"Of course," I replied; "where is your dish-cloth? "—a natural question, as any woman will agree, but what a consternation it evoked! A just perceptible delay, a fumbling among pots and pans, and he came toward me with a most apologetic air, and with the sorriest-looking rag I had ever seen—its narrow circumference encircling a very big hole.
"Is that the best dish-cloth you have?" I asked.
For answer he held it up in front of his face, but the most of it being hole, it did not hide the eyes that twinkled so merrily that my housewifely reproof was effectually silenced. I took the sorry remnant and began washing the dishes, mentally resolving, and carrying out my resolution the next day, to send him a respectable dish-cloth. Prosaic, if you will, but does not his own Emerson say something about giving—
"to barrows, trays, and pans,
Grace and glimmer of romance"?
And what graces a dish-pan better than a clean, whole, self-respecting dish-cloth?
So there we stood, John Burroughs and his humble reader, washing and wiping dishes, and weighing Amiel and Schopenhauer in the balance at the same time; and a very novel and amusing experience it was. Yet it did not seem so strange after all, but almost as though it had happened before. Silly Sally purred beseechingly as she followed her master about the room and out to the wood-pile, reminding him that she liked chicken bones.
While putting the bread in the large tin box that stood on the stair-landing, I had some difficulty with the clasp. "Never mind that," said Mr. Burroughs, as he scraped the potato skins into the fire; "a Vassar girl sat down on that box last summer, and it's never been the same since."
The work finished, there was more talk before the fire. It was here that the author told his guest about Anne Gilchrist, the talented, noble-hearted Englishwoman, whose ready acceptance of Whitman's message bore fruit in her penetrating criticism of Whitman, a criticism which stands to-day unrivaled by anything that has been written concerning the Good Gray Poet.
Like most of Mr. Burroughs' readers, I cherish his poem "Waiting," and, like most of them, I told him so on seeing him seated before the fire with folded hands and face serene, a living embodiment of the faith and trust expressed in those familiar lines. It would seem natural that he should write such a poem after the heat of the day, after his ripe experience, after success had come to him; it is the lesson we expect one to learn on reaching his age, and learning how futile is the fret and urge of life, how infinitely better is the attitude of trust that what is our own will gravitate to us in obedience to eternal laws. But I there learned that he had written the poem when a young man, life all before him, his prospects in a dubious and chaotic condition, his aspirations seeming likely to come to naught.
"I have lived to prove it true," he said,—"that which I but vaguely divined when I wrote the lines. Our lives are all so fearfully and wonderfully shot through with the very warp and woof of the universe, past, present, and to come! No doubt at all that our own—that which our souls crave and need—does gravitate toward us, or we toward it. 'Waiting' has been successful," he added, "not on account of its poetic merit, but for some other merit or quality. It puts in simple and happy form some common religious aspirations, without using the religious jargon. People write me from all parts of the country that they treasure it in their hearts; that it steadies their hand at the helm; that it is full of consolation for them. It is because it is poetry allied with religion that it has this effect; poetry alone would not do this; neither would a prose expression of the same religious aspirations do it, for we often outgrow the religious views and feelings of the past. The religious thrill, the sense of the Infinite, the awe and majesty of the universe, are no doubt permanent in the race, but the expression of these feelings in creeds and forms addressed to the understanding, or exposed to the analysis of the understanding, is as transient and flitting as the leaves of the trees. My little poem is vague enough to escape the reason, sincere enough to go to the heart, and poetic enough to stir the imagination."