The Seer of Slabsides

by Dallas Lore Sharp

John Burroughs came naturally by such a view of nature and its consequent optimism. It was due partly to his having been born and brought up on a farm where he had what was due him from the start. Such birth and bringing-up is the natural right of every boy. To know and to do the primitive, the elemental; to go barefoot, to drive the cows, to fish, and to go to school with not too many books, but with "plenty of real things"—these are nominated in every boy's bond.

Serene, I fold my hands and wait,

is the poem of a childhood on the farm, and the poem of a manhood on the farm, in spite of the critic who says:

"We have never ceased to wonder that this friend of the birds, this kindly interpreter of nature in all her moods, was born and brought up on a farm; it was in that smiling country watered by the east branch of the Delaware. No man, as a rule, knows less about the colors, songs, and habits of birds, and is more indifferent to natural scenery than the man born to the soil, who delves in it and breathes its odors. Contact with it and laborious days seem to deaden his faculties of observation and deprive him of all sympathy with nature."

During the days when the deadening might have occurred, John Burroughs was teaching school. Then he became a United States bank examiner, and only after that returned to the country—to Riverby and Slabsides, and Woodchuck Lodge,—to live out the rest of his years, years as full of life and books as his vines along the Hudson are full of life and grapes.

Could it be otherwise? If men and grapes are of the same divine dust, should they not grow according to the same divine laws? Here in the vineyard along the Hudson, John Burroughs planted himself in planting his vines, and every trellis that he set has become his own support and stay. The very clearing of the land for his vineyard was a preparation of himself physically and morally for a more fruitful life.

"Before the snow was off in March," he says in "Literary Values," "we set to work under-draining the moist and springy places. My health and spirits improved daily. I seemed to be under-draining my own life and carrying off the stagnant water, as well as that of the land." And so he was. There are other means of doing it—taking drugs, playing golf, walking the streets; but surely the advantages and the poetry are all in favor of the vineyard. And how much fitter a place the vineyard to mellow and ripen life, than a city roof of tarry pebbles and tin!

Though necessarily personal and subjective, John Burroughs's writing is entirely free from self-exploitation and confession. There are pages scattered here and there dealing briefly and frankly with his own natural history, but our thanks are due to John Burroughs that he never made a business of watching himself. Once he was inveigled by a magazine editor into doing "An Egotistical Chapter," wherein we find him as a boy of sixteen reading essays, and capable at that age of feeding for a whole year upon Dr. Johnson! Then we find him reading Whipple's essays, and the early outdoor papers of Higginson; and later, at twenty-three, settling down with Emerson's essays, and getting one of his own into the "Atlantic Monthly."

How early his own began to come to him!

That first essay in the "Atlantic" was followed by a number of outdoor sketches in the New York "Leader"—written, Burroughs says, "mainly to break the spell of Emerson's influence and get upon ground of my own." He succeeded in both purposes; and a large and exceedingly fertile piece of ground it proved to be, too, this which he got upon! Already the young writer had chosen his field and his crop. The out-of-doors has been largely his literary material, as the essay has been largely his literary form, ever since. He has done other things—volumes of literary studies and criticisms; but his theme from first to last has been the Great Book of Nature, a page of which, here and there, he has tried to read to us.