long, but part of the time
+I have been away, and during the other portion of it, the fatigue
+that I must undergo was all that my strength would bear.
+
+I read your essay carefully in a few days after receiving it and
+laid it aside for a second perusal.  Now I despair of finding time
+for such a second reading as I designed, and so must write you at
+once my impressions after a single reading.
+
+The inference concerning your mind that I draw from your essay
+enhances the interest I previously felt in you.  All that you tell
+me of yourself has the same effect.  You certainly have high, very
+high, mental power; and the patience and persistency that you must
+have shown hitherto assures me that you will in future be equal to
+the demands of your intellect.  As to publishing what you have now
+written, you must judge.  The main question, is whether you will
+be discouraged by failure of your book.  If not, publish, if you
+like; and then, if the public ignores your thought, gather up your
+strength again and write so that they cannot ignore you.  For, in
+truth, the public does not like to think; it likes to be amused;
+and conceives a sort of hatred against the writer who would force
+it to the use of its intellect.  This is invariably the case; it
+will be so with you.  If the public finds anything in your work
+that can be condemned, it will be but too happy to pass sentence;
+if it can make out to think that you are a pretender, it will
+gladly do so; if it can turn its back upon you and ignore you, its
+back, and nothing else, you will surely see.  And this on account
+of your merits.  You really have thoughts. You make combinations
+of your own.  You have freighted your words out of your own mental
+experience.  You do not flatter any of the sects by using their
+cant.  Now, then, be sure that you have got to do finished work,
+finished in every minutest particular, for years, before your
+claims will be allowed.
+
+If you /were/ a pretender, your success in immediate prospect would
+be more promising; the very difficulty is that you are not--that
+you think--that the public must read you /humbly/, confessing that
+you have intelligence beyond its own.  I said that the general
+public wants to be amused: I now add that it dearly desires to be
+flattered, or at least allowed to flatter itself.  Those people who
+have no thoughts of their own are the very ones who hate mortally
+to admit to themselves that any intelligence in the world is superior
+to their own.  A noble nature is indeed never so delighted as when
+it finds something that may be lawfully reverenced; but all the
+ignoble keep up their self-complacence by shutting their eyes to
+all superiority.
+
+I state the case strongly, as you will feel it bye and bye.  Mind,
+I am not a disappointed man; and have met as generous appreciation
+as I ought to wish.  I am not misanthropic, nor in the least
+soured.  I say all this, not /against/ the public, but /for/ you.
+
+Now, then, as to the essay.  It is rich in thought.  Everywhere
+are the traces of a penetrating and sincere intellect.  Much of
+the expression is also good.  The faults of it, /me judice/, are
+as follows:  The introduction I think too long.  I should nearly
+throw away the first five pages.  Your true beginning I think to
+be near the bottom of the sixth page, though the /island/ in the
+middle paragraph of that page is too fine to be lost.  From the
+sixth to about the twentieth I read with hearty pleasure.  Then
+begin subordinate essays in illustration of your main theme.
+These are good in themselves, but their subordination is a little
+obscured.  I think careless readers--and most of your readers,
+be sure, will be careless--will fail to perceive the connection.
+You are younger than I, and will hope more from your readers; but
+I find even superior men slow, /slow/, SLOW to understand--missing
+your point so often!  I think the relationship must be brought
+out more strongly, and some very good sentences must be thrown
+out because they are more related to the subordinate than the
+commanding subject.  This is about all that I have to say.  Sometimes
+your sentences are a little heavy, but you will find, little by
+little, happier terms of expression.  I do not in the least believe
+that you cannot in time write as well as I.  What I have done to
+earn expression I know better than you  The crudities that I have
+outgrown or outlabored, I also know.
+
+You must be a little less careless about your spelling, simply
+because these slips will discredit your thought in the eyes
+of superficial critics.
+
+You understand, of course, that I speak above of the general
+public--not of the finer natures, who will welcome you with
+warm hands.
+
+I fear that the results of my reading will not correspond to
+your wishes, and that it was hardly worth your while to send me
+your MS.  But I am obliged to you for informing me of your
+existence, for I augur good for my country from the discovery
+of every such intelligence as yours, and I pledge to you my
+warm interest and regard.
+
+Very cordially yours,
+
+David A. Wasson
+
+
+Worcester, Sept. 29, 1862,
+
+My Dear Mr. Burroughs,--
+
+To the medicine proposition I say.  Yes. A man of your tastes
+and mental vigor should be able to do some clean work in that
+profession.  I know not of any other established profession that
+allows a larger scope of mind than this.  There is some danger of
+materialism, but this you have already weaponed yourself against,
+and the scientific studies that come in the line of the profession
+will furnish material for thought and expression which I am sure
+you will know well how to use.
+
+I am glad if my suggestions about your essay proved of some service
+to you.  There is thought and statement in it which will certainly
+one day come to a market. The book, too, all in good season.  Life
+for you is very long, and you can take your time.  Take it by
+all means.  Give yourself large leisure to do your best.  I am
+about setting up my household gods in Worcester.  This makes me
+in much haste, and therefore without another word I must say that
+I shall always be glad to hear from you, and that I am always truly
+your friend.
+
+D. A. Wasson
+
+
+Of the early nature papers which Mr. Burroughs wrote for the New
+York "Leader," and which were grouped under the general title,
+"From the Back Country," there were five or six in number, of
+two or three columns each.  One on "Butter-Making," of which I
+will quote the opening passage, fairly makes the mouth water:--
+
+
+With green grass comes golden butter.  With the bobolinks and the
+swallows, with singing groves, and musical winds, with June,--ah,
+yes! with tender, succulent, gorgeous June,--all things are blessed.
+The dairyman's heart rejoices, and the butter tray with its virgin
+treasure becomes a sight to behold.  There lie the rich masses, fold
+upon fold, leaf upon leaf, fresh, sweet, and odorous, just as the
+ladle of the dairymaid dipped it from the churn, sweating great
+drops of buttermilk, and looking like some rare and precious ore.
+The cool spring water is the only clarifier needed to remove all
+dross and impurities and bring out all the virtues and beauties of
+this cream-evolved element.  How firm and bright it becomes, how
+delicious the odor it emits! what vegetarian ever found it in his
+heart, or his palate either, to repudiate butter?  The essence of
+clover and grass and dandelions and beechen woods is here.  How
+wonderful the chemistry that from elements so common and near at
+hand produces a result so beautiful and useful!  Eureka!  Is not
+this the alchemy that turns into gold the commonest substances?
+How can transformation be more perfect?
+
+
+During the years of this early essay-writing, Mr. Burroughs was
+teaching country schools in the fall and winter, and working on
+the home farm in summer; at the same time he was reading serious
+books and preparing himself for whatever was in store for him.
+He read medicine for only three months, in the fall of 1862, and
+then resumed teaching.  His first magazine article about the birds
+was written in the summer or fall of 1863, and appeared in the
+"Atlantic" in the spring of 1885.  He learned from a friend to
+whom Mr. Sanborn had written that the article had pleased Emerson.
+
+It was in 1864, while in the Currency Bureau in Washington, that he
+wrote the essays which make up his first nature book, "Wake-Robin."
+His first book, however, was not a nature book, but was "Walt
+Whitman as Poet and Person." It was published in 1867, preceding
+"Wake-Robin" by four years.  It has long been out of print, and
+is less known than his extended, riper work, "Whitman, A. Study,"
+written in 1896.
+
+A record of the early writings of Mr. Burroughs would not be
+complete without considering also his ventures into the field
+of poetry.  In the summer of 1860 he wrote and printed his first
+verses (with the exception of some still earlier ones written in
+1856 to the sweetheart who became his wife), which were addressed
+to his friend and comrade E. M. Allen, subsequently the husband of
+Elizabeth Akers, the author of "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in
+your flight."  The lines to E. M. A. were printed in the "Saturday
+Press." Because they are the first of our author's verses to appear
+in print, I quote them here:--
+
+
+             TO E. M. A.
+
+    A change has come over nature
+       Since you and June were here;
+    The sun has turned to the southward
+       Adown the steps of the year.
+
+    The grass is ripe in the meadow,
+       And the mowers swing in rhyme;
+    The grain so green on the hillside
+       Is in its golden prime.
+
+    No more the breath of the clover
+       Is borne on every breeze,
+    No more the eye of the daisy
+       Is bright on meadow leas.
+
+    The bobolink and the swallow
+       Have left for other clime--
+    They mind the sun when he beckons
+       And go with summer's prime.
+
+    Buttercups that shone in the meadow
+       Like rifts of golden snow,
+    They, too, have melted and vanished
+       Beneath the summer's glow.
+
+    Still at evenfall in the upland
+       The vesper sparrow sings,
+    And the brooklet in the pasture
+       Still waves its glassy rings.
+
+    And the lake of fog to the southward
+       With surges white as snow--
+    Still at morn away in the distance
+       I see it ebb and flow.
+
+    But a change has come over nature,
+       The youth of the year has gone;
+    A grace from the wood has departed,
+       And a freshness from the dawn.
+
+
+Another poem, "Loss and Gain," was printed in the New York
+"Independent" about the same time.
+
+
+             LOSS AND GAIN
+
+    The ship that drops behind the rim
+    Of sea and sky, so pale and dim,
+        Still sails the seas
+        With favored breeze,
+    Where other waves chant ocean's hymn.
+
+    The wave that left this shore so wide,
+    And led away the ebbing tide,
+        Is with its host
+        On fairer coast,
+    Bedecked and plumed in all its pride.
+
+    The grub I found encased in clay
+    When next I came had slipped away
+        On golden wing,
+        With birds that sing,
+    To mount and soar in sunny day.
+
+    No thought or hope can e'er be lost--
+    The spring will come in spite of frost.
+        Go crop the branch
+        Of maple stanch,
+    The root will gain what you exhaust.
+
+    The man is formed as ground he tills--
+    Decay and death lie 'neath his sills.
+        The storm that beats,
+        And solar heats,
+    Have helped to form whereon he builds.
+
+    Successive crops that lived and grew,
+    And drank the air, the light, the dew,
+        And then deceased,
+        His soil increased
+    In strength, and depth, and richness, too.
+
+    From slow decay the ages grow,
+    From blood and crime the centuries blow,
+        What disappears
+        Beneath the years,
+    Will mount again as grain we sow.
+
+
+These rather commonplace verses, the first showing his love for
+comrades, the others his philosophical bent, were the forerunners
+of that poem of Mr. Burroughs's--"Waiting"--which has become a
+household treasure, often without the ones who cherish it knowing
+its source. "Waiting" was Written in the fall of 1862.  In response
+to my inquiry as to its genesis, its author said:--
+
+
+I was reading medicine in the office of a country doctor at the
+time and was in a rather gloomy and discouraged state of mind.  My
+outlook upon life was anything but encouraging.  I was poor.  I had
+no certain means of livelihood.  I had married five years before,
+and, at a venture, I had turned to medicine as a likely solution
+of my life's problems.  The Civil War was raging and that, too,
+disturbed me.  It sounded a call of duty which increased my
+perturbations; yet something must have said to me, "Courage!
+all will yet be well.  You are bound to have your own, whatever
+happens."  Doubtless this feeling had been nurtured in me by the
+brave words of Emerson.  At any rate, there in a little dingy back
+room of Dr. Hull's office, I paused in my study of anatomy and wrote
+"Waiting." I had at that time had some literary correspondence with
+David A. Wasson whose essays in the "Atlantic" I had read with
+deep interest.  I sent him a copy of the poem. He spoke of it as
+a vigorous piece of work, but seemed to see no special merit in it.
+I then sent it to "Knickerbocker's Magazine," where it was printed,
+in December, I think, in 1862.  It attracted no attention, and was
+almost forgotten by me till many years afterwards when it appeared
+in Whittier's "Songs of Three Centuries."  This indorsement by
+Whittier gave it vogue.  It began to be copied by newspapers and
+religious Journals, and it has been traveling on the wings of public
+print ever since.  I do not think it has any great poetic merit.
+The secret of its success is its serious religious strain, or what
+people interpret as such.  It embodies a very comfortable optimistic
+philosophy which it chants in a solemn, psalm-like voice.  Its
+sincerity carries conviction.  It voices absolute faith and trust
+in what, in the language of our fathers, would be called the ways of
+God with man.  I have often told persons, when they have questioned
+me about the poem, that I came of the Old School Baptist stock,
+and that these verses show what form the old Calvinistic doctrine
+took in me.
+
+
+Let me quote here the letter which Mr. Wasson wrote to the author of
+"Waiting," on receiving the first autograph copy of it ever written:--
+
+
+Worcester, Dec. 22,1862.
+
+Mr. Burroughs,--
+
+My Dear Sir,--I beg your pardon a thousand times for having neglected
+so long to acknowledge the letter containing your vigorous verses.
+Excess of work, and then a dash of illness consequent upon this excess,
+must be my excuse--by your kind allowance.
+
+The verses are vigorous and flowing, good in sentiment, and
+certainly worthy of being sent to "some paper," if you like to
+print them.  On the other hand, they do not indicate to me that
+you have any special call to write verse.  A man of your ability
+and fineness of structure must necessarily be enough of a poet not
+to fail altogether in use of the poetical form.  But all that I
+know of you indicates a predominance of reflective intellect--a
+habit of mind quite foreign from the lyrical.  I think it may be
+very good practice to compose in verse, as it exercises you in
+terse and rhythmical expression; but I question whether your
+vocation lies in that direction.
+
+After all, you must not let anything which I, or any one, may say
+stand in your way, if you feel any clear leading of your genius
+in a given direction.  What I have said is designed to guard you
+against an expenditure of power and hope in directions that may
+yield you but a partial harvest, when the same ought to be sown on
+more fruitful fields.  I think you have unusual reflective power;
+and I am sure that in time you will find time and occasion for its
+exercise, and will accomplish some honorable tasks.
+
+Very truly yours,
+
+D. A. Wasson
+
+
+It maybe fancy on my part, but I have a feeling that, all
+unconsciously to Mr. Burroughs, a sentence or two in Mr. Wasson's
+letter of September 29, 1862, had something to do with inspiring
+the mood of trustfulness and the attitude of waiting in serenity,
+which gave birth to this poem:--
+
+
+. . . The book, too, all in good season.  Life for you is very
+long, and you can take your time.  Take it by all means.  Give
+yourself large leisure to do your best.
+
+
+Whether or not this is so, I am sure the sympathy and understanding
+of such a man as Mr. Wasson was a godsend to our struggling writer,
+and was one of the most beautiful instances in his life of "his
+own" coming to him.
+
+"Waiting" seems to have gone all over the world.  It has been
+several times set to music, and its authorship has even been
+claimed by others.  It has been parodied, more's the pity; and
+spurious stanzas have occasionally been appended to it; while
+an inferior stanza, which the author dropped years ago, is from
+time to time resurrected by certain insistent ones.  Originally,
+it had seven stanzas; the sixth, discarded by its author, ran
+as follows:--
+
+
+    You flowret, nodding in the wind,
+       Is ready plighted to the bee;
+    And, maiden, why that look unkind?
+       For, lo! thy lover seeketh thee.
+
+
+This stanza is a detraction from the poem as we know it, and
+assuredly its author has a right to drop it.  Concerning the
+fifth stanza, Mr. Burroughs says he has never liked it, and has
+often substituted one which he wrote a few years ago.  The stanza
+he would reject is--
+
+
+    The waters know their own and draw
+       The brook that springs in yonder heights;
+    So flows the good with equal law
+       Unto the soul of pure delights.
+
+
+    The one he would offer instead--
+
+
+    The law of love binds every heart,
+       And knits it to its utmost kin,
+    Nor can our lives flow long apart
+       From souls our secret souls would win.
+
+
+And yet he is not satisfied with this; he says it is too subtle and
+lacks the large, simple imagery of the original lines.
+
+The legion who cherish this poem in their hearts are justly incensed
+whenever they come across a copy of it to which some one, a few
+years ago, had the effrontery to add this inane stanza:--
+
+
+    Serene I fold my hands and wait,
+       Whate'er the storms of life may be,
+    Faith guides me up to heaven's gate,
+       And love will bring my own to me.
+
+
+One of Mr. Burroughs's friends (Joel Benton), himself a poet, in
+an article tracing the vicissitudes of this poem, shows pardonable
+indignation at the "impudence and hardihood of the unmannered
+meddler" who tacked on the "heaven's gate" stanza, and adds:--
+
+
+The lyric as Burroughs wrote it embodies a motive, or concept, that
+has scarcely been surpassed for amenability to poetic treatment, and
+for touching and impressive point.  Its partly elusive outlines add
+to its charm.  Its balance between hint and affirmation; its faith
+in universal forces, and its tender yet virile expression, are all
+shining qualities, apparent to the critical, and hypnotic to the
+general, reader.  There is nothing in it that need even stop at
+"heaven's gate."  It permits the deserving reader by happy instinct
+to go through that portal--without waiting outside to parade his
+sect mark. But the force of the poem and catholicity of its
+sanctions are either utterly destroyed or ridiculously enfeebled,
+by capping it with a sectarian and narrowly interpreted climax.
+
+
+Although the poem is so well known, I shall quote it here in the
+form preferred by its author;--
+
+
+                WAITING
+
+    Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
+       Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
+    I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,
+       For lo! my own shall come to me.
+
+    I stay my haste, I make delays,
+       For what avails this eager pace?
+    I stand amid th' eternal ways,
+       And what is mine shall know my face.
+
+    Asleep, awake, by night or day,
+       The friends I seek are seeking me;
+    No wind can drive my bark astray,
+       Nor change the tide of destiny.
+
+    What matter if I stand alone?
+       I wait with joy the coming years;
+    My heart shall reap where it hath sown,
+       And garner up its fruit of tears.
+
+    The waters know their own and draw
+       The brook that springs in yonder heights;
+    So flows the good with equal law
+       Unto the soul of pure delights.
+
+    The stars come nightly to the sky,
+       The tidal wave comes to the sea;
+    Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
+       Can keep my own away from me.
+
+
+
+A Winter Day At Slabsides
+
+
+"Come and go to Slabsides for over Sunday--I think we can keep warm.
+We will have an old-fashioned time; I will roast a duck in the pot;
+it will be great fun."
+
+This invitation came from Mr. Burroughs in 1911 to friends who
+proposed to call on him early in December.  Riverby was closed for
+the season, its occupants tarrying in Poughkeepsie, but, ever ready
+for an adventure, the Sage of Slabsides proposed a winter picnic at
+his cabin in the hills.
+
+A ride of some two hours from New York brings us to West Park,
+where our host awaits us.  A stranger, glancing at his white
+hair and beard, might credit his seventy-five years, but not
+when looking at his ruddy face with the keen, bright eyes, or
+at his alert, vigorous movements.
+
+Together with blankets and a market-basket of provisions we are
+stowed away in a wagon and driven up the steep, winding way; at
+first along a country road, then into a wood's road with huge
+Silurian rocks cropping out everywhere, showing here and there
+seams of quartz and patches of moss and ferns.
+
+"In there," said Mr. Burroughs, pointing to an obscure path, "I had
+a partridge for a neighbor.  She had a nest there.  I went to see
+her every day till she became uneasy about it, and let me know I
+was no longer welcome."
+
+"Yonder," he continued, indicating a range of wooded hills against
+the wintry sky, "is the classic region of 'Popple Town Hill,' and
+over there is 'Pang Yang.'"
+
+Some friendly spirit has preceded us to the cabin; a fire is
+burning in the great stone fireplace, and mattresses and bedding
+are exposed to the heat.  Moving these away, the host makes room
+for us near the hearth.  He piles on the wood, and we are soon
+permeated by the warmth of the fire and of the unostentatious
+hospitality of Slabsides.
+
+How good it is to be here!  The city, with its rush and roar and
+complexities, seems far away.  How satisfying it is to strip off
+the husks and get at the kernel of things!  There is more chance
+for high thinking when one is big enough to have plain living.
+How we surround ourselves with non-essentials, how we are dominated
+with the "mania of owning things"--one feels all this afresh in
+looking around at this simple, well-built cabin with its few
+needful things close at hand, and with life reduced to the simplest
+terms.  One sees here exemplified the creed Mr. Burroughs outlined
+several years ago in his essay "An Outlook upon Life":--
+
+
+I am bound to praise the simple life, because I have lived it and
+found it good. . . . I love a small house, plain clothes, simple
+living.  Many persons know the luxury of a skin bath--a plunge in
+the pool or the wave unhampered by clothing.  That is the simple
+life--direct and immediate contact with things, life with the
+false wrappings torn away--the fine house, the fine equipage,
+the expensive habits, all cut off.  How free one feels, how good
+the elements taste, how close one gets to them, how they fit
+one's body and one's soul!  To see the fire that warms you, or
+better yet, to cut the wood that feeds the fire that warms you;
+to see the spring where the water bubbles up that slakes your
+thirst, and to dip your pail into it; to see the beams that are
+the stay of your four walls, and the timbers that uphold the roof
+that shelters you; to be in direct and personal contact with the
+sources of your material life; to want no extras, no shields; to
+find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water
+exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening
+saunter; to find a quest of wild berries more satisfying than a gift
+of tropic fruit; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated
+over a bird's nest, or over a wild flower in spring--these are some
+of the rewards of the simple life.
+
+[Illustration: The Living-Room.  From a photograph
+by M. H. Fanning]
+
+The two men were soon talking companionably.  When persons of wide
+reading and reflection, and of philosophic bent, who have lived
+long and been mellowed by life, come together, the interchange
+of thought is bound to be valuable; things are so well said, so
+inevitably said, that the listener thinks he cannot forget the
+manner of saying; but thoughts crowd thick and fast, comments on
+men and measures, on books and events, are numerous and varied,
+but hard to recapture.  The logs ignite, sending out their cheering
+heat, the coals glow, the sparks fly upward, warmth and radiance
+envelop us; but an attempt to warm the reader by the glow of that
+fireside talk is almost as futile as an effort to dispel to-day's
+cold by the fire of yesterday.
+
+A few deserted cottages perched on the rocks near by show us where
+the summer neighbors of our host live, but at all seasons his wild
+neighbors are the ones he hobnobs with the most; while his indoor
+companions are Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, Carlyle, Arnold, Wordsworth,
+Darwin, Huxley, Emerson, Whitman, Bergson, and many others, ancient
+and modern.
+
+"I've been rereading Emerson's essay on 'Immortality' lately,
+evenings in my study down there by the river," said Mr. Burroughs.
+"I had forgotten it was so noble and fine--he makes much of the
+idea of permanence."
+
+In this connection he spoke of John Fiske and his contributions
+to literature, telling of the surprise he felt on first meeting
+Fiske at Harvard, to see the look of the /bon vivant/ in one in
+whom the intellectual and the spiritual were so prominent.
+Laughing, he recalled the amusement of the college boys at Fiske's
+comical efforts to discover a piece of chalk dropped during his
+lecture on "Immortality."  Standing on the hearth, a merry twinkle
+in his eyes, he recited some humorous lines which he had written
+concerning the episode.
+
+Reverting to the question of immortality in a serious vein, he
+summed up the debated question much as he has done in one of his
+essays,--that it has been good to be here, and will be good to go
+hence; that we know not whence we come, nor whither we go; were not
+consulted as to our coming, and shall not be as to our going; but
+that it is all good; all for "the glory of God;" though we must use
+this phrase in a larger sense than the cramped interpretation of
+the theologian.  All the teeming life of the globe, the millions
+on millions in the microscopic world, and the millions on millions
+of creatures that can be seen by the naked eye--those who have
+been swept away, those here now, those who will come after--all
+appearing in their appointed time and place, playing their parts
+and vanishing, and to the old question "Why?" we may as well answer,
+"For the glory of God"; if we will only conceive a big enough glory,
+and a big enough God.  His utter trust in things as they are seemed
+a living embodiment of that sublime line in "Waiting"--
+
+
+    "I stand amid the Eternal ways";
+
+
+and, thus standing, he is content to let the powers that be have
+their way with him.
+
+"To all these mysteries I fall back upon the last words I heard
+Whitman say, shortly before the end--commonplace words, but they
+sum it up: 'It's all right, John, it's all right'; but Whitman
+had the active, sustaining faith in immortality--
+
+
+   'I laugh at what you call dissolution,
+    And I know the amplitude of time.'"
+
+
+As the afternoon wanes, Mr. Burroughs hangs the kettle on the
+crane, broils the chops, and with a little help from one of the
+guests, soon has supper on the table, a discussion of Bergson's
+philosophy suffering only occasional interruptions; such as, "Where
+/have/ those women [summer occupants of Slabsides] put my holder?"
+or, "See if there isn't some salt in the cupboard."
+
+"There! I forgot to bring up eggs for breakfast, but here are other
+things," he mutters as he rummages in his market-basket.  "That
+memory of mine is pretty tricky; sometimes I can't remember things
+any better than I can find them when they are right under my nose.
+I've just found a line from Emerson that I've been hunting for two
+days--'The worm striving to be man.'  I looked my Emerson through
+and through, and no worm; then I found in Joel Benton's Concordance
+of Emerson that the line was in 'May-Day'; he even cited the page,
+but my Emerson had no printing on that page.  I searched all
+through 'May-Day,' and still no worm;  I looked again with no
+better success, and was on the point of giving up when I spied
+the worm--it almost escaped me--"
+
+"It must have turned, didn't it?"
+
+"Yes, the worm surely turned, or I never should have seen it," he
+confessed.
+
+The feminine member of the trio wields the dish-mop while the host
+dries the dishes, and the Dreamer before the fire luxuriates in the
+thought that his help is not needed.
+
+The talk on philosophy and religion does not make the host forget
+to warm sheets and blankets and put hot bricks in the beds to
+insure against the fast-gathering cold.
+
+The firelight flickers on the bark-covered rafters, lighting up the
+yellow-birch partition between living-room and bedroom downstairs,
+and plays upon the rustic stairway that leads to the two rooms
+overhead, as we sit before the hearth in quiet talk.  Outside the
+moonlight floods the great open space around the cabin, revealing
+outlines of the rocky inclosure.  No sounds in all that stillness
+without, and within only the low voices of the friends, and the
+singing logs.
+
+Mr. Burroughs tells of his visit, in October, to the graves of his
+maternal grandparents:--
+
+"They died in 1854, my first season away from home, and there
+they have lain for fifty-seven years, and I had never been to
+their graves!  I'm glad I went; it made them live again for me.
+How plainly I could see the little man in his blue coat with
+brass buttons, with his decidedly Irish features!  And Grandmother,
+a stout woman, with quaint, homely ways.  The moss is on their
+gravestones now, and two evergreen trees wax strong above them.
+I found an indigo-bird had built her nest above their graves.
+I broke off the branch and brought it home."
+
+
+"There! get up and use that water before it freezes over," the host
+calls out the next morning, as, mounting the stairs, he places a
+pitcher of hot water by the door.  It is bitter cold, one's fingers
+ache, and one wonders if, after all, it is so much fun to live in
+a cabin in the woods in the dead of winter.  But a crackling fire
+below and savory smells of bacon and coffee reconcile one, and the
+day begins right merrily.
+
+And what a dinner the author sets before us! what fun to see him
+prepare it, discussing meanwhile the glory that was Greece and the
+grandeur that was Rome, recounting anecdotes of boyhood, touching
+on politics and religion, on current events, on conflicting views
+of the vitalists and the chemico-physicists, on this and on that,
+but never to the detriment of his duck.  It is true he did serenely
+fold his hands and wait, between times.  Then what an event to see
+him lift the smoking cover and try the bird with a fork--" to see
+if the duck is relenting," he explains.  At a certain time he
+arises from a grave psychological discussion to rake out hollow
+places in the coals where he buries potatoes and onions.
+
+"The baking of an onion," he declares, "takes all the conceit out
+of him.  He is sweet and humble after his baptism of fire."  Then
+the talk soars above ducks and onions, until he gives one of the
+idlers permission to prepare the salad and lay the table.
+
+For a dinner to remember all one's days, commend me to a thoroughly
+relented duck; a mealy, ash-baked potato; an onion (yea, several of
+them) devoid of conceit, and well buttered and salted; and a salad
+of Slabsides celery and lettuce; with Riverby apples and pears, and
+beechnuts to complete the feast--beechnuts gathered in October up
+in the Catskills, gathered one by one as the chipmunk gathers them,
+by the "Laird of Woodchuck Lodge," as he is called on his native
+heath, though he is one and the same with the master of Slabsides.
+
+We hear no sounds all the day outside the cabin but the merry calls
+of chickadees, until in mid-afternoon an unwelcome "Halloa!" tells
+us the wagon is come to take us down to Riverby. Reluctantly the
+fire is extinguished, and the wide, hospitable door of Slabsides
+closes behind us.
+
+Riverby, "the house that Jack built," as the builder boasted, is
+a house interesting and individual, though conforming somewhat to
+the conventions of the time when it was built (1874).  It is as
+immaculate within as its presiding genius can make it, presenting a
+sharp contrast to the easy-going housekeeping of the mountain cabin.
+
+We tarry a few minutes in the little bark-covered study, detached from
+the house and overlooking the Hudson, where Mr. Burroughs does his
+writing when at home; we see the rustic summer-house near by, and the
+Riverby vineyards, formerly husbanded by "the Vine-Dresser of Esopus,"
+as his friends used to call him; now by his son Julian, who combines,
+like his father before him, grape-growing with essay-writing.
+
+A pleasant hour is spent in the artistic little cottage, planned and
+built by the author and his son, where live Mr. Julian Burroughs and
+his family.  Here the grandfather has many a frolic with his three
+grandchildren, who know him as "Baba."  John Burroughs the younger
+is his special pride.  Who knows but the naturalist stands somewhat
+in awe of his grandson?--for as the youngster reaches for his
+"Teddy," and says sententiously, "Bear!" the elder never ventures
+a word about the dangers of "sham natural history."
+
+Boarding the West Shore train, laden with fruit and beechnuts and
+pleasant memories, we return to the city's roar and whirl, dreaming
+still of the calls of chickadees in the bare woods and of quiet
+hours before the fire at Slabsides.
+
+
+
+BACK TO PEPACTON
+
+
+There has always been a haunting suggestiveness to me about the
+expression /Rue du Temps Perdu/--the Street of Lost Time.  Down this
+shadowy vista we all come to peer with tear-dimmed eyes sooner or
+later.  Usually this pensive retrospection is the premonitory sign
+that one is nearing the last milestone before the downhill side
+of life begins.  But to some this yearning backward glance comes
+early; they feel its compelling power while still in the vigor
+of middle life.  Why this is so it is not easy to say, but
+imaginative, brooding natures who live much in their emotions
+are prone to this chronic homesickness for the Past, this
+ever-recurring, mournful retrospect, this tender, wistful gaze
+into the years that are no more.
+
+It is this tendency in us all as we grow older that makes us drift
+back to the scenes of our youth; it satisfies a deep-seated want to
+look again upon the once familiar places.  We seek them out with an
+eagerness wholly wanting in ordinary pursuits.  The face of the
+fields, the hills, the streams, the house where one was born--how
+they are invested with something that exists nowhere else, wander
+where we will!  In their midst memories come crowding thick and
+fast; things of moment, critical episodes, are mingled with the
+most trivial happenings; smiles and tears and sighs are curiously
+blended as we stroll down the Street of Lost Time.
+
+While we are all more or less under this spell of the Past, some
+natures are more particularly enthralled by it, even in the very
+zenith of life, showing it to be of temperamental origin rather
+than the outcome of the passing years.  Of such a temperament is
+John Burroughs.  Now, when the snows of five-and-seventy winters
+have whitened his head, we do not wonder when we hear him say, "Ah!
+the Past! the Past has such a hold on me!"  But even before middle
+life he experienced this yearning, even then confessed that he had
+for many years viewed everything in the light of the afternoon's
+sun--"a little faded and diluted, and with a pensive tinge."  "It
+almost amounts to a disease," he reflects, "this homesickness which
+home cannot cure--a strange complaint.  Sometimes when away from
+the old scenes it seems as if I must go back to them, as if I
+should find the old contentment and satisfaction there in the
+circle of the hills.  But I know I should not--the soul's thirst
+can never be slaked.  My hunger is the hunger of the imagination.
+Bring all my dead back again, and place me amid them in the old
+home, and a vague longing and regret would still possess me."
+
+As early as his forty-fifth birthday he wrote in his Journal:
+"Indeed, the Past begins to grow at my back like a great pack,
+and it seems as if it would overwhelm me quite before I get to
+be really an old man.  As time passes, the world becomes more and
+more a Golgotha,--a place of graves,--even if one does not actually
+lose by death his friends and kindred.  The days do not  merely
+pass, we bury them; they are of us, like us, and in them we bury
+our own image, a real part of ourselves."  Perhaps, among the poems
+of Mr. Burroughs, next to "Waiting" the verses that have the most
+universal appeal are those of--
+
+
+                  THE RETURN
+
+    He sought the old scenes with eager feet--
+       The scenes he had known as a boy;
+    "Oh, for a draught of those fountains sweet,
+       And a taste of that vanished joy!"
+
+    He roamed the fields, he wooed the streams,
+       His school-boy paths essayed to trace;
+    The orchard ways recalled his dreams,
+       The hills were like his mother's face.
+
+    Oh, sad, sad hills! Oh, cold, cold hearth!
+       In sorrow he learned this truth--
+    One may return to the place of his birth,
+       He cannot go back to his youth.
+
+
+But a half-loaf is better than no bread, and Mr. Burroughs has now
+yielded to this deep-seated longing for his boyhood scenes, and has
+gone back to the place of his birth amid the Catskills; and one who
+sees him there during the midsummer days--alert, energetic, curious
+concerning the life about him--is almost inclined to think he has
+literally gone back to his youth as well, for the boy in him is
+always coming to the surface.
+
+
+It was on the watershed of the Pepacton (the East Branch of the
+Delaware), in the town of Roxbury, Delaware County, New York, that
+John Burroughs was born, and there that he gathered much of the
+harvest of his earlier books; it was there also that most of his
+more recent books were written.  Although he left the old scenes
+in his youth, his heart has always been there.  He went back many
+years ago and named one of his books ("Pepacton") from the old
+stream, and he has now gone back and arranged for himself a simple
+summer home on the farm where he first saw the light.
+
+Most of his readers have heard much of Slabsides, the cabin in
+the wooded hills back of the Hudson, and of his conventional home,
+Riverby, at West Park, New York; but as yet the public has heard
+little of his more remote retreat on his native heath.
+
+[Illustration: Woodchuck Lodge and Barn.  From a photograph
+by Charles S. Olcott]
+
+For several years it has been his custom to slip away to the old
+home in Delaware County on one pretext or another--to boil sap
+in the old sugar bush and rejoice in the April frolic of the
+robins; to meander up Montgomery Hollow for trout; to gather wild
+strawberries in the June meadows and hobnob with the bobolinks; to
+saunter in the hemlocks in quest of old friends in the tree-tops;
+and--yes, truth compels me to confess--to sit in the fields with
+rifle in hand and wage war against the burrowing woodchuck which
+is such a menace to the clover and vegetables of the farmer.
+
+In the summer of 1908, Mr. Burroughs rescued an old dwelling
+fast going to decay which stood on the farm a half-mile from
+the Burroughs homestead, and there, with friends, camped out
+for a few weeks, calling the place, because of the neighbors
+who most frequented it, "Camp Monax," or, in homelier language,
+"Woodchuck Lodge."  In the succeeding summers he has spent most
+of his time there.  Though repairing and adding many improvements,
+he has preserved the simple, primitive character of the old house,
+has built a roomy veranda across its front, made tables, bookcases,
+and other furniture of simple rustic character, and there in summer
+he dwells with a few friends, as contented and serene a man as
+can be found in this complicated world of to-day.  There his old
+friends seek him out, and new ones come to greet him.  Artists and
+sculptors paint and model him, and photographers carry away
+souvenirs of their pilgrimages.
+
+In order to withdraw himself completely during his working hours
+from the domestic life, Mr. Burroughs instituted a study in the
+hay-barn, a few rods up the hill from the house.  A rough box,
+the top of which is covered with manilla paper, an old hickory
+chair, and a hammock constitute his furnishings.  The hay carpet
+and overflowing haymows yield a fragrance most acceptable to him,
+and through the great doorway he looks out upon the unfrequented
+road and up to Old Clump, the mountain in the lap of which his
+father's farm is cradled, the mountain which he used to climb to
+salt the sheep, the mountain which is the haunt of the hermit
+thrush. (His nieces and nephews at the old home always speak of
+this songster as "Uncle John's bird.")
+
+[Illustration: Mr. Burroughs in the Hay-Barn Study, Woodchuck Lodge.
+From a photograph by R. J. H. DeLoach]
+
+As I watched Mr. Burroughs start out morning after morning with
+his market-basket of manuscripts on his arm, and briskly walk
+to his rude study, I asked myself,  "Is there another literary
+man anywhere, now that Tolstoy has gone, who is so absolutely
+simple and unostentatious in tastes and practice as is John
+Burroughs?" How he has learned to strip away the husks and get
+at the kernels!  How superbly he ignores non-essentials! how free
+he is from the tyranny of things!  There in the comfort of the
+hills among which his life began, with his friends around him, he
+rejoices in the ever-changing face of Nature, enjoys the fruits of
+his garden, his forenoons of work, and the afternoons when friends
+from near and far walk across the fields, or drive, or motor up to
+Woodchuck Lodge; and best of all, he enjoys the peace that evening
+brings--those late afternoon hours when the shadow of Old Clump is
+thrown on the broad mountain-slope across the valley, and when the
+long, silvery notes of the vesper sparrow chant "Peace, goodwill,
+and then good-night."  As the shadows deepen, he is wont to carry
+his Victor out to the stone wall and let the music from Brahms's
+"Cradle Song" or Schubert's "Serenade" float to us as we sit on
+the veranda, hushed into humble gratitude for our share in this
+quiet life.
+
+To see Mr. Burroughs daily amid these scenes; to realize how they
+are a part of him, and how inimitably he has transferred them to
+his books; to roam over the pastures, follow the spring paths,
+linger by the stone walls he helped to build, sit with him on the
+big rock in the meadow where as a boy he sat and dreamed; to see
+him in the everyday life--hoeing in the garden, tiptoeing about
+the house preparing breakfast while his guests are lazily dozing
+on the veranda; to eat his corn-cakes, or the rice-flour pudding
+with its wild strawberry accompaniment; to see him rocking his
+grandson in the old blue cradle in which he himself was rocked;
+to picnic in the beech woods with him, climb toward Old Clump at
+sunset and catch the far-away notes of the hermit; to loll in the
+hammocks under the apple trees, or to sit in the glow of the
+Franklin stove of a cool September evening while he and other
+philosophic or scientific friends discuss weighty themes; to hear
+his sane, wise, and often humorous comments on the daily papers,
+and his absolutely independent criticism of books and magazines--to
+witness and experience all this, and more, is to enjoy a privilege
+so rare that I feel selfish unless I try to share it, in a measure,
+with less fortunate friends of Our Friend.
+
+[Illustration: Cradle in which John Burroughs was rocked.
+From a photograph by Dr. John D. Johnson]
+
+It has been my good fortune to spend many delightful summers with
+Mr. Burroughs at his old home, and also at Woodchuck Lodge.  On my
+first visit he led me to a hilltop and pointed off toward a deep
+gorge where the Pepacton, although it is a placid stream near
+Roxbury, rises amid scenery wild and rugged.  It drains this high
+pastoral country, where the farms hang upon the mountainsides
+or lie across the long, sloping hills.  The look of those farms
+impressed me as the fields of England impressed Mr. Burroughs--"as
+though upon them had settled an atmosphere of ripe and loving
+husbandry."  I was often reminded in looking upon them of that
+line of Emerson's: "The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the
+wide, warm fields."  There is a fresh, blue, cleansed appearance
+to the hills, "like a newly-washed lamp chimney," as Mr. Burroughs
+sometimes said.
+
+Our writer's overmastering attachment to his birthplace seems due
+largely to the fact that the springs, the hills, and the wooded
+mountains are inextricably blended with his parents and his youth.
+As he has somewhere said, "One's own landscape comes in time to be
+a sort of outlying part of him; he has sown himself broadcast upon
+it . .. planted himself in the fields, builded himself in the stone
+walls, and evoked the sympathy of the hills in his struggle."
+
+From a hilltop he pointed off to the west and said, "Yonder is the
+direction that my grandparents came, in the 1790's, from Stamford,
+cutting a road through the woods, and there, over Batavia Hill,
+Father rode when he went courting Mother."
+
+Then we went up the tansy-bordered road, past the little graveyard,
+and over to the site where his grandfather's first house stood.
+As we wandered about the old stone foundations, his reminiscences
+were interrupted by the discovery of a junco's nest.  On the way
+back he pointed across the wide valley to the West Settlement
+schoolhouse where he and his brothers used to go, although his
+first school was in a little stone building which is still standing
+on the outskirts of Roxbury, and known thereabouts as "the old stone
+jug."  Mr. Burroughs remembers his first day in this school, and the
+little suit he wore, of bluish striped cotton, with epaulets on
+the shoulders which flopped when he ran.  He fell asleep one day
+and tumbled off the seat, cutting his head; he was carried to a
+neighboring farmhouse, and he still vividly recalls the smell of
+camphor which pervaded the room when he regained consciousness.  He
+was about four years of age.  He remembers learning his "A-b ab's,"
+as they were called, and just how the column of letters looked in
+the old spelling-book; remembers sitting on the floor under the
+desks and being called out once in a while to say his letters:
+"Hen Meeker, a boy bigger than I was, stuck on /e/. I can remember
+the teacher saying to him; 'And you can't tell that?  Why, little
+Johnny Burroughs can tell you what it is. Come, Johnny.' And I
+crawled out and went up and said it was e, like a little man."
+
+Up the hill a short distance from the old homestead he indicated
+the "turn 'n the road," as it passes by the "Deacon Woods"; this,
+he said, was his first journey into the world.  He was about four
+years old when, running away, he got as far as this turn; then,
+looking back and seeing how far he was from the house, he became
+frightened and ran back crying.  "I have seen a young robin," he
+added, "do the very same thing on its first journey from the nest."
+
+"One of my earliest recollections," he said, "is that of lying on
+the hearth one evening to catch crickets that Mother said ate holes
+in our stockings--big, light-colored, long-legged house crickets,
+with long horns; one would jump a long way.
+
+"Another early recollection comes to me: one summer day, when I
+was three or four years old, on looking skyward, I saw a great hawk
+sailing round in big circles.  I was suddenly seized with a panic
+of fear and hid behind the stone wall.
+
+"The very earliest recollection of my life is that of the 'hired
+girl' throwing my cap down the steps, and as I stood there crying,
+I looked up on the sidehill and saw Father with a bag slung across
+his shoulders, striding across the furrows sowing grain.  It was
+a warm spring day, and as I looked hillward wistfully, I wished
+Father would come down and punish the girl for throwing my cap
+down the stairs--little insignificant things, but how they stick
+in the memory!"
+
+"I see myself as a little boy rocking this cradle," said Mr.
+Burroughs, as he indicated the quaint blue wooden cradle (which I
+had found in rummaging through the attic at the old home, and had
+installed in Woodchuck Lodge), "or minding the baby while Mother
+bakes or mends or spins.  I hear her singing; I see Father pushing
+on the work of the farm."
+
+Most of the soil in Delaware County is decomposed old red sandstone.
+Speaking of this soil Mr. Burroughs said, "In the spring when the
+plough has turned the turf, I have seen the breasts of these broad
+hills glow like the breasts of robins."  He is fond of studying the
+geology of the region now.  I have seen him dig away the earth the
+better to expose the old glacier tracings, and then explain to his
+grandchildren how the glaciers ages ago made the marks on the rocks.
+To me one of the finest passages in his recent book "Time and Change
+" is one wherein he describes the look of repose and serenity of
+his native hills, "as if the fret and fever of life were long since
+passed with them."  It is a passage in which he looks at his home
+hills through the eye of the geologist, but with the vision of
+the poet--the inner eye which assuredly yields him "the bliss
+of solitude."
+
+One evening as we sat in the kitchen at the old home, he described
+the corn-shelling of the olden days: "I see the great splint basket
+with the long frying-pan handle thrust through its ears across the
+top, held down by two chairs on either end, and two of my brothers
+sitting in the chairs and scraping the ears of corn against the
+iron.  I hear the kernels rattle, a shower of them falling in the
+basket, with now and then one flying out in the room.  With the
+cobs that lie in a pile beside the basket I build houses, carrying
+them up till they topple, or till one of the shelters knocks them
+over.  Mother is sitting by, sewing, her tallow dip hung on the
+back of a chair.  Winter reigns without.  How it all comes up
+before me!"
+
+He remembers when four or five years old crying over a thing which
+had caused him deep chagrin: A larger boy--"the meanest boy I ever
+knew, and he became the meanest man," he said with spirit--"found
+me sulking under a tree in the corner of the school-yard; he bribed
+me with a slate pencil into confessing what I was crying about, but
+as soon as I had told him, he ran away with the pencil, shouting my
+secret to the other boys."
+
+One day we went 'cross lots after spearmint for jelly for the table
+at Woodchuck Lodge, and an abandoned house near the mint-patches
+recalled to Mr. Burroughs the first time he had heard the word
+"taste" used, except in reference to food.  The woman who had lived
+in this house, while calling at his home and seeing his attempt at
+drawing something, had said, "What taste that boy has!" "It made me
+open my eyes--'taste'!--then there was another kind of taste than
+the one I knew about--the taste of things I ate!"
+
+At a place in the road near the old stone schoolhouse, he showed me
+where, as a lad of thirteen, perhaps, he had stopped to watch some
+men working the road, and had first heard the word "antiquities"
+used.  "They had uncovered and removed a large flat stone, and under
+it were other stones, probably arranged by the hands of earlier
+roadmakers.  David Corbin, a man who had had some schooling, said,
+as they exposed the earlier layers, 'Ah! here are antiquities!'
+The word made a lasting impression on me."
+
+[Illustration: View of the Catskills from Woodchuck Lodge.
+From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott]
+
+One of our favorite walks at sunset was up the hill beyond the old
+home where the road winds around a neglected graveyard.  From this
+high vantage-ground one can see two of the Catskill giants--Double
+Top and Mount Graham.  It was not a favorite walk of the boy John
+Burroughs.  He told how, even in his early teens, at dusk, he would
+tiptoe around the corner past the graveyard, afraid to run for fear
+a gang of ghosts would be at his heels.  "When I got down the road
+a ways, though, how I would run!"  He was always "scairy" if he had
+to come along the edge of the woods alone at nightfall, and was
+even afraid of the big black hole under the barn in the daytime:
+"I was tortured with the thought of what might lurk there in that
+great black abyss, and would hustle through my work of cleaning
+the stable, working like Hercules, and often sending in 'Cuff,'
+the dog, to scare 'em out."
+
+Fed on stories of ghosts and hobgoblins in childhood, his active,
+sensitive imagination became an easy prey to these fears.  But
+we do outgrow some things.  In the summer of 1911 this grown-up
+boy waxed so bold that he sat in the barn with its black hole
+underneath and wrote of "The Phantoms Behind Us."  There was still
+something Herculean in his task; he looked boldly down into the
+black abysms of Time, not without some shrinking, it is true,
+saw the "huge first Nothing," faced the spectres as they rose
+before him, wrestled with them, and triumphantly conquered by
+acknowledging each phantom as a friendly power--a creature on
+whose shoulders he had raised himself to higher and higher levels;
+he saw that though the blackness was peopled with uncouth and
+gigantic forms, out of all these there at last arose the being
+Man, who could put all creatures under his feet.
+
+Along the road between the old home and Woodchuck Lodge are some
+rocks which were the "giant stairs" of his childhood.  On these
+he played, and he is fond now of pausing and resting there as he
+recalls events of those days.
+
+"Are these rocks very old?" some one asked him one day.
+
+"Oh, yes; they've been here since Adam was a kitten."
+
+Whichever way he turns, memories of early days awaken; as he
+himself has somewhere said in print, "there is a deposit of him
+all over the landscape where he has lived."
+
+
+As we have learned, Mr. Burroughs seems to have been more alive
+than his brothers and playmates, to have had wider interests and
+activities.  When, a lad, he saw his first warbler in the "Deacon
+Woods," the black-throated blue-back, he was excited and curious as
+to what the strange bird could be (so like a visitant from another
+clime it seemed); the other boys met his queries with indifference,
+but for him it was the event of the day; it was far more, it was
+the keynote to all his days; it opened his eyes to the life about
+him--here, right in the "Deacon Woods," were such exquisite
+creatures!  It fired him with a desire to find out about them.
+That tiny flitting warbler!  How far its little wings have carried
+it!  What an influence it has had on American literature, and on
+the lives of readers for the past fifty years, sending them to
+nature, opening their eyes to the beauty that is common and near
+at hand! One feels like thanking the Giver of all good that a
+little barefoot boy noted the warbler that spring day as it flitted
+about in the beeches wood. Life has been sweeter and richer because
+of it.
+
+Down the road a piece is the place where this boy made a miniature
+sawmill, sawing cucumbers for logs.  On this very rock where we sit
+he used to catch the flying grasshoppers early of an August
+morning--"the big brown fellows that fly like birds"; they would
+congregate here during the night to avail themselves of the warmth
+of the rocks, and here he would stop on his way from driving the
+cows to pasture, and catch them napping.
+
+Yonder in the field by a stone wall, under a maple which is no longer
+standing, in his early twenties he read Schlemiel's "Philosophy of
+History," one of the volumes which, when a youth, he had found in an
+old bookstall in New York, on the occasion of his first trip there.
+
+"Off there through what we used to call the 'Long Woods' lies the
+road along which Father used to travel in the autumn when he took
+his butter to Catskill, fifty miles away.  Each boy went in turn.
+When it came my turn to go, I was in a great state of excitement
+for a week beforehand, for fear my clothes would not be ready, or
+else it would be too cold, or that the world would come to an end
+before the time of starting.  Perched high on a spring-seat, I made
+the journey and saw more sights and wonders than I have ever seen
+on a journey since."
+
+On the drive up from the village he showed me the place, a mile
+or more from their haunts on the breezy mountain lands, where the
+sheep were driven annually to be washed.  It was a deep pool then,
+and a gristmill stood near by.  He said he could see now the
+huddled sheep, and the overhanging rocks with the phoebes' nests
+in the crevices.
+
+"Down in the Hollow," as they call the village of Robbery, he drew
+my attention to the building which was once the old academy, and
+where he had his dream of going to school.  He remembers as a lad
+of thirteen going down to the village one evening to hear a man,
+McLaurie, talk up the academy before there was one in Roxbury. "I
+remember it as if it were yesterday; a few of the leading men of
+the village were there.  I was the only boy. I've wondered since
+what possessed me to go.  In his talk the man spoke of what a
+blessing it would be to boys of that vicinity, pointing me out and
+saying, 'Now, like that boy, there.'  I recall how I dropped my
+head and blushed.  He was a small man, very much in earnest.
+When I heard of his death a few years ago, it gave me long, long
+thoughts.  He finally got the academy going, taught it, and had a
+successful school there for several years, but I never got there.
+The school in the West Settlement, Father thought, was good enough
+for me.  But my desire to go, and dreaming of it, impressed it
+and him upon me more, perhaps, than the boys who really went were
+impressed.  How outside of it all I felt when I used to go down
+there to the school exhibitions!  It was after that that I had
+my dream of going to Harpersfield Seminary--the very name had a
+romantic sound.  Though Father had promised me I might go, when
+the time came he couldn't afford it; he didn't mean to go back
+on his word, but there was very little money--I wonder how they
+got along so well as they did with so little."
+
+"As a boy it had been instilled into my mind that God would strike
+one dead for mocking him.  One day Ras Jenkins and I were crossing
+this field when it began to thunder.  Ras turned up his lips to
+the clouds contemptuously.  'Oh, don't, you'll be struck,' I cried,
+cringing in expectation of the avenging thunderbolt.  What a
+revelation it was when he was not struck!  I immediately began to
+think, 'Now, maybe God isn't so easily offended as I thought'; but
+it seemed to me any God with dignity ought to have been offended
+by such an act."
+
+Mr. Burroughs showed me the old rosebush in the pasture, all that
+was left to mark the site where a house had once stood; even before
+his boyhood days this house had become a thing of the past.  The
+roses, though, had always been a joy to him, and had played such a
+part in his early days that he had transplanted some of the old bush
+to a spot near his doorsteps at Slabsides.  Once when he sent me
+some of the roses he wrote of them thus: "The roses of my boyhood!
+Take the first barefooted country lad you see with homemade linen
+trousers and shirt, and ragged straw hat, and put some of these
+roses in his hand, and you see me as I was fifty-five years ago.
+They are the identical roses, mind you.  Sometime I will show you
+the bush in the old pasture where they grew."
+
+One day we followed the course he and his brothers and sisters used
+to take on their way to school.  Leaving the highway near the old
+graveyard, we went down across a meadow, then through a beech wood,
+and on through the pastures in the valley along which a trout brook
+used to flow, on across more meadows and past where a neglected
+orchard was, till we came to where the little old schoolhouse
+itself stood.
+
+How these trout streams used to lure him to play hookey!  All the
+summer noonings, too, were spent there.  He spoke feelingly of the
+one that coursed through the hemlocks--"loitering, log-impeded,
+losing itself in the dusky, fragrant depths of the hemlocks."  They
+used to play hookey down at Stratton Falls, too, and get the green
+streaks in the old red sandstone rocks to make slate pencils of,
+trying them on their teeth to make sure they were soft enough not
+to scratch their slates.  The woods have been greatly mutilated
+in which they used to loiter on the way to school and gather
+crinkle-root to eat with their lunches,--though they usually ate
+it all up before lunch-time came, he said.  In one of his books
+Mr. Burroughs speaks of a schoolmate who, when dying, said, "I must
+hurry, I have a long way to go over a hill and through a wood, and
+it is getting dark."  This was his brother Wilson, and he doubtless
+had in mind this very course they used to take in going to school.
+
+This school (where Jay Gould was his playmate) he attended only
+until he was twelve years of age.  A rather curious reciprocal help
+these two lads gave each other--especially curious in the light of
+their subsequent careers as writer and financier.  The boy John
+Burroughs was one day feeling very uncomfortable because he could
+not furnish a composition required of him.  Eight lines only were
+sufficient if the task was completed on time, but the time was up
+and no line was written.  This meant being kept after school to
+write twelve lines.  In this extremity. Jay Gould came to his
+rescue with the following doggerel:--
+
+
+    "Time is flying past,
+    Night is coming fast,
+    I, minus two, as you all know,
+    But what is more
+    I must hand o'er
+    Twelve lines by night,
+    Or stay and write.
+    Just eight I've got
+    But you know that's not
+    Enough lacking four,
+    But to have twelve
+    It wants no more."
+
+
+"I have never been able to make out what the third line meant,"
+said Mr. Burroughs.  A few years later, when Jay Gould was hard
+up (he had left school and was making a map of Delaware County),
+John Burroughs helped him out by buying two old books of him,
+paying him eighty cents.  The books were a German grammar and
+Gray's "Elements of Geology."  The embryo financier was glad to
+get the cash, and the embryo writer unquestionably felt the richer
+in possessing the books.
+
+Mr. Burroughs loves to look off toward Montgomery Hollow and talk
+of the old haunt.  "I've taken many a fine string of trout from
+that stream," he would say.  One day he and his brother Curtis and
+I drove over there and fished the stream, and he could hardly stay
+in the wagon the last half-mile.  "Isn't it time to get out now,
+Curtis?" he fidgeted every little while.  "Not yet, John,--not
+yet," said the more phlegmatic brother.  But it was August, and
+although the rapid mountain brook seemed just the place for trout,
+the trout were not in their places.  I shall long remember the
+enticing stream, the pretty cascades, the high shelving rocks
+sheltering the mossy nest of the phoebe, and the glowing masses of
+bee-balm blooming beside the stream; yes, and the eagerness of one
+of the fishermen as he slipped along ahead of me, dropping his hook
+into the pools.  Occasionally he would relinquish the rod, putting
+it into my hands with a rare self-denial as we came to a promising
+pool; but I was more deft at gathering bee-balm than taking trout,
+and willingly spared the rod to the eager angler.  And even he
+secured only two troutling to carry back in his mint-lined creel.
+
+"Trout streams gurgled about the roots of my family tree," he was
+wont to say as he told of his grandfather Kelly's ardor for the
+pastime.  One day, in crossing the fields near the old home, he
+showed me the stone wall where he and his grandfather tarried the
+last time they went fishing together, he a boy of ten and his
+grandfather past eighty.  As they rested on the wall, the old man,
+without noticing it, sat on the lad's hand as it lay on the wall.
+"It hurt," Mr. Burroughs said, "but I didn't move till he got ready
+to get up."
+
+It was a great pleasure to go through the old sap bush with Mr.
+Burroughs, for there he always lives over again the days in early
+spring when sugar-making was in progress.  He showed where some of
+the old trees once stood,--the grandmother trees,--and mourned that
+they were no more; but some of the mighty maples of his boyhood are
+still standing, and each recalls youthful experiences. He sometimes
+goes back there now in early spring to re-create the idyllic days.
+Their ways of boiling sap are different now, and he finds less
+poetry in the process.  But the look of the old trees, the laugh
+of the robins, and the soft nasal calls of the nuthatch, he says,
+are the same as in the old times.  "How these sounds ignore the
+years!" he exclaimed as a nuthatch piped in the near-by trees.
+
+Sometimes he would bring over to Woodchuck Lodge from the homestead
+a cake of maple sugar from the veteran trees, and some of the
+maple-sugar cookies such as his mother used to make; though he eats
+sparingly of sweets nowadays.  Yet, when he and a small boy would
+clear the table and take the food down cellar, it was no uncommon
+thing to see them emerge from the stairway, each munching one of
+those fat cookies, their eyes twinkling at the thought that they
+had found the forbidden sweets we had hidden so carefully.
+
+He and this lad of eleven were great chums; they chased wild bees
+together, putting honey on the stone wall, getting a line on the
+bees; shelled beechnuts and cracked butternuts for the chipmunks;
+caught skunks in a trap, just to demonstrate that a skunk can be
+carried by the tail with impunity, if you only do it right (and,
+though succeeding one day, got the worst of the bargain the next);
+and waged war early and late on the flabby woodchucks which one
+could see almost any hour in the day undulating across the fields.
+We called these boys "John of Woods," and "John of Woodchucks";
+and it was sometimes difficult to say which was the veriest boy,
+the one of eleven or the one of seventy-four.
+
+One morning I heard them laughing gleefully together as they were
+doing up the breakfast work.  Calling out to learn the cause of
+their merriment, I found the elder John had forgotten to eat his
+egg--he had just found it in his coat-pocket, having put it in
+there to carry from the kitchen to the living-room.
+
+He often amused us by his recital of Thackeray's absurd "Little
+Billee," and by the application of some of the lines to events
+in the life at Woodchuck Lodge.
+
+[Illustration: Living-Room, Woodchuck Lodge, with Rustic Furniture
+made by Mr. Burroughs.  From a photograph by M. H. Fanning]
+
+As the evenings grew longer and cooler, we would gather about the
+table and Mr. Burroughs would read aloud, sometimes from Bergson's
+"Creative Evolution," under the spell of which he was the entire
+summer of 1911, sometimes from Wordsworth, sometimes from Whitman.
+"No other English poet has touched me quite so closely," he said,
+"as Wordsworth. . . . But his poetry has more the character of a
+message, and a message special and personal, to a comparatively
+small circle of readers."  As he read "The Poet's Epitaph" one
+evening, I was impressed with the strong likeness the portrait
+there drawn has to Mr. Burroughs:--
+
+
+    "The outward shows of sky and earth,
+       Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
+    And impulses of deeper birth
+       Have come to him in solitude.
+
+    In common things that round us lie
+       Some random truths he can impart,--
+    The harvest of a quiet eye
+       That broods and sleeps on his own heart."
+
+
+What are the books, and notably the later philosophical essays,
+of Mr. Burroughs but the "harvest of a quiet eye"?  His "Summit of
+the Years," his "Gospel of Nature" (which one of his friends calls
+"The Gospel according to Saint John"), his "Noon of Science," his
+"Long Road"?  And most of this rich harvest he has gathered in his
+journeys back to Pepacton, inspired by the scenes amid which he
+first felt the desire to write.
+
+Seeing him daily in these scenes, one feels that it may, indeed,
+be said of him as Matthew Arnold said of Sophocles, that he sees
+life steadily, and sees it whole.  What a masterly handling is
+his of the facts of the universe, giving his reader the truths
+of the scientist touched with an idealism such as is only known
+to the poet's soul!  A friend, writing me of "The Summit of the
+Years," spoke of "its splendid ascent by a rapid crescendo from
+the personal to the cosmic," and of how gratifying it is to see
+our author putting forth such fine work in his advancing years.
+Another friend called it "a beautiful record of a beautiful life."
+I recall the September morning on which he began that essay.  He
+had written the first sentence--"The longer I live, the more I am
+impressed with the beauty and the wonder of the world"--when he was
+interrupted for a time.  He spoke of what he had written, and said
+he hardly knew what he was going to make of it.  Later in the day
+he brought me a large part of the essay to copy, and I remember how
+moved I was at its beauty, how grateful that I had been present at
+its inception and birth.
+
+One afternoon he called us from our separate work, the artist from
+her canvas and me from my typewriter, to look at a wonderful rainbow
+spanning the wide valley below us.  The next day he brought me a
+short manuscript saying, "If that seems worth while to you, you
+may copy it--I don't know whether there is anything in it or not."
+It was "The Rainbow," which appeared some months later in a popular
+magazine--a little gem, and a good illustration of his ability to
+throw the witchery of the ideal around the facts of nature.  The
+lad with us had been learning Wordsworth's "Rainbow," a favorite
+of Mr. Burroughs, and it was no unusual thing of a morning to hear
+the rustic philosopher while frying the bacon for breakfast, singing
+contentedly in a sort of tune of his own making:--
+
+
+    "And I could wish my days to be
+     Bound each to each by natural piety."
+
+
+One afternoon a neighbor came and took him in her automobile a
+ride of fifty miles or more, the objective point of which was
+Ashland, the place where he had attended a seminary in 1854 and
+1855.  On his return he said it seemed like wizard's work that
+he could be whisked there and back in one afternoon, to that
+place which had been the goal of his youthful dreams!  They had
+also called on a schoolmate whom he had not seen for forty years.
+He told us how a possession of that boy's had been a thing he had
+coveted for many months--a slate pencil with a shining copper
+gun-cap!  "How I longed for that pencil!  I tried to trade for
+buttons (all I had to offer in exchange), but it was too precious
+for my small barter, and I coveted it in vain."  The wistful Celt
+began early to sigh for the unattainable.
+
+We picked wild strawberries in June from the "clover lot" where
+the boy John Burroughs and his mother used to pick them.  "I can
+see her now," he said reminiscently, "her bent figure moving slowly
+in the summer fields toward home with her basket filled.  She would
+also go berrying on Old Clump, in early haying, long after the
+berries were gone in the lowlands."
+
+During this summer of which I speak, the fields were a gorgeous mass
+of color--buttercups and daisies, and the orange hawkweed--a display
+that rivaled the carpet of gold and purple we had seen in the San
+Joaquin Valley, in company with John Muir three summers before.  Mr.
+Muir was done before starting for South America.  He had promised
+to come to the Catskills, but had to keep putting it off to get
+copy ready, and the Laird of Woodchuck Lodge was exasperated that
+the mountaineer would stay in that hot Babylon,--he, the lover
+of the wild,--when we in the Delectable Mountains were calling him
+hither.  As we looked upon the riot of color one day, Mr. Burroughs
+said, "John Muir, confound him! I wish he was here to see this
+at its height!"
+
+Returning to the little gray farmhouse in the gathering dusk one
+late September day, Mr. Burroughs paused and turned, looking back
+at the old home, and up at the cattle silhouetted against the
+horizon.  He gazed upon the landscape long and long.  How fondly
+his eye dwells upon these scenes!  So I have seen him look when
+about to part from a friend--as if he were trying to fix the
+features and expression in his mind forever.
+
+"The older one grows, the more the later years erode away, as do
+the secondary rocks, and one gets down to bed-rock,--youth,--and
+there he wants to rest.  These scenes make youth and all the early
+life real to me, the rest is more like a dream.  How incredible it
+is!--all that is gone; but here it lives again."
+
+[Illustration: On the Porch at Woodchuck Lodge.  From a photograph
+by Charles S. Olcott]
+
+And yet, though he is face to face with the past at his old home,
+his days there are not so sad as some of his reminiscent talk would
+seem to indicate.  In truth, he is serenely content, so much so
+that he sometimes almost chides himself for living so much in the
+present.  "Oh, the power of a living reality to veil or blot out
+the Past!" he sighed.  "And yet, is it not best so?  Does not the
+grass grow above graves?  Why should these lovely scenes always
+be a cemetery to me?  There seems to have been a spell put upon
+them that has laid the ghosts, and I am glad."  And to see him
+bird-nesting with his grandchildren, hunting in the woods for
+crooked sticks for his rustic furniture, waking the echo in the
+"new barn" (a barn that was new in 1844), routing out a woodchuck
+from a stone wall, blackberrying on the steep hillsides, or going
+a half-mile across the fields just to smell the fragrance of the
+buckwheat bloom, is to know that, wistful Celt that he is, and
+dominated by the spell of the Past, he is yet very much alive to
+the Present, out of which he is probably getting as full a measure
+of content as any man living to-day.
+
+He looked about him at the close of his first stay at Woodchuck
+Lodge after the completion of the repairs which had made the house
+so homelike and comfortable, and said contentedly: "A beautiful
+dream come true!  And to think I've stayed down there on the Hudson
+all these years with never the home feeling, when here were my
+native hills waiting to cradle me as they did in my youth, and I so
+slow to return to them!  I've been homesick for over forty years: I
+was an alien there; I couldn't take root there.  It was a lucky day
+when I decided to spend the rest of my summers here"
+
+
+
+CAMPING WITH BURROUGHS AND MUIR
+
+
+In February, 1909, I was one of a small party which set out with
+Mr. Burroughs for the Pacific Coast and the Hawaiian Islands.  The
+lure held out to him by the friend who arranged his trip was that
+John Muir would start from his home at Martinez, California, and
+await him at the Petrified Forests in Arizona; conduct him through,
+that weirdly picturesque region, and in and around the Grand Canon
+of the Colorado; camp and tramp with him in the Mojave Desert;
+tarry awhile in Southern California; then visit Yosemite before
+embarking on the Pacific preparatory to lotus-eating in Hawaii.
+The lure held out to the more obscure members of the party was
+all that has been enumerated, plus that of having these two great,
+simple men for traveling companions.  To see the wonders of the
+Southwest is in itself great good fortune, but to see them in
+company with these two students of nature, and to study the
+students while the students were studying the wonders, was an
+incalculable privilege.
+
+It frightens me now when I think on what a slight chance hung our
+opportunity for this unique Journey; for Mr. Burroughs, though at
+first deciding to go, had later given it up, declaring himself to
+be too much of a tenderfoot to go so far from home alone at his age.
+
+"Why should I go gadding about to see the strange and the
+extraordinary?" he wrote me, when trying to argue himself into
+abandoning the trip. "The whole gospel of my books (if they have
+any gospel) is 'Stay at home; see the wonderful and the beautiful in
+the simple things all about you; make the most of the common and the
+near at hand.'  When I have gone abroad, I have carried this spirit
+with me, and have tested what I have seen by the nature revealed to
+me at my own doorstep.  Well, I am glad I have triumphed at last; I
+feel much better and like writing again, now that this incubus is
+off my shoulders."  But the incubus soon rested on him again, for
+the next mail carried a letter begging him to reconsider and let
+two of his women friends accompany him.  So it all came about in
+a few days, and we were off.
+
+We wondered how Mr. Muir would relish two women being in the party,
+but assured Mr. Burroughs we should not hamper them, and should be
+ready to do whatever they were.
+
+"Have no fears on that score," he said; "Muir will be friendly
+if you are good listeners; and he is well worth listening to.  He
+is very entertaining, but he sometimes talks when I want to be let
+alone; at least he did up in Alaska."
+
+"But you won't be crusty to him, will you?"
+
+"Oh, no, I shan't dare to be--he is too likely to get the best of
+one; he is a born tease."
+
+
+The long journey across the Western States (by the Santa Fe route)
+was full of interest at every point.  Even the monotony of the
+Middle West was not wearisome, while the scenery and scenes in
+New Mexico and Arizona were fascinating in the extreme.
+
+Mr. Burroughs had been to the Far West by a northern route, but this
+was all fresh territory to him, and he brought to it his usual keen
+appetite for new phases of nature, made still keener by a recently
+awakened interest in geological subjects.  It enhanced the pleasure
+and profit of the trip a hundredfold to get his first impressions of
+the moving panorama, as I did when he dictated notes to me from his
+diary, or descriptive letters to his wife and son.  The impression
+one gets out there of earth sculpture in process is one of the chief
+attractions of the region, and Mr. Burroughs never tired of studying
+the physiognomy of the land, and the overwhelming evidences of time
+and change, and of contrasting these with our still older, maturer
+landscapes in the East.
+
+In passing through Kansas he commented on the monotonous level
+expanse of country as being unbearable from any point of view
+except as good farm land.  Used to hills and mountains, inviting
+brooks and winding roads, he turned away from this unpicturesque
+land, saying if it was a good place to make money, it was also a
+place to lose one's own soul--he was already homesick for the
+beauty and diversity of our more winsome country.
+
+Two days' journey from Chicago and we reached the desert town of
+Adamana.  As the train stopped near the little inn, a voice called
+out in the darkness, "Hello, Johnnie, is that you?"
+
+"Yes, John Muir"; and there under the big dipper, on the great
+Arizona desert, the two friends met after a lapse of ten years.
+
+"Muir, aren't you surprised to find me with two women in my wake?"
+asked Mr. Burroughs, introducing us.
+
+"Yes; surprised that there are only two, Johnnie."  Then to us, "Up
+in Alaska there were a dozen or two following him around, tucking
+him up in steamer rugs, putting pillows to his head, running to
+him with a flower, or a description of a bird--Oh, two is a very
+moderate number, Johnnie, but we'll manage to worry through with
+them, somehow."  And picking up part of our luggage, the tall,
+grizzly Scot led the way to the inn.
+
+The next day we drove nine miles over the rolling desert to
+visit one of the petrified forests, of which there are five in
+that vicinity.  Blended with the unwonted scenes--the gray sands
+dotted with sagebrush and greasewood, the leaping jack rabbits,
+the frightened bands of half-wild horses, the distant buttes and
+mesas, and the brilliant blue of the Arizona sky--is the memory
+of that talk of Mr. Muir's during the long drive, a talk which
+for range and raciness I have never heard equaled.  He often uses
+the broad dialect of the Scot, translating as he goes along.  His
+forte is in monologue.  He is a most engaging talker,--discursive,
+grave and gay,--mingling thrilling adventures, side-splitting
+anecdotes, choice quotations, apt characterizations, scientific
+data, enthusiastic descriptions, sarcastic comments, scornful
+denunciations, inimitable mimicry.
+
+Mr. Burroughs, on the contrary, is not a ready talker; he gives
+of his best in his books.  He establishes intimate relations with
+his reader, Mr. Muir with his listener.  He is more fond of an
+interchange of ideas than is Mr. Muir; is not the least inclined
+to banter or to get the better of one; is so averse to witnessing
+discomfiture that even when forced into an argument, he is loath to
+push it to the bitter end.  Yet when he does engage in argument, he
+drives things home with very telling force, especially when writing
+on debatable points.
+
+As we drove along the desert, Mr. Muir pointed to a lofty plateau
+toward which we were tending,--"Robbers' Roost,"--where
+sheep-stealers hie themselves, commanding the view for hundreds of
+miles in every direction.  I wish I could make vivid the panorama
+we saw from this vantage-ground--the desert in the foreground, and
+far away against the sky the curiously carved pink and purple and
+lilac mountains, while immediately below us lay the dry river-bed
+over which a gaunt raven flew and croaked ominously, and a little
+beyond rose the various buttes, mauve and terra-cotta colored,
+from whose sides and at whose bases projected the petrified trees.
+There lay the giant trees, straight and tapering--no branching as
+in our trees of to-day.  The trunks are often flattened, as though
+they had been under great pressure, often the very bark seemed to
+be on them (though it was petrified bark), and on some we saw marks
+of insect tracery like those made by the borers of to-day.  Some of
+the trunks were more than one hundred and fifty feet long, and five
+to seven feet in diameter, prostrate but intact, looking as though
+uprooted where they lay.  Others were broken at regular intervals,
+as though sawed into stove lengths.  In places the ground looks
+like a chip-yard, the chips dry and white as though bleached by
+the sun.  The eye is deceived; chips these surely are, you think,
+but the ear corrects this impression, for as your feet strike
+the fragments, the clinking sound proves that they are stone.
+In some of the other forests, visited later, the chips and larger
+fragments, and the interior of the trunks, are gorgeously colored,
+so that we walked on a natural mosaic of jasper, chalcedony, onyx,
+and agate.  In many fragments the cell-structure of the wood is
+still visible, but in others nature has carried the process
+further, and crystallization has transformed the wood of these
+old, old trees into the brilliant fragments we can have for the
+carrying--"beautiful wood replaced by beautiful stone," as Mr.
+Muir was fond of saying.
+
+With what wonder and incredulity we roamed about witnessing the
+strange spectacle!--the prostrate monarchs with hearts of jasper
+and chalcedony, now silent and rigid in this desolate region where
+they basked in the sunlight and swayed in the winds millions of
+years ago.  Only a small part of the old forest is as yet exposed;
+these trees, buried for ages beneath the early seas, becoming
+petrified as they lay, are, after ages more, gradually being
+unearthed as the softer parts of the soil covering them wears away.
+
+The scenic aspects of the place, the powerful appeal it made to
+the imagination, the evidences of infinite time, the wonderful
+metamorphosis from vegetable life to these petrified remains which
+copy so faithfully the form and structure of the living trees,
+were powerfully enhanced by the sight of these two men wandering
+amid these ruins of Carboniferous time, sometimes in earnest
+conversation, oftener in silence; again in serious question from
+the one and perhaps bantering answer from the other; for although
+Mr. Burroughs was intensely interested in this spectacle, and full
+of cogitations and questions as to the cause and explanation of it
+all, Mr. Muir was not disposed to treat questions seriously.
+
+"Oh, get a primer of geology, Johnnie," he would say when the
+earnest Eastern student would ask for a solution of some of the
+puzzles arising in his mind--a perversity that was especially
+annoying, since the Scot had carefully explored these regions,
+and was doubtless well equipped to adduce reasonable explanations
+had he been so minded.  That very forest to which we went on that
+first day, and where we ate our luncheon from the trunk of a great
+petrified Sigillaria, had been discovered by Mr. Muir and his
+daughter a few years before as they were riding over the sandy
+plateau.  He told us how excited he was that night--he could not
+sleep, but lay awake trying to restore the living forest in
+imagination, for, from the petrified remains, he could tell to
+what order these giants belonged.
+
+When others congregate to eat, the Scot seems specially impelled
+to talk.  With a fine disregard for food, he sat and crumbled dry
+bread, occasionally putting a bit in his mouth, talking while
+the eating was going on.  He is likewise independent of sleep.
+"Sleep!" he would exclaim, when the rest of us, after a long day of
+sight-seeing, would have to yield to our sense of fatigue,  "why,
+you can sleep when you get back home, or, at least, in the grave."
+
+Mr. Burroughs, on the contrary, is specially dependent upon sleep
+and food in order to do his work or to enjoy anything.  On our
+arrival at the Grand Canon in the morning, after a night of travel
+and fasting, all the rest of us felt the need of refreshing
+ourselves and taking breakfast before we would even take a peep at
+the great rose-purple abyss out there a few steps from the hotel,
+but the teasing Scot jeered at us for thinking of eating when there
+was that sublime spectacle to be seen.  When we did go out to the
+rim, Mr. Muir preceded us, and, as we approached, waved toward the
+great abyss and said: "There! Empty your heads of all vanity, and
+look!"  And we did look, overwhelmed by what must be the most truly
+sublime spectacle this earth has to offer--a veritable terrestrial
+Book of Revelation, as Mr. Burroughs said.
+
+We followed a little path along the rim, led by Mr. Muir, to where
+we could escape from the other sight-seers, and there we sat on
+the rocks, though the snow lay in patches on the ground that bright
+February day.  Mr. Burroughs made a fire of Juniper brush, and as
+the fragrant incense rose on the air, with that wondrous spectacle
+before our eyes, we listened to Mr. Muir reciting some lines from
+Milton--almost the only poet one would think of quoting in the
+presence of such solemn, awful beauty.
+
+Mr. Muir tried to dissuade us the next day from going down into
+the canon: "Don't straddle a mule and poke your noses down to
+the ground, and plunge down that dangerous icy trail, imagining,
+because you get a few shivers down your backs, you are seeing the
+glories of the canon, or getting any conception of the noble river
+that made it.  You must climb, climb, to see the glories, always."
+But when Mr. Burroughs would ask him where we could climb to, to
+see the canon, since under his guidance we had been brought to the
+very edge on the top, he did not deign to explain, but continued to
+deride the project of the descent into the depths--a way the dear
+man has of meeting an argument that is a bit annoying at times.
+
+We did go down into the canon on mule-back,--down, down, over four
+thousand feet,--and the jeering Scot went with us, sitting his
+mule uncompromisingly, and indulging in many a jest at the expense
+of the terrified women who felt, when too late to retreat, that
+it would have been better to heed his advice.  Still, after the
+descent, and then the ascent, were safely accomplished, we were
+glad we had not let him dissuade us.  None of us can ever forget
+that day, with its rich and varied experiences, the mingled fear
+and awe and exultation, the overpowering emotions felt at each
+new revelation of the stupendous spectacle, often relieved by
+the lively sallies of Mr. Muir.  We ate our luncheon on the old
+Cambrian plateau, the mighty Colorado, still a thousand feet below
+us, looking entirely inadequate to have accomplished the tremendous
+results we were witnessing.
+
+One day at the canon, feeling acutely aware of our incalculable
+privilege, I said, "To think of having the Grand Canon, and John
+Burroughs and John Muir thrown in!"
+
+"I wish Muir /was/ thrown  in, sometimes," retorted Mr. Burroughs,
+with a twinkle in his eye, "when he gets between me and the canon."
+
+
+In contrast to Mr. Muir, the Wanderer, is Mr. Burroughs, the
+Home-lover, one who is under the spell of the near and the
+familiar.  The scenes of his boyhood in the Catskills, the woods
+he wandered in about Washington during the years he dwelt there,
+his later tramping-ground along the Hudson--these are the scenes
+he has made his readers love because he has loved them so much
+himself; and however we may enjoy his journeyings in "Mellow
+England," in "Green Alaska," in Jamaica, or his philosophical
+or speculative essays, we find his stay-at-home things the best.
+And he likes the familiar scenes and things the best, much as he
+enjoyed the wonders that the great West offered.  The robins in
+Yosemite Valley and the skylarks in the Hawaiian Islands, because
+these were a part of his earlier associations, did more to endear
+these places to him than did the wonders themselves.  On Hawaii,
+where we saw the world's greatest active volcano throwing up
+its fountains of molten lava sixty or more feet high, the masses
+falling with a roar like that of the "husky-voiced sea," Mr.
+Burroughs found it difficult to understand why some of us were so
+fascinated that we wanted to stay all night, willing to endure the
+discomforts of a resting-place on lava rocks, occasional stifling
+gusts of sulphur fumes, dripping rain, and heat that scorched our
+veiled faces, so long as we could gaze on that boiling, tumbling,
+heaving, ever-changing lake of fire.  Such wild, terrible,
+unfamiliar beauty could not long hold him under its spell.
+
+[Illustration: John Muir and John Burroughs, Pasadena, California.
+From a photograph by George R. King]
+
+A veritable homesickness came over him amid unfamiliar scenes. One
+day in early March, after journeying all day over the strange region
+of the California desert, with its giant cacti, its lava-beds, its
+volcanic cones, its rugged, barren mountains, its deep gorges and
+canons, its snow-capped peaks, on reaching San Bernardino, so green
+and fresh and smiling in the late afternoon sun, and riding through
+miles and miles of orange groves to Riverside, this return to a
+winsome nature (though unlike his own), after so much of the
+forbidding aspect had been before us, was to Mr. Burroughs
+like water brooks to the thirsty hart.
+
+His abiding love for early friends, too, crops out on all
+occasions.  Twice while away on this trip be received the proffer
+of honorary degrees from two of our American universities.  Loath
+to accept such honors at any time, he was especially so now, and
+declined, defending himself by saying that the acceptance would
+have necessitated his hurrying straight home across the States to
+have the degrees conferred upon him, when he was planning to tarry
+in Iowa and see an old schoolmate.
+
+"I didn't want to do it," he said petulantly; "I wanted to stop and
+see Sandy Smith"--his tone being not unlike what he would have used
+when as a boy he doubtless coaxed to "go out and play with Sandy."
+
+Mr. Burroughs is too much a follower of the genuinely simple life
+to be long contented in hotels, however genial the hospitality.
+He declared the elegant suite at the Mission Inn at Riverside,
+which was tendered to him and his party in the most cordial,
+unobtrusive way, was too luxurious for a "Slabsider" like him.
+It was positively painful to him to be asked, as he was frequently
+on the Western and Hawaiian tour, to address audiences, or "just to
+come and meet the students" at various schools and colleges.  Such
+meetings usually meant being "roped in" to making a speech, often
+in spite of assurances to the contrary.  I have known him to slip
+away from a men's club early in the evening, before dinner was
+announced, and return to our little cottage in Pasadena, where he
+would munch contentedly an uncooked wafer, drink a cup of hot water,
+read a little geology, and go to bed at the seasonable hour of nine,
+the next morning awakening with a keen appetite for the new day,
+for his breakfast, and for his forenoon of work, whereas, had he
+stayed out till eleven or twelve, eaten a hearty dinner, and been
+stimulated and excited by much talk, he would have awakened without
+the joy in the morning which he has managed to carry through his
+seventy-six years, and which his readers, who rejoice in the
+freshness and tranquillity of his pages, hope he will keep till
+he reaches the end of the Long Road.
+
+Mr. Muir is as averse to speaking in public as is Mr. Burroughs,
+much as he likes to talk.  They both dislike the noise and
+confusion of cities, and what we ordinarily mean by social life.
+Mr. Burroughs is less an alien in cities than is Mr. Muir, yet,
+on the whole, he is more of a solitaire, more of a recluse.  He
+avoids men where the other seeks them.  He cannot deal or dicker
+with men, but the canny Scot can do this, if need be, and even
+enjoy it.  Circumstances seem to have made Mr. Muir spend most
+of his years apart from his fellows, although by nature he is
+decidedly gregarious; circumstances seem to have decreed that Mr.
+Burroughs spend the greater part of his life among his fellow-men,
+though there is much of the hermit in his make-up.
+
+Mr. Muir gets lost in cities--this man who can find his way on the
+trackless desert, the untrodden glaciers, and in the most remote
+and inaccessible mountain heights.  He will never admit that his
+wanderings were lonely: "You can always have the best part of your
+friends with you," he said; "it is only when people cease to love
+that they are separated."
+
+One Sunday in Pasadena we had planned to have a picnic up one of the
+canons, but the rain decreed otherwise.  So, discarding tables and
+other appurtenances of life within doors, we picnicked on the floor
+of our sitting-room, making merry there with the luncheon we had
+prepared for the jaunt.  While passing back and forth through the
+room in our preparations, we heard the men of the party talk in
+fragments, and amusing fragments they were.  Once when Mr. Browne,
+the editor of the "Dial," was discussing some point in connection
+with the Spanish-American War, I heard Mr. Muir say, with a sigh of
+relief, "I was getting flowers up on the Tuolumne meadows then, and
+didn't have to bother about those questions."  When another friend
+was criticizing Mr. Roosevelt for the reputed slaughter of so many
+animals in Africa, and Mr. Burroughs declared he did not credit half
+the things the papers said the hunter was doing, Mr. Muir said, half
+chidingly, half tolerantly, "Roosevelt, the muggins, I am afraid he
+is having a good time putting bullets through those friends of his."
+Now I had heard him call Mr. Burroughs "You muggins" in the same
+winning, endearing way he said "Johnnie"; I had heard him speak of
+a petrified tree in the Sigillaria forest as a "muggins"; of a bear
+that trespassed on his flowery domains in the Sierra meadows as a
+"muggins" that he tried to look out of countenance and failed; of
+a "comical little muggins of a daisy" that some one had named
+after him; and one day he had rejoiced my heart by dubbing me "You
+muggins, you"; and behold! here he was now applying the elastic term
+to our many-sided (I did not say "strenuous") ex-President!  Later
+I heard him apply it to a Yosemite waterfall, and by then should not
+have been surprised to hear him speak of a mighty glacier, or a
+giant sequoia, as a "muggins."
+
+"Stickeen," Mr. Muir's incomparable dog story, came out in book form
+while we were in Pasadena.  I sent a copy to my brother, who wrote
+later asking me to inquire of Mr. Muir why he did not keep Stickeen
+after their perilous adventures together.  So I put the question to
+him one day.  "Keep him!" he ejaculated, as he straightened his
+back, and the derisive wrinkles appeared on one side of his nose;
+"keep him! he wasn't mine--I'm Scotch, I never steal."  Then he
+explained that Stickeen's real master was attached to him; that he
+could not take him from him; and besides, the dog was accustomed
+to a cold climate, and would have been very unhappy in California.
+"Oh, no, I couldn't keep Stickeen," he said wistfully, but one felt
+that he /had/ kept Stickeen, the best part of him, by immortalizing
+him in that story.
+
+While we were housekeeping in Pasadena, Mr. Burroughs began writing
+on the Grand Canon.  One morning, after having disposed of several
+untimely callers, he had finally settled down to work.  We sat
+around the big table writing or reading.  Mr. Burroughs was there in
+the body, but in spirit we could see he was at the "Divine Abyss,"
+as he called the Canon.  Once he read us a few sentences which were
+so good that I resolved we must try harder to prevent interruptions,
+that he might keep all his writing up to that standard.  But while
+engaged in letter-writing, some point arose, and, forgetting my
+laudable resolution,  I put a question to him.  Answering me
+abstractedly, he went on with his writing.  Then I realized how
+inexcusable it was to intrude my trivialities at such a time.
+Castigating myself and resolving anew, I wrote on in contrite
+silence.  After a little Mr. Burroughs paused and lifted his head;
+his expression was puzzled, as though wrestling with some profound
+thought, or weighing some nicety of expression; I saw he was about
+to speak--perhaps to utter his latest impression concerning the
+glories of the Canon.  As he opened his lips this is what we heard:
+"/Couldn't we warm up those Saratoga chips for luncheon?/" Whereupon
+it will be seen that the abyss he was then cogitating about was in
+the epigastric region, instead of in Arizona.
+
+Mr. Muir likes a laugh at his own expense.  He told us of a
+school-teacher in the vicinity of his home instructing her pupils
+about Alaska and the glaciers; and on telling them that the great
+Muir Glacier was named after their neighbor, who discovered it,
+one little boy piped up with, "What, not that old man that drives
+around in a buggy!"
+
+I may as well offset this with one of our Hawaiian experiences.
+When we were in Honolulu, we heard that one of the teachers there,
+thinking to make a special impression upon her pupils, told them
+the main facts about Mr. Burroughs's writings, their scope and
+influence, what he stood for as a nature writer, his place in
+literature, and then described his appearance, and said, "And
+this noted man, this great nature lover, is right here--a guest
+in our city!"  A little lad broke in with, "I know--I saw him
+yesterday--he was in our yard stealing mangoes."
+
+
+One day, while still in Pasadena, I told Mr. Muir that on April 3d
+a few of us wished to celebrate Mr. Burroughs's birthday, his
+seventy-second, by a picnic up one of the Mount Lowe canons.  He
+said it would be impossible for him to be with us on that day, as he
+had to go up to San Francisco.  On my expressing keen disappointment
+he teasingly said:--"Why, you will have Johnnie, and Mr. Browne, and
+the mountains--what more do you want?"
+
+"But we want /you/ ," I protested, assuring him that this was not a
+case where one could say,--
+
+
+    "How happy could I be with either,
+     Were t'other dear Johnnie away!"
+
+
+"Well, then, why can't you have it some other day?"
+
+"Because he wasn't born some other day."
+
+"But why must you be tied to the calendar?  Can't you celebrate
+Johnnie's birthday a few days later just as well?  Such a stickler
+for the exact date as you are, I never saw."
+
+Thus he bantered, but when he had to leave us, we knew he was as
+disappointed as we all were that he could not be with us on that
+"exact date."
+
+How he did enjoy hectoring us for our absurd mistake in not reading
+our long tickets through, consequently getting on the Santa Fe
+train to go up to San Francisco when a little coupon stated that
+the ticket took us by the Coast line.  We were bound to let the
+Scot know of our mistake, and our necessary transfer to the other
+road (as we had arranged to meet him at a certain point on the
+Santa Fe), else, I suppose, we never should have given him that
+chance to jeer at us.  He made us tell him all about it when we
+met, and shaking with laughter at all the complications the mistake
+entailed, he declared, "Oh, but that's a bully story!"
+
+"It'll put an inch of fat on Muir's ribs," retorted "Oom John,"
+who was not without chagrin at the fiasco.
+
+"Johnnie, when you sail for Honolulu, I expect, unless you're
+narrowly watched, you'll get on the wrong ship and go off to
+Vancouver," teased the fun-loving Scot.
+
+
+In Yosemite, Mr. Muir told us about the great trees he used to
+saw into timber during his early years in the valley, showing us
+the site of his old mill, and bragging that he built it and kept
+it in repair at a cost of less than twenty-five cents a year.  It
+seemed strange that he, a tree-lover, could have cut down those
+noble spruces and firs, and I whispered this to Mr. Burroughs.
+
+"Ask him about it," said the latter, "ask him." So I did.
+
+"Bless you, I never cut down the trees--I only sawed those the
+Lord had felled."
+
+The storms that swept down the mountains had laid these monarchs
+low, and the thrifty Scot had merely taken advantage of the ill
+winds, at the same time helping nature to get rid of the debris.
+
+"How does this compare with Esopus Valley, Johnnie?" Mr. Muir was
+fond of asking Mr. Burroughs, when he saw the latter gazing in
+admiration at mighty El Capitan, or the thundering Yosemite
+Falls.  Or he would say, "How is that for a piece of glacial work,
+Johnnie?" as he pointed to Half Dome and told how the glacier had
+worn off at least half a mile from its top, and then had sawed
+right down through the valley.
+
+"O Lord! that's too much, Muir," answered Mr. Burroughs.  He
+declared that it stuck in his crop--this theory that ice alone
+accounts for this great valley cut out of the solid rocks.  When
+the Scot would get to riding his ice-hobby too hard, Mr. Burroughs
+would query, "But, Muir, the million years before the ice age--what
+was going on here then?'
+
+"Oh, God knows," said Mr. Muir, but vouchsafed no further explanation.
+
+[Illustration: John Burroughs and John Muir in the Yosemite.  From
+a photograph by F. P. Clatworthy]
+
+
+"With my itch for geology," said Mr. Burroughs, "I want it scratched
+all the time, and Muir doesn't want to scratch it."  So he dropped
+his questions, which elicited only bantering answers from the
+mountaineer, and gave himself up to sheer admiration of the glories
+and beauties of the region, declaring that of all the elemental
+scenes he had beheld, Yosemite beat them all--"The perpetual thunder
+peal of the waters dashing like mad over gigantic cliffs, the
+elemental granite rocks--it is a veritable 'wreck of matter and
+crush of worlds' that we see here."
+
+
+Mr. Burroughs urged Mr. Muir again and again to reclaim his early
+studies in the Sierra which were printed in the "Overland Monthly"
+years ago, and give them to the public now with the digested
+information which he alone can supply, and which is as yet
+inaccessible in his voluminous notes and sketches of the region.
+At Mr. Muir's home we saw literally barrels of these notes.  He
+admitted that he had always been dilatory about writing, but not
+about studying or note-taking; often making notes at night when
+fatigued from climbing and from two and three days' fasting; but
+the putting of them into literature is irksome to him.  Yet, much
+as he dislikes the labor of writing, he will shut himself away from
+the air and sunshine for weeks at a time, if need arises, and write
+vigorously in behalf of the preservation of our forests.  He did
+this back in the late seventies, and in more recent years has been
+tireless in his efforts to secure protection to our noble forests
+when danger has threatened them.
+
+Mr. Muir's knowledge of the physiognomy and botany of most of the
+countries of the globe is extensive, and he has recently added
+South America and South Africa to his list; there is probably no
+man living, and but few who have lived, so thoroughly conversant
+with the effects of glaciation as is he; yet, unless he puts his
+observations into writing, much of his intimate knowledge of these
+things must be lost when he passes on.  And, as Mr. Burroughs says,
+"The world wants this knowledge seasoned with John Muir, not his
+mere facts.  He could accumulate enough notes to fill Yosemite,
+yet that would be worth little.  He has spent years studying and
+sketching the rocks, and noting facts about them, but you can't
+reconstruct beauty and sublimity out of mere notes and sketches.
+He must work his harvest into bread."  But concerning this writing
+Mr. Muir confesses he feels the hopelessness of giving his readers
+anything but crumbs from the great table God has spread: "I can
+write only hints to incite good wanderers to come to the feast."
+
+Here we see the marked contrast between these two nature students:
+Mr. Muir talks because he can't help it, and his talk is good
+literature; he writes only because he has to, on occasion; while
+Mr. Burroughs writes because he can't help it, and talks when he
+can't get out of it.  Mr. Muir, the Wanderer, needs a continent
+to roam in; while Mr. Burroughs, the Saunterer, needs only a
+neighborhood or a farm.  The Wanderer is content to scale mountains;
+the Saunterer really climbs the mountain after he gets home, as he
+makes it truly his own only by dreaming over it and writing about it.
+The Wanderer finds writing irksome; the Saunterer is never so well
+or so happy as when he can write; his food nourishes him better,
+the atmosphere is sweeter, the days are brighter.  The Wanderer has
+gathered his harvest from wide fields, just for the gathering; he has
+not threshed it out and put it into the bread of literature--only
+a few loaves; the Saunterer has gathered his harvest from a rather
+circumscribed field, but has threshed it out to the last sheaf; has
+made many loaves; and it is because he himself so enjoys writing that
+his readers find such joy and morning freshness in his books, his own
+joy being communicated to his reader, as Mr. Muir's own enthusiasm
+is communicated to his hearer.  With Mr. Burroughs, if his field of
+observation is closely gleaned, he turns aside into subjective fields
+and philosophizes--a thing which Mr. Muir never does.
+
+
+One of the striking things about Mr. Muir is his generosity; and
+though so poor in his youth and early adult life, he has now the
+wherewithal to be generous.  His years of frugality have, strange
+to say, made him feel a certain contempt for money.  At El Tovar
+he asked, "What boy brought up my bags?"  Whereupon a string of
+bell-boys promptly appeared for their fees, and Mr. Muir handed
+out tips to all the waiting lads, saying in a droll way, "I didn't
+know I had so many bags."  When we tried to reimburse him for the
+Yosemite trip, he would have none of it, saying, almost peevishly,
+"Now don't annoy me about that."  Yet, if he thinks one is trying
+to get the best of him, he can look after the shekels as well as
+any one.  One day in Yosemite when we were to go for an all day's
+tramp and wished a luncheon prepared at the hotel, on learning of
+the price they were to charge, he turned his back on the landlord
+and dispatched one of us to the little store, where, for little
+more than the hotel would have charged for one person, a luncheon
+for five was procured, and then he really chuckled that he had been
+able to snap his fingers at mine host, who had thought he had us
+at his mercy.
+
+
+I see I have kept Mr. Muir close to the footlights most of the
+time, allowing Mr. Burroughs to hover in the background where
+he blends with the neutral tones; but so it was in all the
+thrilling scenes in the Western drama--Mr. Muir and the desert,
+Mr. Muir and the petrified trees, Mr. Muir and the canon, Mr.
+Muir and Yosemite; while with "Oom John," it was a blending with
+the scene, a quiet, brooding absorption that made him seem a part
+of them--the desert, the petrified trees, the Grand Canon, Yosemite,
+and Mr. Burroughs inseparably linked with them, but seldom standing
+out in sharp contrast to them, as the "Beloved Egotist" stood out
+on all occasions.
+
+
+Perhaps the most idyllic of all our days of camping and tramping
+with John of Birds and John of Mountains was the day in Yosemite
+when we tramped to Nevada and Vernal Falls, a distance of fourteen
+miles, returning to Camp Ahwahnee at night, weary almost to
+exhaustion, but strangely uplifted by the beauty and sublimity
+n which we had lived and moved and had our being.  Our brown tents
+stood hospitably open, and out in the great open space in front we
+sat around the campfire under the noble spruces and firs, the Merced
+flowing softly on our right, mighty Yosemite Falls thundering away
+in the distance, while the moon rose over Sentinel Rock, lending
+a touch of ineffable beauty to the scene, and a voice, that is now
+forever silenced, lent to the rhymes of the poets its richness of
+varied emotion, as it chanted choicest selections from the Golden
+Poems of all time.  We lingered long after the other campers had
+gone to rest, loath to bring to its close a day so replete with
+sublimity and beauty.  Mr. Burroughs summed it up as he said
+good-night:  "A day with the gods of eld--a holy day in the
+temple of the gods."
+
+
+
+JOHN BURROUGHS: AN APPRECIATION
+
+
+"John is making an impression on his age--has come to stay--has
+veritable, indisputable, dynamic gifts," Walt Whitman said
+familiarly to a friend in 1888, in commenting on our subject's
+place in literature.  And of a letter written to him by Mr.
+Burroughs that same year he said: "It is a June letter, worthy
+of June; written in John's best outdoor mood.  Why, it gets into
+your blood, and makes you feel worth while.  I sit here, helpless
+as I am, and breathe it in like fresh air."
+
+Minot Savage once asked in a sermon if it did not occur to his
+hearers that John Burroughs gets a little more of June than the
+rest of us do, and added that Mr. Burroughs had paid years of
+consecration of thought and patient study of the lives of birds
+and flowers, and so had bought the right to take June and all that
+it means into his brain and heart and life; and that if the rest
+of us wish these joys, we must purchase them on the same terms.
+We are often led to ask what month he has not taken into his heart
+and life, and given out again in his writings.  Perhaps most of all
+he has taken April into his heart, as his essay on it in "Birds and
+Poets" will show:--
+
+
+How it [April] touches one and makes him both glad and sad!  The
+voices of the arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of
+pigeons sweeping across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin
+horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of
+the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at
+sundown, the camp-fire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar
+rising over the trees, the tinge of green that comes so suddenly
+on the sunny knolls and slopes, the full translucent streams, the
+waxing and warming sun,--how these things and others like them are
+noted by the eager eye and ear!  April is my natal month, and I am
+born again into new delight and new surprises at each return of it.
+Its name has an indescribable charm to me.  Its two syllables are
+like the calls of the first birds,--like that of the phoebe-bird,
+or of the meadowlark.
+
+
+But why continue? The whole essay breathes of swelling buds,
+springing grass, calls of birds, April flowers, April odors,
+and April's uncloying freshness and charm.  As we realize what the
+returning spring brings to this writer, we say with Bliss Carman:--
+
+
+    "Make [him] over.  Mother April,
+     When the sap begins to stir."
+
+
+I fancy there are many of his readers who will echo what one of
+his friends has said to him: "For me the 3d of April will ever
+stand apart in the calendar with a poignant beauty and sweetness
+because it is your birthday.  It is the keynote to which the whole
+springtime music is set."  Or another: "If April 3d comes in like
+any other day, please understand that it will be because she does
+not dare to show how glad she is over her own doings."  On another
+birthday, the same correspondent says: "I find that you are so
+inwoven with the spring-time that I shall never again be able to
+resolve the season into its elements.  But I am the richer for it.
+I feel a sort of compassion for one who has never seen the spring
+through your eyes."
+
+Mr. Burroughs puts his reader into close and sympathetic communion
+with the open-air world as no other literary naturalist has done.
+Gilbert White reported with painstaking fidelity the natural
+history of Selborne; Thoreau gave Thoreau with glimpses of nature
+thrown in; Richard Jefferies, in dreamy, introspective descriptions
+of rare beauty and delicacy, portrayed his own mystical impressions
+of nature; but Mr. Burroughs takes us with him to the homes and
+haunts of the wild creatures, sets us down in their midst, and lets
+us see and hear and feel just what is going on.  We read his books
+and echo Whitman's verdict on them: "They take me outdoors! God
+bless outdoors!"  And since God /has/ blessed outdoors, we say, "God
+bless John Burroughs for taking us out of doors with him!"
+
+Our writer never prates about nature, telling us to look and
+admire.  He loves the common, everyday life about him, sees it
+more intimately than you or I see it, and tells about it so simply
+and clearly that he begets a like feeling in his reader.  It was
+enjoined of the early Puritans "to walke honestlie in the sweete
+fields and woodes."  How well our friend has obeyed this injunction!
+
+And what an unobtrusive lover he is!  Although it is through him that
+his mistress stands revealed, it is not until we look closely that
+we spy her adorer in the background, intent only on unveiling her
+charms.  How does he do this?  First by succumbing himself--Nature's
+graces, her inconsistencies, even her objectionable traits appeal to
+him.  Like the true lover, he is captivated by each of her phases,
+and surrenders himself without reserve.  Such homage makes him the
+recipient of her choicest treasures, her most adorable revelations.
+
+[Illustration: Mr. Burroughs sitting for a Statuette.  From a
+photograph by Charles S. Olcott]
+
+I have mentioned Gilbert White's contributions to the literature
+about nature: one must admire the man's untiring enthusiasm, but his
+book is mainly a storehouse of facts; how rarely does he invest the
+facts with charm!  To pry into nature's secrets and conscientiously
+report them seems to be the aim of the English parson; but we get
+so little of the parson himself.  What were his feelings about
+all these things he has been at such pains to record?  The things
+themselves are not enough. It is not alluring to be told soberly:--
+
+
+Hedge-hogs abound in my garden and fields. The manner in which they
+eat the roots of the plaintain in the grass walk is very curious;
+with their upper mandible, which is much larger than the lower,
+they bore under the plant, and so eat the root off upward, leaving
+the tuft of leaves untouched.
+
+
+And so on.  By way of contrast, see how Mr. Burroughs treats
+a similar subject.  After describing the porcupine, mingling
+description and human encounter, thereby enlisting the reader's
+interest, he says:--
+
+
+In what a peevish, injured tone the creature did complain of our
+unfair tactics!  He protested and protested, and whimpered and
+scolded like some infirm old man tormented by boys.  His game
+after we led him forth was to keep himself as much as possible
+in the shape of a ball, but with two sticks and the cord we
+finally threw him over on his back and exposed his quill-less
+and vulnerable under side, when he fairly surrendered and seemed
+to say, "Now you may do with me as you like."
+
+
+Here one gets the porcupine and Mr. Burroughs too.
+
+Thoreau keeps his reader at arm's length, invites and repels at
+the same time, piques one by his spiciness, and exasperates by
+his opinionatedness.  You want to see his bean-field, but know
+you would be an intruder.  He might even tell you to your face
+that he was happiest the mornings when nobody called.  He likes
+to advise and berate, but at long range.  Speaking of these two
+writers, Whitman once said, "Outdoors taught Burroughs gentle
+things about men--it had no such effect upon Thoreau."
+
+Richard Jefferies appeals to lovers of nature and lovers of
+literature as well.  He has the poet's eye and is a sympathetic
+spectator, but seldom gives one much to carry away.  His
+descriptions, musical as they are, barely escape being wearisome
+at times.  In his "Pageant of Summer" he babbles prettily of green
+fields, but it is a long, long summer and one is hardly sorry to
+see its close.  In some of his writings he affects one unpleasantly,
+gives an uncanny feeling; one divines the invalid as well as the
+mystic back of them; there is a hectic flush, perhaps a neurotic
+taint.  Beautiful, yes, but not the beauty of health and sanity. It
+is the same indescribable feeling I get in reading that pathetically
+beautiful book, "The Road-Mender," by "Michael Fairless"--the gleam
+of the White Gate is seen all along the Road, though the writer
+strives so bravely to keep it hidden till it must open to let him
+pass.  One of the purest gems of Jefferies--"Hours of Spring"--has
+a pathos and haunting melody of compelling poignancy.  It is like
+a white violet or a hepatica.
+
+But with Mr. Burroughs we feel how preeminently sane and healthy
+he is.  His essays have the perennial charm of the mountain brooks
+that flow down the hills and through the fertile valleys of his
+Catskill home.  They are redolent of the soil, of leaf mould,
+of the good brown earth.  His art pierces through our habitual
+indifference to Nature and kindles our interest in, not her beauty
+alone, but in her rugged, uncouth, and democratic qualities.
+
+Like the true walker that he describes, he himself "is not merely
+a spectator of the panorama of nature, but is a participator in it.
+He experiences the country he passes through,--tastes it, feels it,
+absorbs it."  Let us try this writer by his own test.  He says:
+"When one tries to report nature he has to remember that every
+object has a history which involves its surroundings, and that the
+depth of the interest which it awakens in us is in the proportion
+that its integrity in this respect is preserved."  He must, as we
+know Mr. Burroughs does, bring home the river and the sky when he
+brings home the sparrow that he finds singing at dawn on the alder
+bough; must make us see and hear the bird /on the bough/, and this is
+worth a whole museum of stuffed and labeled specimens.  To do this
+requires a peculiar gift, one which our essayist has to an unusual
+degree--an imagination that goes straight to the heart of whatever
+he writes about, combined with a verbal magic that re-creates what
+he has seen.  Things are felicitously seen by Mr. Burroughs, and
+then felicitously said.  A dainty bit in Sidney's "Apologie for
+Poetrie" seems to me aptly to characterize our author's prose: "The
+uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the minde, which is
+the end of speech."
+
+One can pick out at random from his books innumerable poetic
+conceits; the closed gentian is the "nun among flowers"; a patch
+of fringed polygalas resembles a "flock of rose-purple butterflies"
+alighted on the ground; the male and female flowers of the early
+everlasting are "found separated from each other in well-defined
+groups, like men and women in an old-fashioned country church";
+"the note of the pewee is a human sigh"; the bloodroot--"a
+full-blown flower with a young one folded in a leaf beneath it,
+only the bud emerging, like the head of a papoose protruding
+from its mother's blanket."  Speaking of the wild orchids known
+as "lady's-slippers," see the inimitable way in which he puts
+you on the spot where they grow: "Most of the floral ladies
+leave their slippers in swampy places in the woods, only the
+stemless one (/Cypripedium acaule/) leaves hers on dry ground
+before she reaches the swamp, commonly under evergreen trees
+where the carpet of pine needles will not hurt her feet."
+Almost always he invests his descriptions with  some human
+touch that gives them rare charm--nature and human nature
+blended--if it is merely the coming upon a red clover
+in England--
+
+"The first red clover head just bloomed . . . but like
+the people I meet, it has a ruddier cheek than those at home."
+
+
+When we ask ourselves what it is that makes his essays so engaging,
+we conclude it is largely due to their lucidity, spontaneity, and
+large simplicity--qualities which make up a style original, fresh,
+convincing.  His writing, whether about nature, literature,
+science, or philosophy, is always suggestive, potent, pithy; his
+humor is delicious; he says things in a crisp, often racy, way.
+Yet what a sense of leisureliness one has in reading him, as well
+as a sense of companionability!
+
+What distinguishes him most, perhaps, is his vivid and poetic
+apprehension of the mere fact.  He never flings dry facts at us,
+but facts are always his inspiration.  He never seeks to go behind
+them, and seldom to use them as symbols, as does Thoreau.  Thoreau
+preaches and teaches always; Mr. Burroughs, never.  The facts
+themselves fill him with wonder and delight--a wonder and delight
+his reader shares.  The seasons, the life of the birds and the
+animals, the face of nature, the ever new, the ever common day--all
+kindle his enthusiasm and refresh his soul.  The witchery of the
+ideal is upon his page without doubt, but he will not pervert
+natural history one jot or tittle for the sake of making a pretty
+story.  His whole aim is to invest the fact with living interest
+without in the least lessening its value as a fact.  He does not
+deceive himself by what he wants to be true; the scientist in him
+is always holding the poet in check.  Of all contemporary writers
+in this field, he is the one upon whom we can always depend to be
+intellectually honest.  He has an abiding hankering after the true,
+the genuine, the real; cannot stand, and never could stand, any
+tampering with the truth.  Had he been Cromwell's portrait painter,
+he would have delighted in his subject's injunction: "Paint me as I
+am, mole and all."  And he would have made the mole interesting; he
+has done so, but that is a mole of another color.
+
+This instinct for the truth being so strong in him, he knows it
+when he sees it in others; he detects its absence, too; and has
+no patience and scant mercy for those past-masters in the art of
+blinking facts,--those natural-history romancers who, realizing
+that "the crowd must have emphatic warrant," are not content with
+the infinite Variety of nature, but must needs spend their art in
+the wasteful and ridiculous excess of painting the lily, perfuming
+the violet, and giving to the rainbow an added hue.  Accordingly,
+when one warps the truth to suit his purpose, especially in the
+realm of nature, he must expect this hater of shams to raise a
+warning voice--"Beware the wolf in sheep's clothing!"  But he never
+cries "Wolf!" when there is no wolf, and he gives warm and generous
+praise to deserving ones.
+
+It has surprised some of his readers, who know how kindly he is
+by nature, and how he shrinks from witnessing pain, in beast or
+man, much less inflicting it, to see his severity when nature is
+traduced--for he shows all the fight and fury and all the defense of
+the mother bird when her young are attacked.  He won't suffer even a
+porcupine to be misrepresented without bristling up in its defense.
+
+
+I have said that he never preaches, never seeks to give a moral
+twist to his observations of nature, but I recall a few instances
+where he does do a bit of moralizing; for example, when he speaks
+of the calmness and dignity of the hawk when attacked by crows
+or kingbirds: "He seldom deigns to notice his noisy and furious
+antagonist, but deliberately wheels about in that aerial spiral,
+and mounts and mounts till his pursuers grow dizzy and return to
+earth again.  It is quite original, this mode of getting rid of an
+unworthy opponent--rising to heights where the braggart is dazed and
+bewildered and loses his reckoning!  I'm not sure but it is worthy
+of imitation."  Or, in writing of work on the farm, especially
+stone-fence making, he speaks of clearing the fields of the stones
+that are built into boundaries: "If there are ever sermons in
+stones, it is when they are built into a stone wall--turning your
+hindrances into helps, shielding your crops behind the obstacles
+to your husbandry, making the enemies of the plough stand guard
+over its products."  But do we find such sermonizing irksome?
+
+Just as "all architecture is what you do to it when you look upon
+it," so is all nature.  Lovers of Nature muse and dream and invite
+their own souls.  They interpret themselves, not Nature. She
+reflects their thoughts and minds, gives them, after all, only
+what they bring to her.  And the writer who brings much--much of
+insight, of devotion, of sympathy--is sure to bring much away for
+his reader's delectation.  Does not this account for the sense of
+intimacy which his reader has with the man, even before meeting
+him?--the feeling that if he ever does meet him, it will be as
+a friend, not as a stranger?  And when one does meet him, and
+hears him speak, one almost invariably thinks: "He talks just
+as he writes."  To read him after that is to hear the very tones
+of his voice.
+
+
+We sometimes hear the expression, "English in shirt-sleeves,"
+applied to objectionable English; but the phrase might be applied
+in a commendatory way to good English,--to the English of such a
+writer as Mr. Burroughs,--simple, forceful language, with homely,
+everyday expressions; English that shows the man to have been
+country-bred, albeit he has wandered from the home pastures to
+distant woods and pastures new, browsing in the fields of literature
+and philosophy, or wherever he has found pasturage to his taste.
+Or, to use a figure perhaps more in keeping with his main pursuits,
+he is one who has flocked with birds not of a like feather with
+those that shared with him the parent nest.  Although his kin knew
+and cared little for the world's great books, he early learned
+to love them when he was roaming his native fields and absorbing
+unconsciously that from which he later reaped his harvest.  It is to
+writers of /this/ kind of "English in shirt-sleeves" that we return
+again and again.  In them we see shirt-sleeves opposed to evening
+dress; naturalness, sturdiness, sun-tan, and open sky, opposed to
+the artificial, to tameness, constriction, and characterless
+conformity to prescribed customs.
+
+Do we not turn to writers of the first class with eagerness, slaking
+our thirst, refreshing our minds at perennial springs?  How are
+we glad that they lead us into green pastures and beside still
+waters, away from the crowded haunts of the conventional, and
+the respectably commonplace society garb of speech!  What matter
+if occasionally one even gives a wholesome shock by daring to come
+into the drawing-room of our minds in his shirt-sleeves, his hands
+showing the grime of the soil, and his frame the strength that comes
+from battling with wind and weather?  It is the same craving which
+makes us say with Richard Hovey:--
+
+
+"I am sick of four walls and a ceiling;
+I have need of the sky,
+I have business with the grass."
+
+
+But it will not do to carry this analogy too far in writing of Mr.
+Burroughs lest it be inferred that I regard the author's work as
+having in it something of the uncouth, or the ill-timed, or the
+uncultured.  His writing is of the earth, but not of the earth
+earthy.  He sees divine things underfoot as well as overhead.
+His page has the fertility of a well-cultivated pastoral region,
+the limpidness of a mountain brook, the music of our unstudied
+songsters, the elusive charm of the blue beyond the summer clouds;
+it has, at times, the ruggedness of a shelving rock, combined with
+the grace of its nodding columbines.
+
+Mr. Burroughs has told us, in that June idyl of his, "Strawberries,"
+that he was a famous berry-picker when a boy.  It was with a
+peculiar pleasure that I wandered with him one midsummer day over
+the same meadows where he used to gather strawberries.  My first
+introduction to him as a writer, many years before, had been in
+hearing this essay read.  And since then never a year passes that
+I do not read it at least three times--once in winter just to bring
+June and summer near; once in spring when all outdoors gives promise
+of the fullness yet to be; and once in the radiant summer weather
+when daisies and clover and bobolinks and strawberries riot in
+one's blood, making one fairly mad to bury one's self in the June
+meadows and breathe the clover-scented air.  And it always stands
+the test--the test of being read out in the daisy-flecked meadows
+with rollicking bobolinks overhead.
+
+
+What quality is it, though, that so moves and stirs us when Mr.
+Burroughs recounts some of the simple happenings of his youth?
+What is it in his recitals that quickens our senses and perceptions
+and makes our own youth alive and real?  It is paradise regained--the
+paradise of one's lost youth.  Let this author describe his boyhood
+pastures, going 'cross lots to school, or to his favorite spring,
+whatsoever it is--is it the path that he took to the little red
+schoolhouse in the Catskills?  Is it the spring near his father's
+sugar bush that we see?  No.  One is a child again, and in a
+different part of the State, with tamer scenery, but scenery
+endeared by early associations.  The meadow you see is the one
+that lies before the house where you were born; you read of the
+boy John Burroughs jumping trout streams on his way to school,
+but see yourself and your playmates scrambling up a canal bank,
+running along the towpath, careful to keep on the land side of the
+towline that stretches from mules to boat, lest you be swept into
+the green, uninviting waters of the Erie. On you run with slate and
+books; you smell the fresh wood as you go through the lumber yard.
+Or, read another of his boyish excursions, and you find yourself
+on that first spring outing to a distant, low-lying meadow after
+"cowslips"; another, and you are trudging along with your brother
+after the cows, stopping to nibble spearmint, or pick buttercups
+by the way.  Prosaic recollections, compared to spring paths and
+trout brooks in the Catskill valleys, yet this is what our author's
+writings do--re-create for each of us our own youth, with our own
+childhood scenes and experiences, invested with a glamour for us,
+however prosy they seem to others; and why?  Because, though
+nature's aspects vary, the human heart is much the same the world
+over, and the writer who faithfully adds to his descriptions of
+nature his own emotional experiences arouses answering responses in
+the soul of his reader.
+
+
+Perhaps the poet in Mr. Burroughs is nowhere more plainly seen
+than in his descriptions of bird life, yet how accurately he
+gives their salient points; he represents the bird as an object
+in natural history, but ah! how much more he gives!  Imagine our
+bird-lover describing a bird as Ellery Channing described one, as
+something with "a few feathers, a hole at one end and a point at
+the other, and a pair of wings"!  We see the bird Mr. Burroughs
+sees; we hear the one he hears.  Long before I had the memorable
+experience of standing with him on the banks of the Willowemoc
+and listening at twilight to the slow, divine chant of the hermit
+thrush, I had heard it in my dreams, because of that inimitable
+description of its song in "Wake-Robin."  It does, indeed, seem
+to be "the voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one attains to in
+his best moments." As one listens to its strain in the hush of
+twilight, the pomp of cities and the pride of civilization of a
+truth seem trivial and cheap.
+
+What a near, human interest our author makes us feel in the birds,
+how we watch their courtships, how we peer into their nests, and
+how lively is our solicitude for their helpless young swung in
+their "procreant cradles," beset on all sides by foes that fly
+and creep and glide!  And not only does he make the bird a visible
+living creature; he makes it sing joyously to the ear, while all
+nature sings blithely to the eye.  We see the bird, not as a mass
+of feathers with "upper parts bright blue, belly white, breast
+ruddy brown, mandibles and legs black," as the textbooks have it,
+but as a thing of life and beauty: "Yonder bluebird with the earth
+tinge on his breast and the sky tinge on his back,--did he come
+down out of heaven on that bright March morning when he told us so
+softly and plaintively that, if we pleased, spring had come?"  Who
+is there in reading this matchless description of the bluebird that
+does not feel the retreat of winter, that does not feel his pulse
+quicken with the promise of approaching spring, that does not feel
+that the bird did, indeed, come down out of heaven, the heaven of
+hope and promise, even though the skies are still bleak, and the
+winds still cold?  Who, indeed, except those prosaic beings who are
+blind and deaf to the most precious things in life?
+
+"I heard a bluebird this morning!" one exclaimed exultantly, so
+stirred as to forget momentarily her hearer's incapacity for
+enthusiasm.  "Well, and did it sound any different from what it
+did last year, and the year before, and the year before that?"
+inquired in measured, world-wearied tones the dampener of ardors.
+No, my poor friend, it did not.  And just because it sounded the
+same as it has in all the succeeding springs since life was young,
+it touched a chord in one's heart that must be long since mute in
+your own, making you poor, indeed, if this dear familiar bird voice
+cannot set it vibrating once more.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Our Friend John Burroughs, by Clara Barrus
+
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