The Lure of the Camera

by Charles S. Olcott

JOHN BURROUGHS AT WOODCHUCK LODGE

Not wishing to interfere with his plans, I expressed the hope that I was not interrupting him, when he quickly replied, “O, my work for to-day is all done. I rise at six and usually do all my writing before noon.” “You are like Sir Walter Scott, then,” said I, “who always began early and, as he said, ‘broke the neck of the day’s work’ before the family came down to breakfast and was ‘his own man before noon.’” “Ah, he was a wonderful man,” replied Mr. Burroughs. Then, after a pause and with a little sigh—“I wish I could invest these hills with romance as he did the hills of Scotland.” “But you have invested them with romance,” I said, “although of a different kind.” “Yes,” he replied, with brightening eyes, “with the romance of humanity and of nature, the only kind to which they are entitled.”

I could not help thinking how wonderfully like Wordsworth this seemed. The romance of humanity and nature! Is it not this, which, since Wordsworth’s time, has given a new charm to the hills and valleys of Westmoreland and Cumberland, causing every visitor to seek the dwelling-places of the poet? And are not those who spend their summers in the Catskills finding a new delight in those beautiful mountains because of the spell which John Burroughs has thrown upon them?

Wordsworth wrote the history of his own mind and called it “The Prelude,” intending it to be but the introduction to a greater poem to be entitled “The Recluse,” which should be a broad presentation of his views on Man, Nature, and Society. “The Excursion” was to be the second part, but the third was never written. He conceived that this great work would be like a Gothic church, the main body of which would be represented by “The Recluse,” while “The Prelude” would be but the ante-chapel. All his other poems, when properly arranged, would then be “likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in those edifices.”

Burroughs is far too modest to compare his writings to a cathedral, but he has nevertheless, like Wordsworth, written himself into nearly all of them. Following the English poet’s simile in a modified form, we may think of the product of his pen, not as a cathedral, but as a mansion of many rooms, each furnished with beautiful simplicity and charming taste to represent some different phase of the author’s mind, and each equipped, so to speak, with a mirror, possessing all the magic but without the unpleasant duty of the one in Hawthorne’s tale, so arranged as to reflect the very soul of its builder with perfect fidelity.

So sincere is Burroughs that you feel certain he is constantly revealing his true self. Therefore, when he praises Wordsworth as the English poet who has touched him more closely than any other, you begin to realize the bond of sympathy. When he says that Wordsworth’s poetry has the character of “a message, special and personal to a comparatively small circle of readers,” you know that he is one of the few who have taken the message to heart.

Wordsworth’s love of Nature was of the same kind as the American poet’s. “Nature,” says Burroughs, “is not to be praised or patronized. You cannot go to her and describe her; she must speak through your heart. The woods and fields must melt into your mind, dissolved by your love for them. Did they not melt into Wordsworth’s mind? They colored all his thoughts; the solitude of those green, rocky Westmoreland fells broods over every page. He does not tell us how beautiful he finds Nature, and how much he enjoys her; he makes us share his enjoyment.” Substitute Burroughs for Wordsworth, and Catskill for Westmoreland, and you have in this passage a fine statement of the reason why John Burroughs is winning the gratitude of more and more people every year.

Wordsworth thought of Nature as an all-pervading Presence, something mysterious and sublime, a supreme Being,—

“The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.”

Burroughs does not rise to such ethereal heights, but recognizes that the passion for Nature is “a form of, or closely related to, our religious instincts.” He lives closer to Nature than Wordsworth ever did. His knowledge of her secrets is far deeper and more intimate. He is a naturalist and scientist, as well as a man of poetic temperament. He has a trained eye that sees what others would miss. “There is a great deal of byplay going on in the life of Nature about us,” he says, “a great deal of variation and outcropping of individual traits, that we entirely miss unless we have our eyes and ears open.”