The most notable thing, however, about Higginson's out-door papers was their ringing call for a return to reality. It was he who more than any one else created interest in Thoreau; and it was he who first gained attention with the cry, "Back to nature." "The American temperament," he declared, "needs at this moment nothing so much as that wholesome training of semi-rural life which reared Hampden and Cromwell to assume at one grasp the sovereignty of England.... The little I have gained from colleges and libraries has certainly not worn so well as the little I learned in childhood of the habits of plant, bird, and insect.... Our American life still needs, beyond all things else, the more habitual cultivation of out-door habits.... The more bent any man is on action, the more profoundly he needs the calm lessons of Nature to preserve his equilibrium." To the new generation of writers he flung a challenge: "Thoreau camps down by Walden Pond and shows us that absolutely nothing in Nature has ever yet been described—not a bird or a berry of the woods, not a drop of water, not a spicula of ice, nor winter, nor summer, nor sun, nor star." And again, "What do we know, for instance, of the local distribution of our birds? I remember that in my latest conversation with Thoreau last December, he mentioned most remarkable facts in this department, which had fallen under his unerring eyes."
This was published in the Atlantic, September, 1862. In May, 1865, as if in answer to the challenge, there appeared in the same magazine John Burroughs's "With the Birds," a paper which he had written two years before. The army life of Higginson and later his humanitarian work in many fields put an end to his out-door writings, but not to his influence.
III
John Burroughs was born on a farm in Roxbury, New York, just below the Otsego County made famous by Cooper and the Leather-stocking Tales. His boyhood until he was seventeen "was mainly occupied," to quote his own words, "with farm work in the summer, and with a little study, offset by much hunting and trapping of wild animals in winter." One must study this boyhood if one is to understand the man's work:
From childhood I was familiar with the homely facts of the barn, and of cattle and horses; the sugar-making in the maple woods in early spring; the work of the corn-field, hay-field, potato-field; the delicious fall months with their pigeon and squirrel shootings; threshing of buckwheat, gathering of apples, and burning of fallows; in short, everything that smacked of, and led to, the open air and its exhilarations. I belonged, as I may say, to them; and my substance and taste, as they grew, assimilated them as truly as my body did its food. I loved a few books much; but I loved Nature, in all those material examples and subtle expressions, with a love passing all the books of the world.[81]
Of schooling he had little. "I was born," he once wrote, "of and among people who neither read books nor cared for them, and my closest associations since have been alien to literature and art." The usual winter term in his native district, a year or two in academy courses after he was seventeen—that was the extent of his formal education. At twenty he was married, at twenty-seven, after having drifted about as a school teacher, he settled at Washington in a position in the Treasury Department that held him closely for nine years.
It was a period of self-discipline. His intellectual life had been awakened by Emerson, and he had followed him into wide fields. He read enormously, he studied languages, he trained himself with models of English style. His love of the country, legacy of the boyhood which he never outgrew, impelled him to a systematic study of ornithology. Birds were his avocation, his enthusiasm; by and by they were to become his vocation.
In 1861, when he was twenty-four, he came for the first time in contact with Leaves of Grass, and it aroused him like a vision.
It produced the impression upon me in my moral consciousness that actual Nature did in her material forms and shows; ... I shall never forget the strange delight I had from the following passage, as we sat there on the sunlit border of an autumn forest:
I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the reasons of things;
They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen.
I cannot say to any person what I hear—I cannot say it to myself—it is very wonderful;
It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe, moving so exactly in its orbit forever and ever, without one jolt, or the untruth of a single second;
I do not think it was made in six days, nor in ten thousand years, nor in ten billions of years;
Nor planned and built one thing after another, as an architect plans and builds a house.