Our Friend John Burroughs

by Clara Barrus

My Dear Mr. Burroughs,—

To the medicine proposition I say. Yes. A man of your tastes and mental vigor should be able to do some clean work in that profession. I know not of any other established profession that allows a larger scope of mind than this. There is some danger of materialism, but this you have already weaponed yourself against, and the scientific studies that come in the line of the profession will furnish material for thought and expression which I am sure you will know well how to use.

I am glad if my suggestions about your essay proved of some service to you. There is thought and statement in it which will certainly one day come to a market. The book, too, all in good season. Life for you is very long, and you can take your time. Take it by all means. Give yourself large leisure to do your best. I am about setting up my household gods in Worcester. This makes me in much haste, and therefore without another word I must say that I shall always be glad to hear from you, and that I am always truly your friend.

D. A. Wasson

Of the early nature papers which Mr. Burroughs wrote for the New York "Leader," and which were grouped under the general title, "From the Back Country," there were five or six in number, of two or three columns each. One on "Butter-Making," of which I will quote the opening passage, fairly makes the mouth water:—

With green grass comes golden butter. With the bobolinks and the swallows, with singing groves, and musical winds, with June,—ah, yes! with tender, succulent, gorgeous June,—all things are blessed. The dairyman's heart rejoices, and the butter tray with its virgin treasure becomes a sight to behold. There lie the rich masses, fold upon fold, leaf upon leaf, fresh, sweet, and odorous, just as the ladle of the dairymaid dipped it from the churn, sweating great drops of buttermilk, and looking like some rare and precious ore. The cool spring water is the only clarifier needed to remove all dross and impurities and bring out all the virtues and beauties of this cream-evolved element. How firm and bright it becomes, how delicious the odor it emits! what vegetarian ever found it in his heart, or his palate either, to repudiate butter? The essence of clover and grass and dandelions and beechen woods is here. How wonderful the chemistry that from elements so common and near at hand produces a result so beautiful and useful! Eureka! Is not this the alchemy that turns into gold the commonest substances? How can transformation be more perfect?

During the years of this early essay-writing, Mr. Burroughs was teaching country schools in the fall and winter, and working on the home farm in summer; at the same time he was reading serious books and preparing himself for whatever was in store for him. He read medicine for only three months, in the fall of 1862, and then resumed teaching. His first magazine article about the birds was written in the summer or fall of 1863, and appeared in the "Atlantic" in the spring of 1885. He learned from a friend to whom Mr. Sanborn had written that the article had pleased Emerson.

It was in 1864, while in the Currency Bureau in Washington, that he wrote the essays which make up his first nature book, "Wake-Robin." His first book, however, was not a nature book, but was "Walt Whitman as Poet and Person." It was published in 1867, preceding "Wake-Robin" by four years. It has long been out of print, and is less known than his extended, riper work, "Whitman, A. Study," written in 1896.

A record of the early writings of Mr. Burroughs would not be complete without considering also his ventures into the field of poetry. In the summer of 1860 he wrote and printed his first verses (with the exception of some still earlier ones written in 1856 to the sweetheart who became his wife), which were addressed to his friend and comrade E. M. Allen, subsequently the husband of Elizabeth Akers, the author of "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight." The lines to E. M. A. were printed in the "Saturday Press." Because they are the first of our author's verses to appear in print, I quote them here:—

TO E. M. A.
A change has come over nature
Since you and June were here;
The sun has turned to the southward
Adown the steps of the year.
The grass is ripe in the meadow,
And the mowers swing in rhyme;
The grain so green on the hillside
Is in its golden prime.
No more the breath of the clover
Is borne on every breeze,
No more the eye of the daisy
Is bright on meadow leas.
The bobolink and the swallow
Have left for other clime—
They mind the sun when he beckons
And go with summer's prime.
Buttercups that shone in the meadow
Like rifts of golden snow,
They, too, have melted and vanished
Beneath the summer's glow.
Still at evenfall in the upland
The vesper sparrow sings,
And the brooklet in the pasture
Still waves its glassy rings.
And the lake of fog to the southward
With surges white as snow—
Still at morn away in the distance
I see it ebb and flow.
But a change has come over nature,
The youth of the year has gone;
A grace from the wood has departed,
And a freshness from the dawn.