Our Friend John Burroughs

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"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!"

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