Our Friend John Burroughs

by Clara Barrus

Our poet-naturalist seems to have appropriated all outdoors for his stamping-ground. He has given us in his limpid prose intimate glimpses of the hills and streams and pastoral farms of his native country; has taken us down the Pepacton, the stream of his boyhood; we have traversed with him the "Heart of the Southern Catskills," and the valleys of the Neversink and the Beaverkill; we have sat upon the banks of the Potomac, and sailed down the Saguenay; we have had a glimpse of the Blue Grass region, and "A Taste of Maine Birch" (true, Thoreau gave us this, also, and other "Excursions" as well); we have walked with him the lanes of "Mellow England"; journeyed "In the Carlyle Country"; marveled at the azure glaciers of Alaska; wandered in the perpetual summerland of Jamaica; camped with him and the Strenuous One in the Yellowstone; looked in awe and wonder at that "Divine Abyss," the Grand Canon of the Colorado; felt the "Spell of Yosemite," and idled with him under the sun-steeped skies of Hawaii and by her morning-glory seas.

Our essayist is thus seen not to be untraveled, yet he is no wanderer. No man ever had the home feeling stronger than has he; none is more completely under the spell of a dear and familiar locality. Somewhere he has said: "Let a man stick his staff into the ground anywhere and say, 'This is home,' and describe things from that point of view, or as they stand related to that spot,—the weather, the fauna, the flora,—and his account shall have an interest to us it could not have if not thus located and defined."

(Illustration of Riverby from the Orchard. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott)

Before hunting out Mr. Burroughs in his mountain hermitage, let us glance at his conventional abode, Riverby, at West Park, Ulster County, New York. This has been his home since 1874. Having chosen this place by the river, he built his house of stone quarried from the neighboring hills, and finished it with the native woods; he planted a vineyard on the sloping hillside, and there he has successfully combined the business of grape-culture with his pursuits and achievements as a literary naturalist. More than half his books have been written since he has dwelt at Riverby, the earlier ones having appeared when he was a clerk in the Treasury Department in Washington, an atmosphere supposedly unfriendly to literary work. It was not until he gave up his work in Washington, and his later position as bank examiner in the eastern part of New York State, that he seemed to come into his own. Business life, he had long known, could never be congenial to him; literary pursuits alone were insufficient; the long line of yeoman ancestry back of him cried out for recognition; he felt the need of closer contact with the soil; of having land to till and cultivate. This need, an ancestral one, was as imperative as his need of literary expression, an individual one. Hear what he says after having ploughed in his new vineyard for the first time: "How I soaked up the sunshine to-day! At night I glowed all over; my whole being had had an earth bath; such a feeling of freshly ploughed land in every cell of my brain. The furrow had struck in; the sunshine had photographed it upon my soul." Later he built him a little study somewhat apart from his dwelling, to which he could retire and muse and write whenever the mood impelled him. This little one-room study, covered with chestnut bark, is on the brow of a hill which slopes toward the river; it commands an extended view of the Hudson. But even this did not meet his requirements. The formality and routine of conventional life palled upon him; the expanse of the Hudson, the noise of railway and steamboat wearied him; he craved something more retired, more primitive, more homely. "You cannot have the same kind of attachment and sympathy for a great river; it does not flow through your affections like a lesser stream," he says, thinking, no doubt, of the trout-brooks that thread his father's farm, of Montgomery Hollow Stream, of the Red Kill, and of others that his boyhood knew. Accordingly he cast about for some sequestered spot in which to make himself a hermitage.

(Illustration of The Study, Riverby. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott)

During his excursions in the vicinity of West Park, Mr. Burroughs had lingered oftenest in the hills back of, and parallel with, the Hudson, and here he finally chose the site for his rustic cabin. He had fished and rowed in Black Pond, sat by its falls in the primitive forest, sometimes with a book, sometimes with his son, or with some other hunter or fisher of congenial tastes; and on one memorable day in April, years agone, he had tarried there with Walt Whitman. There, seated on a fallen tree, Whitman wrote this description of the place which was later printed in "Specimen Days":—

I jot this memorandum in a wild scene of woods and hills where we have come to visit a waterfall. I never saw finer or more copious hemlocks, many of them large, some old and hoary. Such a sentiment to them, secretive, shaggy, what I call weather-beaten, and let-alone—a rich underlay of ferns, yew sprouts and mosses, beginning to be spotted with the early summer wild flowers. Enveloping all, the monotone and liquid gurgle from the hoarse, impetuous, copious fall—the greenish-tawny, darkly transparent waters plunging with velocity down the rocks, with patches of milk-white foam—a stream of hurrying amber, thirty feet wide, risen far back in the hills and woods, now rushing with volume—every hundred rods a fall, and sometimes three or four in that distance. A primitive forest, druidical, solitary, and savage—not ten visitors a year—broken rocks everywhere, shade overhead, thick underfoot with leaves—a just palpable wild and delicate aroma.

"Not ten visitors a year" may have been true when Whitman described the place, but we know it is different now. Troops of Vassar girls come to visit the hermit of Slabsides, and are taken to these falls; nature-lovers, and those who only think themselves nature-lovers, come from far and near; Burroughs clubs, boys' schools, girls' schools, pedestrians, cyclists, artists, authors, reporters, poets,—young and old, renowned and obscure,—from April till November seek out this lover of nature, who is a lover of human nature as well, who gives himself and his time generously to those who find him. When the friends of Socrates asked him where they should bury him, he said: "You may bury me if you can find me." Not all who seek John Burroughs really find him; he does not mix well with every newcomer; one must either have something of Mr. Burroughs's own cast of mind, or else be of a temperament capable of genuine sympathy with him, in order to find the real man. He withdraws into his shell before persons of uncongenial temperament; to such he can never really speak—they see Slabsides, but they don't see Burroughs. He is, however, never curt or discourteous to any one. Unlike Thoreau, who "put the whole of nature between himself and his fellows," Mr. Burroughs leads his fellows to nature, although it is sometimes, doubtless, with the feeling that one can lead a horse to water, but can't make him drink; for of all the sightseers that journey to Slabsides there must of necessity be many that "Oh!" and "Ah!" a good deal, but never really get further in their study of nature than that. Still, it can scarcely fail to be salutary even to these to get away from the noise and the strife in city and town, and see how sane, simple, and wholesome life is when lived in a sane and simple and wholesome way. Somehow it helps one to get a clearer sense of the relative value of things, it makes one ashamed of his petty pottering over trifles, to witness this exemplification of the plain living and high thinking which so many preach about, and so few practice.

"The thing which a man's nature calls him to do—what else so well worth doing?" asks this writer. One's first impression after glancing about this well-built cabin, with the necessities of body and soul close at hand, is a vicarious satisfaction that here, at least, is one who has known what he wanted to do and has done it. We are glad that Gilbert White made pastoral calls on his outdoor parishioners,—the birds, the toads, the turtles, the snails, and the earthworms,—although we often wonder if he evinced a like conscientiousness toward his human parishioners; we are glad that Thoreau left the manufacture of lead pencils to become, as Emerson jocosely complained, "the leader of a huckleberry party",—glad because these were the things their natures called them to do, and in so doing they best enriched their fellows. They literally went away that they might come to us in a closer, truer way than had they tarried in our midst. It must have been in answer to a similar imperative need of his own that John Burroughs chose to hie himself to the secluded yet accessible spot where his mountain cabin is built.

"As the bird feathers her nest with down plucked from her own breast," says Mr. Burroughs in one of his early essays, "so one's spirit must shed itself upon its environment before it can brood and be at all content." Here at Slabsides one feels that its master does brood and is content. It is an ideal location for a man of his temperament; it affords him the peace and seclusion he desires, yet is not so remote that he is shut off from human fellowship. For he is no recluse; his sympathies are broad and deep. Unlike Thoreau, who asserts that "you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature," and that "those qualities that bring you near to the one estrange you from the other," Mr. Burroughs likes his kind; he is doubtless the most accessible of all notable American writers,—a fact which is perhaps a drawback to him in his literary work, his submission to being hunted out often being taken advantage of, no doubt, by persons who are in no real sense nature-lovers, but who go to his retreat merely to see the hermit in hiding there.