Our Friend John Burroughs

by Clara Barrus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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