Our Friend John Burroughs

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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.

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