Our Friend John Burroughs

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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.

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