III
In the afternoon, we set out early from Woodchuck Lodge for a long tramp through the pasture south of the Burroughs farm and in the direction of the Nath Chase farm. Back through the woods between the Lodge and the old farm, were scattered apple trees, which had some apples on them. Mr. Burroughs told something of the history of some of these apple trees, that they had been grafted many years ago by his father, and that others had been planted by the cattle as they followed the pathway through this pasture. There were signs that the gray squirrels had been eating the apples. We saw several piles of chips and a few apple seeds scattered on the wall fence, which the squirrels had chosen for a festal hall. On this wall, the naturalist would lean and look off over the hills toward the town of Roxbury, and tell of the neighbors who had settled this field and that. His mind sometimes seemed to be on,
"Far-off things,
And battles long ago."
Suddenly he looked around and said: "It's sweet to muse over one's early years and first experiences. I was just thinking of the many times I had gone through these woods. But O, how I dislike to see these trees cut down for wood, when so many are already down and rotting. This patch of woods extended to the bottom of the hillside, when I was a boy, and I think it was much prettier then than it is now." A very interesting piece of natural history pointed out to me beyond this pasture, was the tendency of birch to trace its roots over large areas of stone almost barren of soil. It has a preference for rocky places. The root of this tree will sometimes trace a small crevice in the stone twenty or thirty feet and does not seem to reach into any soil throughout its whole length.
At the edge of the flat grass covered hill beyond the pasture, was a perpendicular wall of several feet in height,—the outcrop of the same stratification of stone we had observed during the earlier part of the day. A number of birch roots had reached all the way down to the bottom of this ledge and fastened themselves in the soil below. Several phoebe nests had been built on the shelves of rock along under the ledge, which the naturalist pointed out to me. Under one ledge that extended over at least twelve feet, was a phoebe's nest that Mr. Burroughs thought had been there for more than a quarter of a century. On the table of rock beneath the nest was a pile of waste ten or twelve inches in height, and there was enough material in the nest itself to build more than a dozen phoebe's nests. The place was so inaccessible to other animals, that the birds took advantage of this, and doubtless made of it hereditary property, handing it down from generation to generation since its discovery.
Passing on down through the Scudder pasture toward the lower woods, to the south, we met a lad herding cattle for the night, and after a few words with him, we turned to the left and went up the side of a steep hill through a deep hemlock forest. This was a pretty hard climb, and I kept looking for Mr. Burroughs to stop and blow a little, but not a bit of it. He took the lead and kept up the climb without even a hint of exhaustion. In fact, I had begun to wish that he would stop and rest for a moment, when pointing up to a white wall of stone he said, "There is the Old Gray Ledge. It looks like a white house from here. This is one of the most beautiful places you will find in this part of the Catskill mountains, and O, the times I have come here for rest and study!" There is a rough broken surface of rock wall at least seventy-five feet high, all covered with moss and lichens, and almost as gray as whitewash on a stone house. In the hemlocks toward the valley from here, are hundreds of fine timber trees, and we could hear among them nut-hatches, chickadees and titmice. We spent almost an hour about this beautiful place, discussing in a friendly way, neighbors and people, great and small. Our next task was to get to the top of the Old Gray Ledge, which we did by going a little distance south and picking the place that showed the least resistance. The woods on the top of the Ledge were level and consisted of much shrubbery and some large hardwood trees and a few hemlocks and pines. We soon came out of the woods to the west and entered a pasture on the Nath Chase farm, from which we could see across the beautiful valley to the south and many mountain peaks, among which were a few that Mr. Burroughs said he could see from the top of a mountain by Slabsides, down at West Park. This was the connecting link between the old and the new home.
Turning around, we could see to the north across the valley, in which was the Burroughs farm and the Old Clump beyond. There was a swift breeze from the northeast and the air was quite cool for the early part of August. But after our climb up The Old Gray Ledge, it was quite wholesome and renewed our strength. The pure swift mountain breeze fitted well with my own feelings, for I had begun to feel the effects of a steady pull up the hill and needed oxygen and ozone. But best of all, I had enjoyed the day with the man who brought the pleasures of the woods and the mountains to me, and I felt that I had been blest. I had felt the sympathies and love of a strong poetic pulse. I had a glimpse of something that,
"Made the wild blood start
In its mystic springs,"
and I wondered if we have any greater heights to look forward to! I wondered if we should ever find in the trackless paths of eternity a joy that would eclipse this! I thought I had learned "that a good man's life is the fruit of the same balance and proportion as that which makes the fields green and the corn ripen. It is not by some fortuitous circumstances, the especial favor of some god, but by living in harmony with immutable laws through which the organic world has evolved, that he is what he is." We reached the Lodge just as the sun was going down, and soon the evening meal was over. I went back across the hill to the old home for the night, and as I passed down the road way, I called to mind many things that had interested me during the day. After I had retired for the night and sleep had been induced, the joys, the pleasures, the happiness of the day, haunted me in my dreams, and I knew that I had 'staid my haste and made delays, and what was mine had known my face.'
A CATSKILL MOUNTAIN SIDE WHERE THE PHŒBE BUILDS
THE OLD CLUMP
It is Sunday morning, and the mists are beginning to roll away and the summer sun of August just beginning to smile once more upon a world of beauty and of love, after the ugly days during the latter part of the week. The cattle are lowing to the north and to the south, and the shadows of the clouds are floating o'er the meadows less swiftly. The mountain peaks are clearing up after their cloud-baths. When I reached the Lodge in the early morning, I found John Burroughs preparing breakfast, and I brought the water and the wood and stirred the malted wheat while he prepared some other foods.
After the meal was over, I read the papers and walked around in neighboring meadows, while Mr. Burroughs went down to the home farm for a pail of milk. The flickers were playing in the corner of the pasture to the south, and the goldfinches seemed to be feeding their young in the large apple trees across the road, but I never found a nest. To the west I saw an indigo bird flitting about some shrubbery by the stone fence, which attracted me that way. I thought perhaps something had disturbed the birds' nest, but I looked in vain for some vindication of my suspicion.
By this time, Mr. Burroughs had returned and all were ready to begin our climb to the summit of the Old Clump, the mountain most beloved of all by the naturalist, and the one about which he speaks oftenest. His father's farm extends far up the southeast side of this mountain and, of course, he played on and about it when he was a young boy. The face of this mountain doubtless made inroads on his character, and stimulated him to a love of nature. For on the summit of it, he sits or rolls and dreams of former—and he almost thinks better—days.
Here on the summit of this mountain is where Mr. Burroughs wrote, "Mid-summer in the Catskills," August, 1905, which is possibly the best poem he ever wrote, with the exception "Waiting." Just as we had left the Lodge, we came to a tree under which was a large boulder. The naturalist mounted this boulder and sat for a moment sighing: "How many times, I have played upon this rock when I was a boy. I remember mother used to look this way when she did not find us about the house." Below this boulder, two of the small boys in the party found a vesper sparrow's nest, in which we all became interested, but in order to get back to dinner we must be away and up the mountain. To go straight up the side of the Clump would have been a hard climb, so we went angling across toward the east, and after passing the boys' sleeping place in the trees, we turned back to the north and west, following the old pathway that leads from the Burroughs farm to the mountain top. Not far had we followed this path before we came to a spring flowing with cool, clear water, and nestled in the side of the mountain. Here we all quenched our thirst, Mr. Burroughs taking the lead. "Many times have I quenched my thirst here at this spring," he said. "The Naiads have welcomed me here for more than sixty years, and still they guard this sacred fountain for me. Narcissus meets me here every summer with refreshing beauty after my hard pull up the mountain. I still join the great god Pan in making love to the wood nymphs hereabouts. O, there are so many ways of getting happiness in these places." Imagine how delightful it was to hear the voice of John Burroughs as he told these stories of his love for these his native scenes! There was every indication that he was experiencing much happiness as he recalled his first walks up the mountain and of his first sight of that spring.
The mountain woods were beautifully decked with flowers everywhere, the antenaria perhaps taking the lead so far as numbers go. This was particularly plentiful about the top of the mountain. Soon we were on the highest peak from which we could see the many neighboring peaks in all directions, and the blue folds of the ridges, layer upon layer for many miles to the south and east. What a fine view-point! The exhilaration of the mountain air, how much it means after a long hard climb! Down in the valley are markings of the farms with the long straight stone fences, so delicate and so finely drawn! The panoramic view of the valleys present the colorings and fine markings of maps on the pages of a book, but much more beautiful, and in these parts more perfect. The liquid depths of air and long vistas are a feast to the eyes.
I was anxious to know where Mr. Burroughs was nestled on this lofty peak when he wrote the poem of which mention has been made, and asked him to point out the place when we reached it. "It is over near the northeast edge of the summit, and we shall soon be there." As we pushed our way between two large boulders where, Mr. Burroughs told us it had long been the custom for young men to kiss their girls as they helped them through there, and of the many he, himself, had kissed there, we came to a large open grassy spot. Here the naturalist sat down and rolled over in the grass, indicating that he had at last reached home. About twenty paces off toward the eastern edge of the mountain top, was a large flat rock, almost as level as a table top, just beneath which was a fine growth of large trees, the tops of which were a little above the table of stone. "Here," he said, "is where I began writing 'Midsummer in the Catskills'."
The poem begins as follows:
"The strident hum of sickle bar,
Like giant insect heard afar,
Is on the air again;
I see the mower where he rides
Above the level grassy tides
That flood the meadow plain."
"I remember," he says, "on that day I saw, in the field toward the Betsy Bouton place, the cradlers walking through the fields of grain, and it made a deep impression on me."
"The cradlers twain with right good will,
Leave golden lines across the hill,
Beneath the mid-day sun.
The cattle dream 'neath leafy tent
Or chew the cud of sweet content
Knee-deep in pond or run."
We could see the cattle in the nether pasture on the old Burroughs' home place, and my mind was full of the above lines which I had committed to memory when they were first printed.
"The dome of day o'erbrims with sound
From humming wings on errands bound
Above the sleeping fields."
What a picture of bees in the upper air freighting honey from field to hive and storing it away for the winter supply! The two following stanzas perhaps interpret the beauty of the situation better than any other part of the poem:
"Poisèd and full is summer's tide
Brimming all the horizon wide,
In varied verdure dressed;
Its viewless currents surge and beat
In airy billows at my feet
Here on the mountain crest.
"Through pearly depths I see the farms,
Where sweating forms and bronzèd arms
Reap in the land's increase;
In ripe repose the forests stand
And veilèd heights on every hand
Swim in a sea of peace."
The truth of these lines lay out before us. There lay the grain in the fields where the cradlers had reaped in the land's increase. There stood the veiled heights on every side which John Burroughs named beginning on the right: Table mountain, Slide mountain, Double Top mountain and Graham. From the front of Woodchuck Lodge he had already named for us Bald Mountain, Hack's Flats, Schutle's and the one we were now on. Truly they were all veiled heights as we viewed them from the summit of the Old Clump.
As I loitered about among the boulders on the mountain I became much interested in the names cut in the large boulders of people who had lived in the Burroughs community, and seeing that Mr. Burroughs himself was also interested in them, I began to ask him about them, and I copied many of them in my note book. Nothing pleased the Naturalist better than to tell of the people who used to be his neighbors, and I think he remembered them all. As we looked out again across the valley, his eyes got a glimpse of the old Betsy Bouton place, and he recalled that she was a widow who had one daughter and two sons. "These were the laziest human beings I ever saw,—these boys. They would sit up by the fire and mumble, while the mother brought in the wood and the water, and cooked the meals, and the daughter would do the milking. Nothing could the mother get out of them, but to sit around the open fire and grumble at their hard lot, and that they had so much to do. She used to have a hard time getting them up and ready for school."
From here we could see the vicinity of the little red school house where John Burroughs had gone to school sixty years before, and he told of his experience with Jay Gould. Jay paid him for writing an essay, and he paid Jay eighty cents for a grammar and an algebra. "These were my first grammar and algebra, and I paid for them with the money I had earned selling sugar from my individual boiling pan in the sugar bush. I shall tell you about it and show you where I boiled the sugar, as we go down that way."
UNDER THE OLD GRAY LEDGE
He enjoyed telling of one certain student—a schoolmate of his who had long curly hair. "His hair was as curly as you ever saw and turned under at the bottom. O, how I longed to have my hair look like his did! I thought it was the prettiest hair I ever saw grow."
Our descent from the mountain top was easy. We followed the path to the right coming down, and the decline was a little more gradual. The upper Burroughs pasture extended almost half-way up the mountain side. It was separated from the lower pasture by a stone wall. I never saw so many stones and small boulders in one place as I saw in this lower pasture. The ground was almost covered. There was certainly a much larger crop of these than of grass. Here I thought Deucalion and Pyrrha must have failed to convert stones into people, but continued throwing, even to the tiring of Jupiter's patience. Rolling them down the long steep hill afforded some fine sport for us. Mr. Burroughs told of a very interesting incident in his early life. "I remember," he said, "when I was a young chap I used to roll stones down this hill very often. One day I got a large, round boulder high up the mountain side and turned it loose with a good push. Those bars down there had just been finished by father and had cost him considerable work and worry. The stone was heavy and was almost a disc, and had gathered considerable momentum as it neared the base of the hill, and ran directly into the bars and literally knocked them to pieces. Perhaps I could not have remembered the incident so well if this had been all, but as a further reminder, father gave me a pretty severe lashing. I remember how out of patience he was at my carelessness."
Passing through these bars we went through the sugar maple bush, that had longer than he could remember, supplied the family with syrup and sugar. The old vat and the furnace were there and the shell of a house to ward off the cold winds of April,
"While smoking Dick doth boil the sap."
I was thinking of Spring Gladness, and The Coming of Phoebe,
"When buckets shine 'gainst maple trees
And drop by drop the sap doth flow,
When days are warm, but nights do freeze,
And deep in woods lie drifts of snow,
When cattle low and fret in stall,
Then morning brings the phoebe's call,
'Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe'."
As we came down to the roadway that leads from the old farm to Woodchuck Lodge, Mr. Burroughs pointed out to us a junco's nest just outside the road. This nest had afforded him much pleasure during his present stay up at Roxbury, as he saw it two or four times a day, as he passed by on his way to his brother's home for milk. On the crest of the hill between the two houses—the old home and Woodchuck Lodge—I stopped and looked for several moments at the place of the naturalist's birth, and at the farm, with all the beautiful meadows and pastures, for I knew that I would not see them again soon. When it was told me that all these meadows and woods and stone walls, look now as they did sixty and more years ago, I could understand how a country lad, born and reared among such scenes, could grow into a great naturalist. I could now enjoy and understand some of the qualities of his literary productions. The country was a new one to me and altogether unlike any I had seen, but having tasted of it through the medium of good literature, I was prepared to make the best of my opportunity to study it. What particularly impressed me, and what was so different from the scenes of my childhood, was the buckwheat fields dotting the meadows here and yonder, and the long straight stone fences marking the meadows and hillsides. "These walls were built by a generation of men that had ginger," Mr. Burroughs said, "a quality so much lacking these days."
No words could express the happiness that had come to me during the week that I was rambling through the Catskills. While going down through the meadow in front of Woodchuck Lodge, on my way to the railroad station, I seemed to be flooded with memories of a happy experience. These memories still haunt me and may they continue to do so even unto the end of time. I had learned better than I ever knew, that "this brown, sun-tanned, sin-stained earth is a sister to the morning and the evening star," and that it has more of beauty and love written on it than has ever been read by all the poets in the distant ages past; that there are still left volumes for the interpreter. I had taken a little journey in the divine ship as it sailed over the divine sea. I had heard one talk of the moral of the solar system,—of its harmony, its balance, its compensation, and I thought that there is no deeper lesson to be learned.
JOHN BURROUGHS AS POET
A few years ago Herr Brandes, the great French critic, in commenting upon the method of criticism used by Saint Beuve, sounded a pretty harsh note to the old school of critics, on method and material in poetry, which in a measure explains what I am about to say of the poetry of John Burroughs. "At the beginning of the century," he says, "imagination was considered the essential quality in poetry. It was his capacity of invention which made the poet a poet; he was not tied down to nature and reality, but was as much at home in the supernatural as in the actual world. But as romanticism, by degrees, developed into realism, creative literature, by degrees, gave up its fantastic excursions into space.... It exerted itself even more to understand than to invent."
An observer cannot fail to see in modern poetry a tendency to beautify objects of nature, and facts of science. Past ages were taken up with the heroic, the legendary in poetry. Legends were creations of the mind and in turn subjects for all poetic effort. Some moral and spiritual lesson or truth, must be taught by the introduction of ideals drawn purely from imagination. Such an ideal was many times created for the special lesson at hand. The Homeric poems, Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost, are all poems of this character. They are founded on the unknown and the unknowable, yet they bring to us suggestions that inspire us and make us better for having read them. Milton never knew how Paradise was lost, nor even that it ever was lost. Dante did not know the history of the departed soul, nor did Homer and Virgil know what part the gods and heroes played in the fall of the city of Troy, nor has the riddle of the origin of the Latin and Greek races ever been written. Yet such themes give us pleasure when they come from the great poets, who actually believed what they were writing to be true, and the poems themselves will live forever.
We have reached a new order of things in the present era of the world's history, and we must look to something else for poetic inspiration, as well as to interpret the origin of things in the light of the last word on evolution. The minor poets have about worn these old themes threadbare, and the public mind is beginning to look to something else for entertainment. People are now seeking the poetic interpretation of facts of science and of nature, and the poet of the future will have the peculiar task of giving us new eyes with which to see truth, instead of leading us into fields of fancy.
John Burroughs is an interpreter of this latter kind. He has gone to nature with the poet's eye, and has needed no fiction to get us interested in what he is trying to tell us. The facts need only to be seen with the poet's eyes to make them beautiful, and he has translated them in terms of the human soul, without having to create beings of fancy to interest us while he tells the message. This is what differentiates his prose and poetry from the poetry of the past. It is true, he ranges from the commonplace to the sublime, but in it all with unfaltering devotion to truth, which should be the aim of every poet and is the aim of every true poet, despite the claims of some that literature is only to entertain, and should never be taken seriously. If it is not serious, it is not literature, and if it is serious, it will always have, as its entering wedge, some fundamental truth. The whole aim of Burroughs is to lead humanity into the proper method of interpreting the truths of nature, and if all his poetry is not the best, he has sacrificed poetry rather than truth and owns up to it like a man. He says: "My poetry is not the free channel of myself that my prose is. I, myself, do not think that my poetry takes rank with my prose." His best poetry takes rank with his or any body's prose. Replying to some questions with reference to Mid-summer in the Catskills, Mr. Burroughs says: "It was an attempt to paint faithfully, characteristic mid-summer scenes of that locality. I do not think it ranks high as poetry, but it is true. The genesis of such a poem, or of any poem, is hidden in the author's subconsciousness." Perched on a mountain top that overlooked the beautiful valleys amid the Catskill mountains, and seeing the many activities of farm life in August, Mr. Burroughs saw the beauty and simplicity of the situation, and could not forego his duty of telling it to the world.
"The strident hum of sickle-bar,
Like giant insect heard afar,
Is on the air again;
I see the mower where he rides
Above the level grassy tides
That flood the meadow plain."
From beginning to end the poem paints the rural life amid the Catskills in its busiest season, and associates with it all the best in Nature. It is literally a poet's vision of his own country, after many years absence from the fields he paints. How many times he himself has gone.
"Above the level grassy tides,
That flood the meadow plain,"
but perhaps without seeing the beauty that the scene now brings to him.
ON THE SUMMIT OF THE OLD CLUMP, LOOKING IN THE VALLEY BELOW "WHERE SWEATING FORMS AND BRONZED ARMS REAP IN THE LAND'S INCREASE"
Far different from this is his first poetry, which is the expression of a youth groping in the dark for some unknown god, with his only guide that of faith in the world, faith in himself and faith in his fellowman. He says of his early poem: "Waiting was written in 1862, during a rather gloomy and doubtful period of my life. I was poor, was in doubt as to my career, did not seem to be able to get hold of myself, nor to bring myself to bear upon the problems before me. Yet underneath all was this abiding faith that I should get what belonged to me; that sooner or later I should find my own. The poem was first printed in the old Knickerbocker Magazine of New York, in the fall of 1862. I received nothing for it. I builded better than I knew. It has proved a true prophesy of my life."
"Serene I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.
"I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.
"Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me;
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny.
"What matter if I stand alone?
I wait with joy the coming years;
My heart shall reap where it hath sown,
And garner up its fruits of tears.
"The waters know their own, and draw
The brook that springs in yonder heights;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delights.
"The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave unto the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me."
It is this willingness to wait the results of his efforts without fretting or worrying, to which Mr. Burroughs owes his success. This I think, is what has toned and sweetened his prose and poetry, and makes him so readable. He looks for truth and finds it, and lets it ripen into expression in his mind, and we get the good after the smelting process has completed its work, and the dross all worked off. The above poem has been a true prophesy of his life. His own has come to him, and he is now experiencing the richest reward for his long years of waiting and patience. If too much success comes to us in the beginning of any career, the career is most likely to suffer, or possibly better, we are likely to develop a little vain glory and never return to the proper attitude to truth and service. Mr. Burroughs in his plain simple way has been 'still achieving, still pursuing,' and has long since learned 'to labor and to wait.' His attitude toward his work is almost as pleasant as the work itself. Never in a hurry—though he always manages to get much done. The melancholy days have been 'few and far between' with him, though we do see some few sad but wholesome lines in his poetry. These almost sound like some homesick visitor in a foreign land. The following from the poem, "In Blooming Orchards," is a good illustration of this:
"My thoughts go homeward with the bees;
I dream of youth and happier days—
Of orchards where amid the trees
I loitered free from time's decrees,
And loved the birds and learned their ways.
"Oh, orchard thoughts and orchard sighs,
Ye, too, are born of life's regrets!
The apple bloom I see with eyes
That have grown sad in growing wise,
Through Mays that manhood ne'er forgets."
"The Return" is another of his poems in which this longing for the days of his youth crops out:
"O sad, sad hills! O cold, cold hearth!
In sorrow he learned this truth—
One may go back to the place of his birth,
He cannot go back to his youth."
Again in "Snow Birds" he says:
"Thy voice brings back dear boyhood days
When we were gay together."
His contact with out-door life and his habits of observation are unmistakably those of a poet. "In the rugged trail through the woods or along the beach we shall now and then get a whiff of natural air, or a glimpse of something to
"Make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs."
Burroughs says himself, 'the very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. How many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song! Indeed, is not the bird the original type and teacher of the poet, and do we not demand of the human thrush or lark that he shake out his carols in the same free manner as his winged prototype?... The best lyric pieces, how like they are to certain bird-songs!—clear, ringing, ecstatic, and suggesting that challenge and triumph which the outpouring of the male bird contains.' Again he says 'Keats and Shelly have pre-eminently the sharp semi-tones of the sparrows and larks.'
But what shall we say of Burroughs? His poetry is somewhat matter-of-fact, like the songs of the Indigo bunting and the Thrushes, and we cannot help but feel that the songs of these birds had the effect on him that Burns speaks of in one of his letters: "I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild, mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of the soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry." Verily he has achieved his purpose. 'He has brought home the bough with the bird he heard singing upon it. His verse is full of the spirit of the woods and fields; the winds of heaven blow through it; there is the rustle of leaves, the glint of sunlight; the voices of the feathered folk are present. One finds himself in touch with out-doors in every line.' O, what a blessing when one can drink from the great fountain of Nature! When one can be so inured with the larger and more wholesome truths of the universe that he forgets to fret and to make records of the negative forces of the world! This we claim is pre-eminently true of Burroughs. He tells truths about Nature in his simple, musical verse, and almost vindicates Wordsworth's definition of poetry: "The breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," or "The impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." I would almost say of him what Dryden said of Chaucer: "He is a perpetual fountain of good sense." Perhaps Mr. Dowden, in speaking of Coleridge's poetry, comes nearer than any one else to the truth about Burroughs' poetry. "These poems contemplate and describe Nature in a resting and meditative temper. There is no passionate feeling in their delight. The joy he has in the beauty of the world is the joy of dreaming, often only a recollected joy in what he has seen. He found in poetry, paths of his imagination. The pensiveness, the dying fall, the self-loving melancholy, are harmonized by him with Nature." Thoreau says in one of his books: "Very few men can speak of Nature with any truth. They overstep her modesty somehow or other, and confer no favor." The richest flavor in the poetry of John Burroughs is the flavor of truth, and 'beauty is truth, truth beauty.' Unlike Thoreau, he never forgets his fellowmen, nor has he ever failed to find beauty in man as well as in Nature.
"He sees the mower where he rides
Above the level grassy tides
That flood the meadow plain,"
and writes a poem. He dislikes the conventional in man no less than he dislikes the conventional in poetry, but man unaffected is as beautiful as the Nature that surrounds him.
A few years ago when Mr. E. H. Harriman took a number of friends to Alaska on what was known as The Harriman Alaska Expedition, John Burroughs was selected as a purely literary man to write a narrative of the Expedition. In addition to the story of the trip, Mr. Burroughs was so inspired with the new scenery of those Borean Hills that the muse seized him and the result was three of his best poems: To the Oregon Robin, To the Golden Crown Sparrow of Alaska, and To the Lapland Longspur. Since that trip in 1899, he has written no verse, I believe, except The Return. Before then he was an irregular contributor of poetry to the current magazines since the appearance of Waiting, in 1862. He says now that he does not seem to be in a mood for poetry, but that he may find his muse again some day. The total number of his poems in print amounts to only thirty-five and none of them are lengthy. The longest of all is his very life which is to me one continuous poem. His verses are only sparks from the life in which they grew, and never rise to the height of the fountain head.
Perhaps one way to test a poet is to measure him by the number of single line poems that can be found in his poetry; lines that make the real poem of a number of verses. Pope thought that a long poem was a contradiction of terms, and we certainly know many references in the poets to suggestive lines that are almost poems in themselves. Wordsworth's Solitary Reaper contains one or two passages of this kind.
"Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago."
or the following from the Ode:
"Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence."
Another of his most exquisite lines is,
"And the stars move along the edges of the hills."
Walter Pater finds in Wordsworth's poetry an extraordinary number of these short passage poems, which he called 'delicious morsels.' Coleridge says of Wordsworth: "Since Milton, I know of no poet with so many felicitous and unforgetable lines." Many critics have found these suggestive lines in the poets, and I find Wordsworth full of them. The lines of this kind that I find in the poetry of John Burroughs are rather numerous for the amount of poetry he gave to the world, and some of them are as fine as the language has.
"Like mellow thunder leagues away,"
"I hear the wild bee's mellow chord,
In airs that swim above,"
"Once more the tranquil days brood o'er the hills,
And sooth earth's toiling breast,"
"The dome of day o'erbrims with sound
From humming wings on errands bound,"
"Pausing in the twilight dim,
Hear him lift his evening hymn,"
"Again from out the garden hives
The exodus of frenzied bees;
The humming cyclone onward drives,
Or finds repose amid the trees."
"Then waiting long hath recompense,
And all the world is glad with May."
"Oh, skater in the fields of air," he says of the swallow. How well this expresses the flight of the swallow!
"The robin perched on treetop tall
Heavenward lifts his evening call."
"Forth from the hive go voyaging bees,
Cruising far each sunny hour."
There are many passages of this kind in his poems and they express the moods of Nature, perhaps as well as it is possible for them to be put in words. In Arbutus Days, he uses the following figure to paint a spring day:
"Like mother bird upon her nest
The day broods o'er the earth."
To him the common things are all beautiful and if we only have the eyes to see with, they are made beautiful for us by him. Recognizing the fate of every insincere book, he declares: "Only an honest book can live; only absolute sincerity can stand the test of time. Any selfish or secondary motive vitiates a work of art, as it vitiates a religious life. Indeed, I doubt if we fully appreciate the literary value of staple, fundamental human virtues and qualities—probity, directness, simplicity, sincerity, love." He is probably not an inspired poet, but I shall claim for him that he is an honest singer, a sincere interpreter of Nature, and every virtue referred to in the above quotation he has woven into Bird and Bough. What he says of another we can appropriately say of him: "This poet sees the earth as one of the orbs, and has sought to adjust his imagination to the modern problems and conditions, always taking care, however, to preserve an outlook into the highest regions."
LOOKING ACROSS THE PASTURE WALL IN THE DIRECTION OF THE NATHAN CHASE FARM
JOHN BURROUGHS AND WALT WHITMAN
A certain publisher, who honored very much Walt Whitman, could have paid him no higher tribute than to have closed the preface to Whitman's Poems as follows: "To have met Whitman was a privilege, to have been his friend was an honor. The latter was mine; and among the many reminiscences of my life, none are to me more pleasing than those which gather about the name of 'The Good Grey Poet'."
John Burroughs was for thirty years the intimate friend and constant associate of Walt Whitman, and I have heard him say that those were among the most pleasant years of his life. All who ever knew Whitman, and became in any way intimate with him, have practically the same to say of him. No writer ever unfolded himself and his greatness more completely than Whitman, and yet we have a great many excellent critics who are pretty harsh on him. This we believe is so, because the critics have not read the poet aright. They have failed to get out of the poems what was put in them. Whitman is not a poet according to classical standards, but as a "Creator" he is.
Emerson says of his poetry: "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." Julian Hawthorne says of it: "Original and forceful, Whitman cannot be judged by ordinary literary standards. His scornful trampling upon all metrical rules, and his freedom in treating of matters, usually passed in silence, have so far been a decided barrier to the approval of his work."
Professor Underwood of the California University has the following good word for the poet: "Pupils who are accustomed to associate the idea of poetry with regular classic measure in rhyme, or in ten-syllabled blank verse or elastic hexameter, will commence these short and simple prose sentences with surprise, and will wonder how any number of them can form a poem. But let them read aloud with a mind in sympathy with the picture as it is displayed, and they will find by Nature's unmistakable response, that the author is a poet, and possesses the poets' incommunicable power to touch the heart."
Professor Pattee of the Pennsylvania State College, on the other hand says: "It is certainly true that to the majority of readers, 'Leaves of Grass', contains a few good things amid a disgusting mass of rubbish.
"Whitman is confessedly the poet of the body. His book is not upward. He grovels in the earthly and disgusting parts of human life and experience. His egotism is remarkable.
"All the great poets have looked away from their disgusting surroundings and fleshly fetters, into a world of their creation that was bright and ethereal, but Whitman cries: 'I am satisfied with the perishable and the casual.' This alone would debar him from the company of the great masters of song."
Professor Newcomer of Stanford University, divides honors by offending and defending:
First: "It deliberately violates the rules of art, and unless we admit that our rules are idle, we must admit Whitman's defects."
Second: "It is diffuse, prolix."
Third: "This is perhaps the most that can be charged—he was needlessly gross."
Fourth: "The innovations in his vocabulary are inexcusable."
In the following, he as faithfully defends the poet.
First: Of the charged egotism: "It was not to parade himself as an exceptional being, but rather as an average man to hold the mirror up to other men and declare his kinship with them."
Second: "Taking Whitman simply at his own valuation we get much. The joys of free fellowship, the love of comrades, none has sung more heartily or worthily. And his courage and optimism are as deep as Emerson's."
Third: "He became the truest laureate of the war, and of Lincoln the idol of the people."
Fourth: "Comerado this is no book. Who touches this touches a man! As such, therefore, the book must go down to posterity, not a perfect song, but a cry vibrant still with the feeling of the man who uttered it."
Professor Newcomer closes his estimate by the declaration that Whitman stands for the American people, but not in the sense that Washington or Lincoln or Lowell does, and that his office was somewhat like one who stands by and cheers while the procession goes by. He thinks that Whitman did not sit in the seats of the mighty.
Charles W. Hubner is much more charitable and in fact just, with our poet of the body. He says: "Proclaiming the sanctity of manhood and womanhood, the power and eminence of God within us and without us; the divine relationship of body and soul; the eternalness of spirit and matter, he aims to teach us that all of these are manifestations of the Almighty spirit, present within and without all things, and out of whom all created things have come." How far this critic removes Whitman from the class of those who stood by and cheered while the procession moved on! Hubner makes him a real teacher and revealer of divine laws and eternal truth.
Joel Chandler Harris has also given a vivid picture and a most wholesome interpretation of Whitman: "In order to appreciate Whitman's poetry and his purpose, it is necessary to possess the intuition that enables the mind to grasp in instant and express admiration, the vast group of facts that make man—that make liberty—that make America. There is no poetry in the details; it is all in the broad, sweeping, comprehensive assimilation of the mighty forces behind them—the inevitable, unaccountable, irresistible forward movement of man in the making of the republic." These estimates pro and con could be multiplied indefinitely.
How much more beautiful it is to face this new force in American poetry and deal with it justly, than to stand off and bark like some of our lesser critics have done and are doing! A recent comment upon Whitman says he has come to stay, and we must make up our minds to study him and to dispose of him by getting in sympathy with him, rather than by decrying him. This seems the just way, and the only safe way to deal with any great original force in literature.
John Burroughs has undoubtedly interpreted Whitman better than any other critic, and unquestionably owes Whitman more than any one else. He has found in the poet what so many others have found in Burroughs. "Whitman does not to me suggest the wild and unkempt, as he seems to do to many; he suggests the cosmic and the elemental.... He cherished the hope that he had put into his 'Leaves', some of the tonic and fortifying quality of Nature in her more grand and primitive aspects." From Whitman, I am constrained to believe, Burroughs has drawn much of his primitive strength as a writer. Whitman opened the book of Nature to him, and led him into a certain wilderness of beauty. At twenty, Burroughs began to read Whitman's poems, and says of them: "I was attracted by the new poet's work from the first. It seemed to let me into a larger, freer air than I found in the current poetry.... Not a poet of dells and fells, but of the earth and the orbs." He knew that he had found in Whitman a very strong and imposing figure, but he was doubly reassured when he came upon the statement from the English critic, John Addington Symonds, that Whitman had influenced him more than any other book except the Bible,—more than Plato, more than Goethe.
THE PILE OF STONES MARKING THE SITE OF THOREAU'S CABIN, BY WALDEN POND
It was about the year 1858, when Burroughs first began reading Whitman and five years after that, in 1863, when Burroughs moved to Washington, the two men began to cultivate each other and were frequent companions till Whitman moved to Camden in 1873.
The friendship of the two men became so beautiful and grew so sacred, till Mr. Burroughs visited him every year in Camden, from 1873 till 1891, when he saw the poet for the last time. Whitman also visited Mr. Burroughs, who had gone back up the Hudson in 1873, and built his home at West Park, New York.
The peculiar mountain wilderness around Slabsides induced the Naturalist to name the woods about his home, Whitman Land, and now you will hear him speak of the border of "Whitman Land," when he approaches Slabsides. I have sometimes thought that Whitman's influence on him, more than Thoreau's, induced him to retreat to the woods and build Slabsides, where he could "follow out these lessons of the earth and air." So much of this elemental power or force has he seen in Whitman, that he honestly, and probably justly, thinks him "the strongest poetic pulse that has yet beat in America, or perhaps in Modern times." A study of the poet is to him an application of the laws of Nature to higher matters, and he pleads guilty to a "loving interest in Whitman and his work, which may indeed amount to one-sided enthusiasm." But this is honest, real, and not affected.
After a long study of the art of poetry and the artists, together with a thorough appreciation of form and beauty in all art, Burroughs declares there is once in a great while "born to a race or people, men who are like an eruption of life from another world, who belong to another order, who bring other standards, and sow the seeds of new and larger types; who are not the organs of the culture or modes of their time and whom their times for the most part decry and disown—the primal, original, elemental men. It is here in my opinion that we must place Whitman; not among the minstrels and edifiers of his age, but among its prophets and saviors. He is nearer the sources of things than the popular poets—nearer the founder and discoverer, closer akin to the large, fervent, prophetic, patriarchal men, who figure in the early heroic ages. His work ranks with the great primitive books. He is of the type of the skald, the bard, the seer, the prophet." In another place, Burroughs thinks that one can better read Whitman after reading the Greeks, than after reading our finer artists, and I have found this true.
We cannot wonder that he finds Whitman "the one mountain in our literary landscape," though, as he appropriately says there are many beautiful hills. Tall and large, he grew more beautiful in his declining years, and "the full beauty of his face and head did not appear till he was past sixty." However he was dressed, and wherever he was, one could not fail to be impressed "with the clean, fresh quality of the man." To me, his poems have this same clean, fresh quality, and I never read one of them that I don't feel far more satisfied with my lot.
Whitman says: "I do not call one greater and one smaller. That which fills its place is equal to any." To him, as to any prophet of the soul, greatness is filling one's place, and the poor get as much consolation out of this almost, as they do from Christ's beatitude: "Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the earth." To make a world, it takes many kinds of individuals, and Whitman did not rank them severally according to money, culture and social position. If a man filled his place, he was equal to any one else, for that is the whole duty of man.
He did not grovel in the earthly and disgusting, as one of our "artistic" critics has said above. He alluded to many things that the over-nice could call disgusting, but he saw and painted only the beautiful in it all. For an instance that happens to come to my mind, he alludes to the battle of Alamo, but overlooks the military display, the common part of the slaughter. This may be found in any battle, and why Alamo and Goliad, if only to picture an army! Certainly there were more imposing dress parades than that. But after Fannin had surrendered and had accepted honorable terms that were offered by the Mexican General Urrea, Santa Anna orders the entire body of United States Soldiers executed, and on that bright and beautiful sunshiny Palm Sunday, they were marched out upon the neighboring prairie and shot down in cold blood, and their bodies committed to the flames! Such a horrible picture has not been recorded elsewhere in the history of this republic. What then does Whitman say?
"Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men.
Retreating, they formed in a hollow square, with their baggage for breastworks;
Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy's, nine times their number was the price they took in advance;
Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone;
They treated for an honorable capitulation, received writing and seal, gave up their arms, and marched back prisoners of war.
They were the glory of the race of rangers;
Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship,
Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate,
Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters,
Not a single one over thirty years of age.
The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and massacred—it was beautiful early summer;
The work commenced about five o'clock, and was over by eight.
None obeyed the command to kneel;
Some made a mad and helpless rush—some stood stark and straight;
A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart—the living and dead lay together;
The maimed and mangled dug in the dirt—the newcomers saw them there;
Some, half-killed, attempted to crawl away;
These were despatched with bayonets, or battered with the blunts of muskets;
A youth not seventeen years old seiz'd his assassin till two more came to release him;
The three were all torn, and covered with the boy's blood.
At eleven o'clock began the burning of the bodies:
That is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men."
After reading this picture of the horrible battle or slaughter at Goliad, who wonders that the battle cry at San Jacinto was, "Remember the Alamo!" or "Remember Goliad!" And still less do we wonder that the Mexicans, while scattered after the battle could be heard on all sides, "Me no Alamo!" "Me no Goliad!" Our poet has given the best picture we shall ever get of the Alamo and Goliad. The burden of his big, warm heart was to portray in vivid colors, the tragedy of the four hundred and twelve young men, and how manly they suffered.
John Burroughs has observed from the notes of Mr. Charles W. Eldridge, that Emerson was not only an admirer of Whitman, but that every year from 1855 to 1860, he sought Whitman in his Brooklyn home. The two men were together much, but Walt never sought Emerson. When he was invited by Emerson to Concord, he refused to go, perhaps because he feared that he would see too much of that "literary coterie that then clustered there, chiefly around Emerson."
Burroughs is also responsible for the suggestion that Whitman burst into full glory at one bound, and his work from the first line is Mature. At the age of thirty-five, a great change came over the man and his habits were different thereafter. His first poem, "Starting from Paumanook," outlines his work, observes Burroughs, and he fulfills every promise made.
"I conned old times;
I sat studying at the feet of the great Masters,
Now, if eligible, O that the great Masters might return and study me!
The Soul:
Forever and forever—longer than soil is brown and solid—longer than water ebbs and flows.
I will mate the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems—
And I will mate the poems of my body and mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my Soul, and of immortality."
And so he did. As perfect as the last or any part of his work is the first. But the poet is true to himself and to the great undertaking.
In what particular qualities does Whitman differ from the other poets? Especially the poets who conform to the traditions of the past.
"When Tennyson sends out a poem," observes Burroughs, "it is perfect, like an apple or a peach; slowly wrought out and dismissed, it drops from his boughs, holding a conception or an idea that spheres it and makes it whole. It is completed, distinct and separate—might be his, or might be any man's. It carries his quality, but it is a thing of itself, and centers and depends upon itself. Whether or not the world will hereafter consent, as in the past, to call only beautiful creations of this sort, poems, remains to be seen. But this is certainly not what Walt Whitman does, or aims to do, except in a few cases. He completes no poems apart from himself. His lines or pulsations, thrills, waves of force, indefinite dynamic, formless, constantly emanating from the living centre, and they carry the quality of the Author's personal presence with them in a way that is unprecedented in literature."
The more I read Whitman the more I am drawn to him, and feel the greatness of the man. His poems have meant to me recently, what Emerson's Essays meant to me as a younger man. In about the same way they affect me now, only my love for the poems grows with each reading.
It is well to recall that so much was John Burroughs inspired by his early contact with Whitman that his first book was, Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person, which was printed in 1867. A little later, in 1877, he renewed his study of the poet, in his last essay in Birds and Poets. The title of the essay is "The Flight of the Eagle," and is one of Burroughs' best papers. Still later, in about 1895, he wrote his final word on Whitman, in his volume, Whitman: A Study. This last volume is a complete interpretation of the poet. The poems of the man are given full treatment, and it is perhaps the best defense of Whitman in print.
The publishers of these books have long expected to get John Burroughs to write a biography of Whitman, but his many other literary activities, have combined to banish their hopes, and in his stead, Mr. Bliss Perry, in 1905, was asked to write the biography, which was published in 1906.
In recent years, Whitman has been gaining pretty general acceptance, and most of the papers in current literature expose his merits. His enemies are growing fewer and fewer, and those who still survive are not so bold. They are on the defensive instead of the offensive. He is such a potent factor in the present day literature of America, that our only conclusion is that he is with us to stay, and the sooner we learn to 'Walk the open road' with him, the better will we be prepared for the future critic of American literature.
Bliss Perry thinks that on account "of the amplitude of his imagination," and "the majesty with which he confronts the eternal realities," instead of the absolute perfection of his poems, he is bound to a place somewhere among the immortals.
Mr. Perry has made a critical study of Whitman, and his judgment and conclusions are charitable and will stand. No critic can ever give an adequate conception of Whitman's poems. As he, himself said, "They will elude you." In order to understand in any degree his eccentricities and his poetic freedom, one must go to the poems and read them as a whole. One will either turn away from them for a breath of air, or he will be forever won by them.
I happened to be among the latter class, and I must agree with his most enthusiastic critics, that he is a real poet, and one of the few that make you think and feel. Most of our other American poets have said some pretty things in verse but are not elemental. They lack the "high seriousness," the all-essential quality of a real poet. This quality we cannot fail to recognize in Whitman, from the beginning to the end, if we tolerate him.
Mr. Stedman's paper on Whitman, though less readable than Burroughs', and far more labored than Mr. Perry's, contains many excellent estimates of Whitman's democracy, and a lover of Whitman cannot afford to be ignorant of his fine judgments. He thinks that Whitman is well equipped as a poet—having had such genuine intercourse "With Nature in her broadest and minutest forms."
JOHN BURROUGHS AND THE BIRDS
One day while I was at West Park, John Burroughs and I had started over the mountains to Slabsides, and just as we had crossed the railroad we noticed a small flock of English sparrows in some nearby trees. We both halted suddenly and after a moment's silence he said: "I think the English sparrow will eventually develop some form of song. Listen to that suppressed sound so near to song! I have often wondered if all birds do not develop song by degrees, and if so, how long it takes or has taken such birds as the thrushes, the song sparrows and the wrens to develop their songs. Bird songs have always been an interesting study to me." It would be hard for me to conceive of one of his books being complete without some mention of bird life in it. I am sure he would not attempt to complete a Nature book and leave birds out of it.
One of our first American Bird Societies, which was organized in 1900, was named after him, but I am not sure that this ever pleased him, as he was not an ornithologist in any restricted sense, and he certainly sees how much better it is for the organization to have been renamed and after Audubon, our greatest Ornithologist. Whenever I have been with him, and a bird of any kind appeared in sight or in hearing, he was sure to observe it first, and has been the means of sharpening my eyes and ears. Each of the little stories that follow, has been the result directly, or indirectly, of my walks in the woods with him. No school library is quite complete without a copy of his Wake Robin as it savors of that peculiar delight with which out-door life imbues him, as no other book he ever wrote, and I must say, puts one in tune with Nature as no book with which I am acquainted. The two essays Spring at the Capitol and The Return of the Birds, give one the true spirit of the Naturalist, and have the best spirit of the out-door world in every paragraph and sentence.
Mr. Sharpe rightly thinks that Burroughs is more than a scientist, for he is always hiding his science in love and genuine interest, though he is generally true to the facts. As an evidence of his genuineness he refuses to go to Nature in 'the reporter fashion, but must camp and tramp with her' in order for the truth to sink in and become part of him. Then he gives up only that which has clung to him, and certainly we do not find in his writings anything but the reflection of some phase of Nature. Go to the fields and the mountains with him, and you will soon be impressed that he is on speaking terms with bird life in almost every detail. This sincerity has impressed me as much as his ability to see and read Nature.
The Tragedy of the Chickadee's Nest
Usually when I find a bird's nest in a conspicuous place, I have a peculiar feeling that the bird has not chosen wisely, but I suspect that most birds that are on good terms with man, choose to brave his presence rather than risk themselves further away from man, and out where birds of prey and animals dangerous to them, are accustomed to go. They seem to think that man will do to trust, while they know that Nature knows no other law but struggle and destruction.
The little nest about which I am now to tell was in an old decayed fencepost about three feet from the ground on the south side of the lane that leads down through the pasture and to the lake beyond. It was easily accessible to all that passed along the lane, and besides, the chickadee is so motherly in her habits and so innocent of all that is going on about her, that one can see her on the post or even in the door of the little house almost any time. The interest I had taken in the nest, caused me to frighten her away many times as I passed down the lane on my morning and afternoon walks. I thought that I would by this means train her to be a little more cautious, but she seemed to take my warning as a joke and finally became so gentle that I could almost put my hand on her.
When I knew that many of the day laborers had discovered my nest and had become somewhat curious about it, I began to entertain grave doubts as to whether the brood would ever come off. For very few people have a real love for birds and bird-life, and most people rather delight to tell of their brutality to the bird kingdom, when they were smaller. Many times have I sat and listened to men tell of how many bird nests they broke up when they were boys, and they seemed to think that a boy could spend his time no better. Some of my neighbors have large collections of birds' eggs that were taken in this spirit, and I think they belong to that class of 'Oologists,' spoken of by Burroughs as the worst enemies of our birds, 'who plunder nests and murder their owners in the name of science.'
While I was out one morning for my usual walk, my attention was attracted by an unusually joyful song, "Chickadee-Dee, Chickadee-Dee," in rapid succession, a little softer and sweeter than I had heard from my black cap this season, and I decided to see if there was not some love-making going on. As Seton-Thompson says, I 'froze' for a few moments and saw what it all meant. The mother bird was building her nest in the post to which I have already referred. The male bird did not appear till three days after, but how interested he was when he did come upon the scene. When these little birds decided to neighbor with me my heart rejoiced, for I had often during the winter seen the vacant home and wondered if it would be occupied in the summer, and if so by whom. As soon as I knew that my chickadees were really to stay I thought to myself: Well I shall have one good neighbor at least. On the morning of the 26th of April, I looked into the nest to see what progress was being made with the new home, and found the female bird on, but she made no attempt to fly away. I went away whistling and at the same time thinking that I should soon see some fledgelings with open mouths for food, and that I would in all probability, have the pleasure of giving them a morsel occasionally. To aid the mother in this way helps to get in sympathy with bird life. For then we feel that we have become partly responsible for their health and daily bread. I had often aided mother birds in feeding their young, though I do not remember to have rendered such service to chickadees. I have, however, known for a long time that chickadees are noted for their gentleness and fearlessness. When they meet honesty they are always ready to make friends and will cheer you with their little familiar ditty, but they seem to divine evil, and will get on the other side of the tree from the boy that carries a sling-shot. Nature seems to have taught them what and whom to fear.
POINTING OUT THE JUNCO'S NEST BY A MOUNTAIN ROADSIDE
I shall never forget how provoked I was, when I passed down the lane on Monday morning, May 4th, and found that some vandal had been there and robbed and partially destroyed the nest on Sunday, the day before. I was cross all day and could not collect myself. Everything in my office went wrong and what little work I did that day had to be done over later. This little nest had meant a great deal to me, and the most interesting stage of its development had not yet been reached. If it had been any other nest probably it would not have affected me so seriously or grieved me so much, but this little family had, in a measure, become a part of my own family, and I had a most tender feeling for it. The poor mother bird I saw in some small oaks not far from the wrecked home and I watched her for a long time, that I might see just what emotions she would express to me. The sadness of her song chickadee-dee, chickadee-dee, was evident, but she uttered these words in rapid succession. The following seemed to be her feeling:
Soliloquy of the Chickadee
"Alas! How fallen is man! I never yet have given cause for complaint, nor cost man anything. My deeds have been deeds of kindness. I am calm and peaceful among my neighbors, and have ever loved man's humanity. Never did I think that such a fate as this awaited me at the hand of man whom I have cheered all seasons of the year, in May and December alike, as he has gone forth to and from his daily labor. Had this misfortune been brought on by some cat or mink or weasel, or even by some of my bird enemies, I could have reconciled myself to it. But I have been man's best friend and he knows it. My numberless ancestors have been among man's best supporters. My dream has been, during these many days of toil and care, to watch my happy little family of birds grow up in the ways of chickadees, that they too could soon be able to go forth prepared for the battle of life and partake of the great feast of insects and worms and insect eggs, so abundant over there in the orchards and lawns and to which all farm crops would become a prey without us.
"But alas! My hopes are blighted and my dream turned into a nightmare. Only one egg pipped, so I could glimpse the little mouth beneath! A ray of sunshine! A consummation devoutly to be wished for! My little ones breaking through those prison walls, soon to become my companions!
"Today it is all over. A funeral dirge instead of songs of joy and gladness! Some vandals have wrecked my home and destroyed my prospective little ones! I almost wish they had taken me too. What have I done to cost me this? You said you would protect me, O man! Are you doing it? Have I proved unworthy of your good will and friendship? My record will bear me witness before any court in the land."
Presently the male bird came upon the spot, but had very little to say. What little he did say seemed to be very consoling to the mother bird. As he receded to the thick of the pasture again, the mother bird began anew her low melancholy song. How can we ever reconcile such thoughtless deeds with the higher forms of civilization! But we must return to the nest. It was not entirely destroyed, and I gathered the remains, which contained two eggs covered in the litter torn from the walls of the nest. I sawed off the post just below the nest cavity and put it in my office. The eggs were white with brownish red spots. The nest was made of fibrous roots, jute fiber lined with hair. Dr. Bachman found one made of fine wool, cotton and some fibres of plants, containing pure white eggs, the nest being in a hollow stump about four feet from the ground. It is safe to say that the chickadee is a resident bird throughout the United States and is rather abundant in the Southern states.
I have often thought that we could make ourselves far happier if we studied birds aesthetically, rather than economically, but it seems that we shall for a long time to come, count the worth of any factor in Nature by utilitarian methods. If we must do so, let us see what kind of showing our chickadee makes for herself. Let us see just what relation she bears to plant life. Edward H. Furbush finds that the chickadee feeds upon tent caterpillars and their eggs; both species of the cankerworm moth and their larvae; codling moths with their larvae; the forest tent caterpillar, and the larva chrysalis and imago of the gypsy and brown tail moths. They also eat the lice and their eggs of the apple and willow. We see then that a great deal can be said in their favor. Another thing so favorable to our little friend is that of all his or her habits of life, we know of nothing bad. All that can be said is in her favor, more than can be said of many of us.
The sad story of my chickadee's nest will suggest to all thinking people the reason why so many of our valuable birds are so rapidly vanishing or diminishing in numbers, and the urgent need for an immediate check upon our wreckless slaughter. Upon a careful count in several parts of the country it has been found that birds are a natural check upon insect pests, and not to protect and welcome them is to foster the growth of these pests. The fate of this little nest is likewise the fate of many thousand nests annually, of useful birds. Who could ever estimate the gallons of innocent blood shed at the hands of the untrained and wilfully evil bands of boys roving the woods on the Sabbath!
Robins
Recently in a letter to the Burroughs' Nature Study Clubs of a Southern state John Burroughs wrote:
"If your club can help to send back the robin to us in the spring with his breast unstained with his own blood, but glowing with the warmth of your shining and hospitable land, I shall rejoice that it bears my name."
The people in the Northern United States have courted favor with the robin and in every way possible protect him, and are always ready to welcome him back after the winter is over, and in fact, the robin is to be praised for his summer popularity as much as he is to be pitied for his winter treatment in the south. One writer says his return to the north 'is announced by the newspapers like that of eminent or notorious people to a watering place, as the first authentic notification of spring.' There, where robins are appreciated, they become quite tame and build and raise their young in the orchards and about the houses. Birds are not altogether unlike people in that they never forget favors. They always know in what sections of country they are welcomed.
When robin redbreast returns south, he comes driven by the chilly blasts of the Ice King of the north, and I regret to say has to face the Southern people with fear and trembling. Parents allow boys to take guns and go out and kill anything legally or illegally, and such boys always develop the brutal and barbarous instinct of murder—taking innocent blood. The following I clipped from the locals of a weekly newspaper in the Southern part of Georgia:
"They have about succeeded in killing all the robins out at 'Robin's Roost,' near Robert's Mill. Thousands of these birds had been flying to a ford near there to roost, and they offered fine sport for those who like shooting."
The reporter of the above seemed to count it a success to kill all the robins. Moreover he affirms that killing them is fine sport. This spirit of slaughter is no doubt born in us, but it does seem that we could teach the young how to love, to protect, and to enjoy rather than to kill! kill! kill! Some boys I know can hardly bear to see a live bird of any kind, but are perfectly at ease if they can kill something. They take some weapon with them as religiously as they take their books to school, in order that nothing escape them. They are always hoping to see some form of bird life to persecute or slaughter. Our public schools are beginning to interest themselves in bird protection, and I am glad to say, have accomplished great good wherever they have tried to teach simple lessons of bird life to school children.
The robin is too valuable to exterminate as he feeds upon noxious weed seeds and injurious insects, and usually has a good appetite and certainly never eats useful plants in the south. His practical value to Orchards and Agriculture generally, should be impressed upon parents and a love for him impressed upon the younger minds. When we cannot appeal through either of these channels, we should arouse the sympathy of the public. Robins ordinarily come south to spend the winter, as the weather is much warmer and they get a greater food supply. But in 1905, a small flock of them wintered near Lake Forest, Illinois. This I think was due to the fact that the birds did not care to face their enemies of the South. In that section of country from Lake Forest to Waukegan, Illinois, not a robin had been shot for several years past. The birds knew their friends and preferred to brave the Northern winter with them, rather than come down south where our youths are forever running through the woods with gun on shoulder ready to take life.
Burroughs says: "Robin is one of our most native and democratic birds; he is one of the family (in the north) and seems much more to us than those rare exotic visitors with their distant and high-bred ways." The carol of the robin is very inspiring as you hear him:
"Heavenward lift his evening hymn,"
or perhaps when you first wake in the morning at early dawn, and listen to his love song, as he perches on some treetop in the edge of a nearby woods. How rich his red breast looks from such a perch just as the sun comes above the horizon and reflects its first rays against him! Just one experience like this in the whole year, how much it would add to life's pleasures! "With this pleasing association with the opening season, amidst the fragrance of flowers and the improving verdure of the fields, we listen with peculiar pleasure to the simple song of the robin. The confidence he reposes in us by making his abode in our gardens and orchards, the frankness and innocence of his manners, besides his vocal powers to please, inspire respect and attachment, even in the truant schoolboy, and his exposed nest is but rarely molested," says Nuttall, who writes eloquently of the robin.
The robin sings in autumn as well as in spring, and his autumn song is by no means inferior to his spring song, and I have always loved the old song, Good-bye to Summer, because of the special tribute to the robin's song, the chorus of which goes,
"O, Robin, Robin, redbreast!
O, Robin, Robin, dear!
O, Robin, sing so sweetly,
In the falling of the year!"
It is rather interesting to note, however, that they usually sing in concert when they return south in the autumn. You can hear them in great numbers singing while feeding around a patch of Ilex glabra, the berries of which afford them considerable food in mid-winter. I love to welcome them back to the south in the autumn, and to hear their beautiful concert song.
Blackbirds
It is rather remarkable to note how easy it is to cultivate the friendship of birds, even birds that are ordinarily quite wild. When I used to go to my office in the early morning, I always scattered a few handfuls of grits around the back window that I might accommodate some of my special friends to a breakfast, and it required only a short time for me to win the confidence of so many birds that I had to limit them to quite a short breakfast. At first no blackbirds came near me or my place of business. Soon they would sit on nearby trees and return to the grounds immediately after I returned from the yard back into the house. I had among my daily visitors not less than three or four hundred of these welcome friends. They would play around in the yard very amusingly and pick at each other much like children and afforded me much amusement and many pleasant moments in the course of a week.
Blackbirds have very little music in them or rather get very little out of themselves. John Burroughs has this to say of their music: "Their voices always sound as if they were laboring under a severe attack of influenza, though a large flock of them heard at a distance on a bright afternoon of early spring produce an effect not unpleasing. The air is filled with crackling, splintering, spurting semi-musical sounds, which are like pepper and salt to the ear." I really enjoy the mingled sounds produced by a great congregation of them, and often follow a flock of them down the creek side to their favorite resting place, just to hear them. They are always in great flocks here during the winter, and sometimes when feeding along on a hillside, the rear ranks marching over the bulk to the front in rapid succession, present an appearance somewhat like heavy waves of the sea, and one a short distance looks on with admiration and even surprise, to see such symmetry and uniformity in their movement.
One cannot fail to appreciate how much good a great flock of them do in a day as they move across a field covered with noxious grass and weed seeds. They seem to form an army in order to co-operate with man in every possible way to balance up the powers of nature. Weeds prevent crops from growing. Every seed that germinates in the soil and is allowed to grow, if only for a short while, tends to exhaust the soil. If the birds get these seeds in winter before germination begins, the useful plants will have a much larger fund of food from which to draw. Once in a while our blackbirds get a little grain and the farmer condemns them and looks upon them only with a murderer's eye. The birds do a hundred times more good than evil, and should not be condemned on such slight provocation. Their hard fare during the winter makes them rush into the fields sometimes in spring and get a taste of grains useful to man, but surely they should be pitied rather than censured, and so long as I can get them to depend on me for help, I am going to put out a mite for their breakfast. With sorrow I bid them good-bye each spring, but with renewed delight I hail with joy their return in autumn with their young.
The Nuthatch
Could I ever be satisfied were I located in some nook of this old earth where the voice of the nuthatch is not heard once in a while! His simple song—I speak of the white-breasted nuthatch—beats time to my daily routine of laboratory and field work and its very simplicity adds dignity to my little friend's life. All will easily recognize this useful little neighbor. His coat is of light blueish gray above, with a crown, nap, and upper back black. His tail and wings have black markings, while his lower parts and sides of head are white in the main. It is remarkable to find the nuthatch so ready to make friends with us, when he is generally considered a forest bird in this part of the country.
I see two or three of them near my office every day, and take much delight in my study of them and their habits. They have a peculiar way of perching, head downward, on the trunk of a tree and go that way most of the time. A small white-breasted bird on the trunk of a tree with head downward, is pretty good evidence that it is the nuthatch. This attitude is so natural that the older ornithologists—Audubon and Wilson—claim that they sleep in that position. I am not prepared to affirm or deny the rumor as my study of this bird, and all other birds, is restricted to their daylight comedies and tragedies, though I do often hear certain members of bird families singing at all hours of the night during certain seasons.
His song is, as above stated, quite simple only one note repeated over and over—konk-konk, konk-konk, two strokes generally in rapid succession—a kind of a nasal piping, or as one bird lover has said: "A peculiar, weird sound, somewhat like the quack of a duck, but higher keyed and with less volume, having a rather musical twang."
MY CHICKADEE'S NEST
During the winter months he finds much time to search about on the ground for food, and consequently his crop is at such time partly filled with noxious weed seeds. In spring and summer, he searches all round the trunks and branches of trees for small insects and insect eggs, and as you approach him to study him he seems entirely unconscious of your presence, which I have thought almost approaches human affectation, and I wonder if this is not one of the alluring arts of the white-breasted nuthatch. Birds, in some way or other, express almost all human attributes, love, hate, anger, joy, sorrow, if we only are able to read them, and it is not unreasonable to assume that they are sometimes affectatious. The Southern mocking bird certainly seems to border vanity sometimes.