II
The transition from Thoreau to John Burroughs was through Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Wilson Flagg (1805–1884) had contributed to the early volumes of the Atlantic a series of bird studies Irving-like in atmosphere and sentiment, but he had made little impression. He was too literary, too much the child of the mid century. In his study of the owl, for instance, he could write: "I will not enter into a speculation concerning the nature and origin of those agreeable emotions which are so generally produced by the sight of objects that suggest the ideas of decay and desolation. It is happy for us, that, by the alchemy of poetry, we are able to turn some of our misfortunes into sources of melancholy pleasure, after the poignancy of grief has been assuaged by time," and so on and on till he got to midnight and the owl. It is a literary effort. There is lack of sincerity in it: the author is thinking too exclusively of his reader. The difference between it and a passage from Thoreau is the difference between a reverie in the study and a battle in the woods. Higginson, who followed in the Atlantic with "April Days," "The Life of Birds," and the other studies which he issued as Out-Door Papers in 1863, avoided the over-literary element on one hand and the over-scientific on the other and so became the first of what may be called the modern school of nature writers.
As we read Higginson's book to-day we find style and method curiously familiar. For the first time in American literature we have that chatty, anecdotal, half-scientific, half-sentimental treatment of out-door things that soon was to become so common. It is difficult to persuade oneself that a paper like "The Life of Birds," for instance, was not written by the Burroughs of the earlier period. Out-Door Papers and Wake-Robin are pitched in the same key. Who could be positive of the authorship of a fragment like this, were not Higginson's name appended:
To a great extent, birds follow the opening foliage northward, and flee from its fading, south; they must keep near the food on which they live, and secure due shelter for their eggs. Our earliest visitors shrink from trusting the bare trees with their nests; the song-sparrow seeks the ground; the blue-bird finds a box or hole somewhere; the red-wing haunts the marshy thickets, safer in the spring than at any other season; and even the sociable robin prefers a pine-tree to an apple-tree, if resolved to begin housekeeping prematurely. The movements of birds are chiefly timed by the advance of vegetation; and the thing most thoroughly surprising about them is not the general fact of the change of latitude, but their accuracy in hitting the precise locality. That the same cat-bird should find its way back, every spring, to almost the same branch of yonder larch-tree—that is the thing astonishing to me.
The most notable thing, however, about Higginson's out-door papers was their ringing call for a return to reality. It was he who more than any one else created interest in Thoreau; and it was he who first gained attention with the cry, "Back to nature." "The American temperament," he declared, "needs at this moment nothing so much as that wholesome training of semi-rural life which reared Hampden and Cromwell to assume at one grasp the sovereignty of England.... The little I have gained from colleges and libraries has certainly not worn so well as the little I learned in childhood of the habits of plant, bird, and insect.... Our American life still needs, beyond all things else, the more habitual cultivation of out-door habits.... The more bent any man is on action, the more profoundly he needs the calm lessons of Nature to preserve his equilibrium." To the new generation of writers he flung a challenge: "Thoreau camps down by Walden Pond and shows us that absolutely nothing in Nature has ever yet been described—not a bird or a berry of the woods, not a drop of water, not a spicula of ice, nor winter, nor summer, nor sun, nor star." And again, "What do we know, for instance, of the local distribution of our birds? I remember that in my latest conversation with Thoreau last December, he mentioned most remarkable facts in this department, which had fallen under his unerring eyes."
This was published in the Atlantic, September, 1862. In May, 1865, as if in answer to the challenge, there appeared in the same magazine John Burroughs's "With the Birds," a paper which he had written two years before. The army life of Higginson and later his humanitarian work in many fields put an end to his out-door writings, but not to his influence.