The Seer of Slabsides

by Dallas Lore Sharp

No such fault can be found with John Burroughs. He went pencilless into the woods, and waited before writing until his return home, until time had elapsed for the multitudinous details of the trip to blur and blend, leaving only the dominant facts and impressions for his pen. Every part of his work is of selected stock, as free from knots and seams and sapwood as a piece of old-growth pine. There is plan, proportion, integrity to his essays—the naturalist living faithfully up to a sensitive literary conscience.

John Burroughs was a good but not a great naturalist, as Audubon and Gray were great naturalists. His claim (and Audubon's in part) upon us is literary. He was a watcher in the woods; he made a few pleasant excursions into the primeval wilderness, leaving his gun at home, and his camera, too, thank Heaven! He broke out no new trail, discovered no new animal, no new thing. But he saw all the old, uncommon things, saw them oftener, watched them longer, through more seasons, than any other writer of our out-of-doors; and though he discovered no new thing, yet he made discoveries, volumes of them—contributions largely to our stock of literature, and to our store of love for the earth, and to our joy in living upon it. He turned a little of the universe into literature; translated a portion of the earth into human language; restored to us our garden here eastward in Eden—apple-tree and all.

For a real taste of fruity literature, try John Burroughs's chapter on "The Apple." Try Thoreau's, too,—if you are partial to squash-bugs. There are chapters in John Burroughs, such as "Is it going to Rain?" "A River View," "A Snow-Storm," which seem to me as perfect, in their way, as anything that has ever been done—single, simple, beautiful in form, and deeply significant; the storm being a piece of fine description, of whirling snow across a geologic landscape, distant, and as dark as eternity; the whole wintry picture lighted and warmed at the end by a glowing touch of human life:

"We love the sight of the brown and ruddy earth; it is the color of life, while a snow-covered plain is the face of death; yet snow is but the mark of life-giving rain; it, too, is the friend of man—the tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow."

There are many texts in these volumes, many themes; and in them all there is one real message: that this is a good world to live in; that these are good men and women to live with; that life is good, here and now, and altogether worth living.

III

It was in October that I last saw him—at Woodchuck Lodge. November 22 he wrote:

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 enclosing an old notebook of mine, filled with all sorts of jottings as you will see. I send it for 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.