Our Friend John Burroughs

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I think of the Burroughs branch of my ancestry as rather retiring,
peace-loving, solitude-loving men--men not strongly sketched in
on the canvas of life, not self-assertive, never roistering or
uproarious--law-abiding, and church-going. I gather this
impression from many sources, and think it is a correct one.

Oh, the old farm days! how the fragrance of them still lingers
in my heart! the spring with its farm, the returning birds, and
the full, lucid trout-streams; the summer with its wild berries,
its haying, its cool, fragrant woods; the fall with its nuts, its
game, its apple-gathering, its holidays; the winter with its
school, its sport on ice and snow, its apple-bins in the cellar,
its long nights by the fireside, its voice of fox-bounds on the
mountains, its sound of flails in the barn--how much I still dream
about these things!

But I am slow in keeping my promise to try to account for myself.
Yet all these things are a part of my antecedents; they entered
into my very blood--father and mother and brothers and sisters,
and the homely life of the farm, all entered into and became a
part of that which I am.

I am certain, as I have told you before, that I derived more from
my mother than from my father. I have more of her disposition--her
yearning, breeding nature, her subdued and neutral tones, her
curiosity, her love of animals, and of wild nature generally.
Father was neither a hunter nor a fisherman, and, I think, was
rarely conscious of the beauty of nature around him. The texture
of his nature was much less fine than that of Mother's, and he was
a much easier problem to read; he was as transparent as glass.
Mother had more of the stuff of poetry in her soul, and a deeper,
if more obscure, background to her nature. That which makes a
man a hunter or a fisherman simply sent her forth in quest of
wild berries. What a berry-picker she was! How she would work
to get the churning out of the way so she could go out to the
berry lot! It seemed to heal and refresh her to go forth in the
hill meadows for strawberries, or in the old bushy bark-peelings
for raspberries. The last work she did in the world was to gather
a pail of blackberries as she returned one September afternoon from
a visit to my sister's, less than a mile away.

I am as fond of going forth for berries as my mother was, even to
this day. Every June I must still make one or two excursions to
distant fields for wild strawberries, or along the borders of the
woods for black raspberries, and I never go without thinking of
Mother. You could not see all that I bring home with me in my
pail on such occasions; if you could, you would see the traces
of daisies and buttercups and bobolinks, and the blue skies, with
thoughts of Mother and the Old Home, that date from my youth. I
usually eat some of the berries in bread and milk, as I was wont to
do in the old days, and am, for the moment, as near a boy again as
it is possible for me to be.

[Illustration: One of Mr. Burroughs's Favorite Seats, Roxbury,
New York. From a photograph by Clifton Johnson]

No doubt my life as a farm boy has had much to do with my
subsequent love of nature, and my feeling of kinship with all
rural things. I feel at home with them; they are bone of my bone
and flesh of my flesh. It seems to me a man who was not born and
reared in the country can hardly get Nature into his blood, and
establish such intimate and affectionate relations with her, as
can the born countryman. We are so susceptible and so plastic in
youth; we take things so seriously; they enter into and color and
feed the very currents of our being. As a child I think I must
have been more than usually fluid and impressionable, and that my
affiliations with open-air life and objects were very hearty and
thorough. As I grow old I am experiencing what, I suppose, all
men experience, more or less; my subsequent days slough off, or
fade away, more and more, leaving only the days of my youth as a
real and lasting possession.

When I began, in my twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year, to write
about the birds, I found that I had only to unpack the memories of
the farm boy within me to get at the main things about the common
ones. I had unconsciously absorbed the knowledge that gave the life
and warmth to my page. Take that farm boy out of my books, out of
all the pages in which he is latent as well as visibly active, and
you have robbed them of something vital and fundamental, you have
taken from the soil much of its fertility. At least, so it seems
to me, though in this business of self-analysis I know one may easily
go far astray. It is probably quite impossible correctly to weigh
and appraise the many and complex influences and elements that have
entered into one's life.

When I look back to that twilight of early youth, to that half-mythical
borderland of the age of six or seven years, or even earlier, I can
see but few things that, in the light of my subsequent life, have
much significance. One is the impression made upon me by a redbird
which the "hired girl" brought in from the woodpile, one day with a
pail of chips. She had found the bird lying dead upon the ground.
That vivid bit of color in the form of a bird has never faded from my
mind, though I could not have been more than three or four years old.

Another bird incident, equally vivid, I have related in "Wake-Robin,"
in the chapter called "The Invitation,"--the vision of the small
bluish bird with a white spot on its wing, one Sunday when I was
six or seven years old, while roaming with my brothers in the
"Deacon woods" near home. The memory of that bird stuck to me
as a glimpse of a world of birds that I knew not of.

Still another bird incident that is stamped upon my memory must
have occurred about the same time. Some of my brothers and an
older boy neighbor and I were walking along a road in the woods
when a brown bird flew down from a bush upon the ground in front
of us. "A brown thrasher," the older boy said. It was doubtless
either the veery, or the hermit thrush, and this was my first clear
view of it. Thus it appears that birds stuck to me, impressed me
from the first. Very early in my life the coming of the bluebird,
the phoebe, the song sparrow, and the robin, in the spring, were
events that stirred my emotions, and gave a new color to the day.
When I had found a bluebird's nest in the cavity of a stump or a
tree, I used to try to capture the mother bird by approaching
silently and clapping my hand over the hole; in this I sometimes
succeeded, though, of course, I never harmed the bird. I used to
capture song sparrows in a similar way, by clapping my hat over
the nest in the side of the bank along the road.

I can see that I was early drawn to other forms of wild life, for
I distinctly remember when a small urchin prying into the private
affairs of the "peepers" in the marshes in early spring, sitting
still a long time on a log in their midst, trying to spy out and
catch them in the act of peeping. And this I succeeded in doing,
discovering one piping from the top of a bulrush, to which he clung
like a sailor to a mast; I finally allayed the fears of one I had
captured till he sat in the palm of my hand and piped--a feat I
have never been able to repeat since.

I studied the ways of the bumblebees also, and had names of my
own for all the different kinds. One summer I made it a point
to collect bumblebee honey, and I must have gathered a couple of
pounds. I found it very palatable, though the combs were often
infested with parasites. The small red-banded bumblebees that
lived in large colonies in holes in the ground afforded me the
largest yields. A large bee, with a broad light-yellow band,
was the ugliest customer to deal with. It was a fighter and
would stick to its enemy like grim death, following me across
the meadow and often getting in my hair, and a few times up my
trousers leg, where I had it at as great a disadvantage as it
had me. It could stab, and I could pinch, and one blow followed
the other pretty rapidly.

As a child I was always looked upon and spoken of as an "odd one"
in the family, even by my parents. Strangers, and relatives from
a distance, visiting at the house, would say, after looking us all
over, "That is not your boy," referring to me, "who is he?" And I
am sure I used to look the embarrassment I felt at not being as the
others were. I did not want to be set apart from them or regarded
as an outsider. As this was before the days of photography, there
are no pictures of us as children, so I can form no opinion of how
I differed in my looks from the others. I remember hearing my
parents say that I showed more of the Kelly--Mother's family.

I early "took to larnin'," as Father used to say, differing from
my brothers and sisters in this respect. I quickly and easily
distanced them all in the ordinary studies. I had gone through
Dayball's Arithmetic while two of my older brothers were yet in
addition. "Larnin'" came very hard to all of them except to Hiram
and me, and Hiram did not have an easy time of it, though he got
through his Dayball, and studied Greenleaf's Grammar.

There was a library of a couple of dozen of volumes in the district,
and I used to take home books from it. They were usually books
of travel or of adventure. I remember one, especially, a great
favorite, "Murphy, the Indian Killer." I must have read this book
several times. Novels, or nature books, or natural-history books,
were unknown in that library. I remember the "Life of Washington,"
and I am quite certain that it was a passage in this book that made
a lasting impression upon me when I was not more than six or seven
years old. I remember the impression, though I do not recall the
substance of the passage. The incident occurred one Sunday in
summer when Hiram and a cousin of ours and I were playing through
the house, I carrying this book in my hand. From time to time I
would stop and read this passage aloud, and I can remember, as if
it were but yesterday, that I was so moved by it, so swept away by
its eloquence, that, for a moment, I was utterly oblivious to
everything around me. I was lifted out of myself, caught up in
a cloud of feeling, and wafted I know not whither. My companions,
being much older than I was, regarded not my reading.

These exalted emotional states, similar to that just described,
used occasionally to come to me under other conditions about this
time, or later. I recall one such, one summer morning when I was
walking on the top of a stone wall that ran across the summit of
one of those broad-backed hills which you yourself know. I had in
my hand a bit of a root of a tree that was shaped much like a
pistol. As I walked along the toppling stones, I flourished this,
and called and shouted and exulted and let my enthusiasm have free
swing. It was a moment of supreme happiness. I was literally
intoxicated; with what I do not know. I only remember that life
seemed amazingly beautiful--I was on the crest of some curious
wave of emotion, and my soul sparkled and flashed in the sunlight.
I have haunted that old stone wall many times since that day, but
I have never been able again to experience that thrill of joy and
triumph. The cup of life does not spontaneously bead and sparkle
in this way except in youth, and probably with many people it does
not even then. But I know from what you have told me that you have
had the experience. When one is trying to cipher out his past, and
separate the factors that have played an important part in his
life, such incidents, slight though they are, are significant.

The day-dreams I used to indulge in when twelve or thirteen, while
at work about the farm, boiling sap in the spring woods, driving
the cows to pasture, or hoeing corn,--dreams of great wealth and
splendor, of dress and equipage,--were also significant, but not
prophetic. Probably what started these golden dreams was an
itinerant quack phrenologist who passed the night at our house when
I was a lad of eight or nine. He examined the heads of all of us;
when he struck mine, he grew enthusiastic. "This is the head for
you," he said; "this boy is going to be rich, very rich"; and much
more to that effect. Riches was the one thing that appealed to
country people in those times; it was what all were after, and what
few had. Hence the confident prophesy of the old quack made an
impression, and when I began to indulge in day-dreams I was, no
doubt, influenced by it. But, as you know, it did not come true,
except in a very limited sense. Instead of returning to the Old
Home in a fine equipage, and shining with gold,--the observed of
all observers, and the envy of all enviers,--as I had dreamed, and
as had been foretold, I came back heavy-hearted, not indeed poor,
but far from rich, walked up from the station through the mud and
snow unnoticed, and took upon myself the debts against the old
farm, and so provided that it be kept in the family. It was not
an impressive home-coming; it was to assume burdens rather than
to receive congratulations; it was to bow my head rather than to
lift it up. Out of the golden dreams of youth had come cares and
responsibilities. But doubtless it was best so. The love that
brought me back to the old home year after year, that made me
willing to serve my family, and that invested my native hills
with such a charm, was the best kind of riches after all.

As a youth I never went to Sunday-school, and I was not often
seen inside the church. My Sundays were spent rather roaming
in the woods and fields, or climbing to "Old Clump," or, in summer,
following the streams and swimming in the pools. Occasionally I
went fishing, though this was to incur parental displeasure--unless
I brought home some fine trout, in which case the displeasure was
much tempered. I think this Sunday-school in the woods and fields
was, in my case, best. It has always seemed, and still seems, as
if I could be a little more intimate with Nature on Sunday than
on a week-day; our relations were and are more ideal, a different
spirit is abroad, the spirit of holiday and not of work, and I
could in youth, and can now, abandon myself to the wild life about
me more fully and more joyously on that day than on any other.

The memory of my youthful Sundays is fragrant with wintergreens,
black birch, and crinkle-root, to say nothing of the harvest apples
that grew in our neighbor's orchard; and the memory of my Sundays
in later years is fragrant with arbutus, and the showy orchid, and
wild strawberries, and touched with the sanctity of woodland walks
and hilltops. What day can compare with a Sunday to go to the
waterfalls, or to "Piney Ridge," or to "Columbine Ledge," or to
stroll along "Snake Lane"? What sweet peace and repose is over
all! The snakes in Snake Lane are as free from venom as are
grasshoppers, and the grasshoppers themselves fiddle and dance as
at no other time. Cherish your Sundays. I think you will read a
little deeper in "Nature's infinite book of secrecy" on Sunday than
on Monday. I once began an essay the subject of which was Sunday,
but never finished it. I must send you the fragment.

But I have not yet solved my equation--what sent me to nature?
What made me take an intellectual interest in outdoor things?
The precise value of the /x/ is hard to find. My reading, no doubt,
had much to do with it. This intellectual and emotional interest
in nature is in the air in our time, and has been more or less for
the past fifty years. I early read Wordsworth, and Emerson and
Tennyson and Whitman, and Saint-Pierre's "Studies of Nature," as
I have before told you. But the previous question is, why the
nature poets and nature books appealed to me. One cannot corner
this unknown quantity. I suppose I was simply made that way--the
love of nature was born in me. I suppose Emerson influenced me
most, beginning when I was about nineteen; I had read Pope and
Thomson and Young and parts of Shakespeare before that, but they
did not kindle this love of nature in me. Emerson did. Though
he did not directly treat of outdoor themes, yet his spirit seemed
to blend with Nature, and to reveal the ideal and spiritual values
in her works. I think it was this, or something like it, that
stimulated me and made bird and tree and sky and flower full of
a new interest. It is not nature for its own sake that has mainly
drawn me; had it been so, I should have turned out a strict man of
science; but nature for the soul's sake--the inward world of ideals
and emotions. It is this that allies me to the poets; while it is
my interest in the mere fact that allies me to the men of science.

I do not read Emerson much now, except to try to get myself
back into the atmosphere of that foreworld when a paradox, or a
startling affirmation, dissolved or put to flight a vast array of
commonplace facts. What a bold front he did put on in the presence
of the tyrannies of life! He stimulated us by a kind of heavenly
bragging and saintly flouting of humdrum that ceases to impress us
as we grow old. Do we outgrow him?--or do we fall away from him?
I cannot bear to hear Emerson spoken of as a back-number, and I
should like to believe that the young men of to-day find in him
what I found in him fifty years ago, when he seemed to whet my
appetite for high ideals by referring to that hunger that could
"eat the solar system like gingercake." But I suspect they do not.
The world is too much with us. We are prone to hitch our wagon to
a star in a way, or in a spirit, that does not sanctify the wagon,
but debases the star. Emerson is perhaps too exceptional to take
his place among the small band of the really first-class writers of
the world. Shear him of his paradoxes, of his surprises, of his
sudden inversions, of his taking sallies in the face of the common
reason, and appraise him for his real mastery over the elements of
life and of the mind, as we do Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Carlyle,
and he will be found wanting. And yet, let me quickly add, there
is something more precious and divine about him than about any
or all the others. He prepares the way for a greater than he,
prepares the mind to accept the new man, the new thought, as none
other does.

But how slow I am in getting at my point! Emerson took me captive.
For a time I lived and moved and had my intellectual being in him.
I think I have always had a pretty soft shell, so to speak, hardly
enough lime and grit in it, and at times I am aware that such is
the fact to this day. Well, Emerson found my intellectual shell
very plastic; I took the form of his mould at once, and could not
get away from him; and, what is more, did not want to get away
from him, did not see the need of getting away from him. Nature
herself seemed to speak through him. An intense individuality that
possesses the quality of lovableness is apt to impose itself upon
us in this way. It was under this spell, as you know, that I wrote
"Expression," of which I have told you. The "Atlantic," by the
way, had from the first number been a sort of university to me.
It had done much to stimulate and to shape my literary tastes and
ambitions. I was so eager for it that when I expected it in the
mail I used to run on my way to the post office for it. So, with
fear and trembling, I sent that essay to its editor. Lowell told
a Harvard student who was an old schoolmate of mine that when he
read the paper he thought some young fellow was trying to palm off
an early essay of Emerson's upon him as his own, and that he looked
through the "Dial" and other publications in the expectation of
finding it. Not succeeding in doing so, he concluded the young
man had written it himself. It was published in November, 1860,
and as the contributors' names were not given at that time, it was
ascribed to Emerson by the newspaper reviewers of that number. It
went into Poole's Index as by Emerson, and later. Professor Hill

[Some years ago I took it upon myself to let Professor Hill know
the real author of "Expression." He appeared grateful, though some
what chagrined, and said the error should be corrected in the next
edition. Mr. Burroughs smiled indulgently when he learned of my
zeal in the matter: "Emerson's back is broad; he could have afforded
to continue to shoulder my early blunders," he said. C. B.]

of Harvard, quoted a line from it in a footnote in his "Rhetoric,"
and credited it to Emerson. So I had deceived the very elect.
The essay had some merit, but it reeked with the Emersonian spirit
and manner. When I came to view it through the perspective of
print, I quickly saw that this kind of thing would not do for me.
I must get on ground of my own. I must get this Emersonian musk
out of my garments at all hazards. I concluded to bury my garments
in the earth, as it were, and see what my native soil would do
toward drawing it out. So I took to writing on all manner of rural
themes--sugar-making, cows, haying, stone walls. These, no doubt,
helped to draw out the rank suggestion of Emerson. I wrote about
things of which I knew, and was, therefore, bound to be more
sincere with myself than in writing upon the Emersonian themes.
When a man tells what he knows, what he has seen or felt, he
is pretty sure to be himself. When I wrote upon more purely
intellectual themes, as I did about this time for the "Leader,"
the Emersonian influence was more potent, though less so than
in the first "Atlantic" essay.

Any man progresses in the formation of a style of his own in
proportion as he gets down to his own real thoughts and feelings,
and ceases to echo the thoughts and moods of another. Only thus
can he be sincere; and sincerity is the main secret of style.
What I wrote from "the push of reading," as Whitman calls it, was
largely an artificial product; I had not made it my own; but when
I wrote of country scenes and experiences, I touched the quick of
my mind, and it was more easy to be real and natural.

I also wrote in 1860 or 1861 a number of things for the "Saturday
Press" which exhaled the Emersonian perfume. If you will look them
over, you will see how my mind was working in the leading-strings
of Analogy--often a forced and unreal Analogy.

December, 1907

My Dear Friend,--

You ask me to tell you more about myself, my life, how it has been
with me, etc. It is an inviting subject. How an old man likes to
run on about himself!

I see that my life has been more of a holiday than most persons',
much more than was my father's or his father's. I have picnicked
all along the way. I have on the whole been gay and satisfied. I
have had no great crosses or burdens to bear; no great afflictions,
except such as must come to all who live; neither poverty, nor
riches. I have had uniform good health, true friends, and some
congenial companions. I have done, for the most part, what I
wanted to do. Some drudgery I have had, that is, in uncongenial
work on the farm, in teaching, in clerking, and in bank-examining;
but amid all these things I have kept an outlook, an open door, as
it were, out into the free fields of nature, and a buoyant feeling
that I would soon be there.

My farm life as a boy was at least a half-holiday. The fishing,
the hunting, the berrying, the Sundays on the hills or in the
woods, the sugar-making, the apple-gathering--all had a holiday
character. But the hoeing corn, and picking up potatoes, and
cleaning the cow stables, had little of this character. I have
never been a cog in the wheel of any great concern. I have never
had to sink or lose my individuality. I have been under no exacting
master or tyrant. . . . I have never been a slave to any bad
habit, as smoking, drinking, over-feeding. I have had no social
or political ambitions; society has not curtailed my freedom or
dictated my dress or habits. Neither has any religious order or
any clique. I have had no axe to grind. I have gone with such
men and women as I liked, irrespective of any badge of wealth or
reputation or social prestige that they might wear. I have looked
for simple pleasures everywhere, and have found them. I have not
sought for costly pleasures, and do not want them--pleasures that
cost money, or health, or time. The great things, the precious
things of my life, have been without money and without price,
as common as the air.

Life has laid no urgent mission upon me. My gait has been a
leisurely one. I am not bragging of it; I am only stating a
fact. I have never felt called upon to reform the world. I
have doubtless been culpably indifferent to its troubles and
perplexities, and sins and sufferings. I lend a hand occasionally
here and there in my own neighborhood, but I trouble myself very
little about my neighbors--their salvation or their damnation.
I go my own way and do my own work.

I have loved nature, I have loved the animals, I have loved my
fellow-men. I have made my own whatever was fair and of good
report. I have loved the thoughts of the great thinkers and
the poems of the great poets, and the devout lines of the great
religious souls. I have not looked afar off for my joy and
entertainment, but in things near at hand, that all may have
on equal terms. I have been a loving and dutiful son, and a
loving and dutiful father, and a good neighbor. I have got much
satisfaction out of life; it has been worth while.

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