Our Friend John Burroughs

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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

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