“I hate to have you go. I wish you could stay. You boys are life to me now. Come again soon. Good-bye.”
We promised we would, and we did—in April, the next April, when we went up to say our last good-bye. Meantime he was off to California for the winter months. Before leaving he wrote to me from West Park, his home on the Hudson:
I neglected to make any apologies for the long letter I wrote you the other day. I promise not to do so again. I am sending you an old notebook of mine, filled with all sorts of jottings, as you will see. I send it as a keepsake.
We are off for California to-morrow. Hope to be there in early December. We leave Chicago on the 29th. My address there will be La Jolla, San Diego. Good luck to you and yours.
Ever your friend
John Burroughs
He kept his promise. This was his last letter to me. They were not very happy months in California. Visitors came to see him as usual; he spoke in the schools; and wrote up to the very end; but he was weak, often sick, and always longing for home. He knew if he was ever to see home again he must not delay long; and he counted the days. He wished to celebrate his birthday with his old friends, at the old place; and he was on the way, speeding homeward, with most of the long journey covered, when, suddenly, the end came. And is it at all strange that his last uttered words, as he sank into unconsciousness, should have been “How far are we from home?”
On the front of the boulder which marks his grave, those last words might well be cut, as expressing the real theme of all his books, the dominant note in all his life.
His old friends kept his birthday in the old place—in the “Nest” at Riverby, for the funeral; and the next day, his eighty-fourth birthday, they carried him into his beloved mountains, to his grave by the rock, where so lately we had talked together, and where, since childhood, he had found an altar for his soul.
How great a man Burroughs was I do not know. Time knows. I know that he had three of the elements of greatness as a writer: simplicity, sincerity, and a true feeling for form. And he had these to an uncommon degree. I know that great men and little children loved him; and that three generations already have been led oftener and farther into the out-of-doors by him than by any other American writer. I know how Burroughs thought of himself and of Thoreau; for in a letter, several years ago to me he wrote:
Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am. I may be more human, but he is as certainly more divine. His moral and ethical value I think is much greater, and he has a heroic quality that I cannot approach.
But I am not trying to estimate Burroughs. I am only sketching, through the gray rain and in the golden light at the far end of the autumn, one whom thousands of us read and love.
THE END