Our Friend John Burroughs

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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."

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