Rambles with John Burroughs

by R. J. H. De Loach

"I think that love of nature which becomes a precious boon and solace in life, does not as a rule show itself in the youth. The youth is a poet in feeling, and generally he does not care for poetry. He is like a bulb—rich in those substances that are to make the future flower and fruit of the plant.

"As he becomes less a poet in his unconscious life, he will take more and more to poetry as embodied in literary forms. In the same way, as he recedes from nature, as from his condition of youthful savagery, he is likely to find more and more interest in the wild life about him. Do not force a knowledge of natural things upon him too young."

If Mr. Burroughs had been taught nature after the academic fashion, he would never have developed the love for the subject that is so evident in all his out-door books. My impression is that his early environment was best suited to him and he was the child so "like a bulb." He absorbed nature without having any consciousness of what it meant. "I was born of and among people," he says, "who neither read books nor cared for them, and my closest associations since have been with those whose minds have been alien to literature and art. My unliterary environment has doubtless been best suited to me. Probably what little freshness and primal sweetness my books contain is owing to this circumstance. Constant intercourse with bookish men and literary circles I think would have dwarfed or killed my literary faculty. This perpetual rubbing heads together, as in literary clubs, seems to result in literary sterility. In my own case at least what I most needed was what I had—a few books and plenty of things." The roaming over the hills and mountains and following up trout streams was most conducive to his life, and thus it was he spent his odd hours and rest-days. This gave him "plenty of real things," and just what they have meant to him you will be able to learn from his twelve out-door volumes. But what brought all this long string of books out of him? How comes it that he turned to literature as a profession? From the earliest he had a passion for authorship, and when in the "teens" resolved to become a writer. "It was while I was at school, in my nineteenth year," he says, "that I saw my first author; and I distinctly remember with what emotion I gazed upon him, and followed him in the twilight, keeping on the other side of the street.... I looked upon him with more reverence and enthusiasm than I had ever looked upon any man.... I suppose this was the instinctive tribute of a timid and imaginative youth to a power which he was beginning vaguely to see—the power of letters."

By this time Mr. Burroughs had begun to see his own thoughts in print in a country newspaper. He also began writing essays about the same time and sending them to various periodicals only to receive "them back pretty promptly." These perhaps rather conventional papers on such subjects as Genius, Individuality, A Man and His Times, etc., served a great purpose. They tutored the author of them into his better papers that were welcomed by the editor of the Atlantic Monthly and other leading periodicals. In his twenty-first year, he discovered Emerson—so to speak—in a Chicago book-store, and says: "All that summer I fed upon these essays and steeped myself in them." No doubt Emerson's essays had a wonderful influence on this young reader and almost swamped him. They warped him out of his orbit so far, that had he not resolved to get back upon ground of his own, we would never have had Wake Robin. Emerson had complete possession of him for a time and was hard to shake off, but constant writing upon out-door themes did the work, and put Burroughs back in possession of himself.

THE OLD STONE WALL IN FRONT OF THE BURROUGHS HOME, BUILT BY DEACON SCUDDER. THE CATSKILLS DIMLY SHOW IN THE DISTANCE

In the year 1863, he went to Washington apparently to join the army, but somehow never did. Instead of this, he received an appointment in the Treasury, as a guardian of a vault, to count the money that went in or came out. During this time he had many leisure moments which he put to good account writing his nature sketches that make up his first nature book, Wake Robin. Before he had been in the National Capital a great while he became acquainted with the poet Walt Whitman, and immediately fell in with him. Whitman's poetry was not new to Burroughs who had already developed a taste for it. The man Whitman seemed to be an embodiment of the poetry, Leaves of Grass, and Burroughs was so greatly moved by a study of the man that he soon began making notes of this study which resulted in his first book—Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867). This little volume is one of the best, raciest and freshest books on Whitman, and certainly is as readable as Burroughs' later book on Whitman: A Study, (1896).

To any man, who would rise in the world, one thing must become evident; he must know that the idle moments must be the busiest of all. On this basis Burroughs worked. While at his work in the Treasury, he recalled his many experiences in the Western Catskills, and wrote these experiences. His Sundays and Holidays were spent in the woods around the National Capital that he may each season increase his knowledge about natural history. The Atlantic Monthly began to publish his nature papers about 1864, the year after he reached Washington, and has continued to do so at regular intervals ever since. In fact at the present time that periodical has three of Burroughs' essays yet unpublished. Wake Robin, a collection of these early nature sketches and his first book on out-door themes, was published in 1871, just four years after the little book on Whitman came from the press. Perhaps we have no more readable book on bird life than this volume of nature sketches, which won for the writer immediate and complete success.

Mr. Joel Benton formally introduced Burroughs to American literary people in the old Scribner's Monthly in 1876 while his third volume, Winter Sunshine (1875), was fresh in the mind of the public. In this timely article Mr. Benton claims: "What first strikes me in Mr. Burroughs's work, even above its well-acquired style, is the unqualified weight of conscience it exhibits. There is no posturing for effect; an admiration he does not have he never mimics. We find in him, therefore, a perfectly healthy and hearty flavor. Apparently, he does not put his pen to paper hastily, or until he is filled with his subject. What has been aptly termed the secondary, or final stage of thought, has with him full play.... A natural observer of things, he summons all the facts, near or remote—there is no side-light too small—and, when the material is all in, it seems to undergo a long incubation in his mind; or shows at least that reflection has done its perfect and many-sided work. Under his careful treatment and keen eye for the picturesque, the details get the proper artistic distribution and stand forth in poetic guise. The essay, when it appears, comes to us freighted with 'the latest news' from the meadows and the woods, and bears the unmistakable imprint of authenticity." This is a good testimonial from a good source, especially since it is the first public utterance of an opinion by an authority, on the quality of Burroughs' literary work. In a recent letter, Mr. Benton writes: "I did not say Burroughs was made by me, or that he remembers the priority of my article, but that I had the privilege and honor of being the first to write about him." This paper, I am sure, renewed his hopes for literary distinction and fame, and perhaps encouraged him to greater efforts.

In Birds and Poets (1877), we find our nature student measuring other men's observations by his own deductions. He is beginning to branch out in literature and note nature references in the poets and now and then calls them to taw for stepping beyond the bounds of truth. Here we find Burroughs as much of a student of literature as he is of nature, and as delightful in his literary references as one could desire. Ten years after his appointment, he tired of his clerkship in the Treasury, as he resigned in 1872 to become receiver for a broken bank in Middletown, New York. Pretty soon after leaving Washington, he was made bank examiner for the Eastern part of New York State, which position he held till 1885. Since this last date he has depended entirely on literature and on a small farm for a livelihood. He purchased a place up the Hudson river at West Park about 1873 and began immediately to build a stone mansion which he named Riverby, and in which he has lived since its completion. But stone houses did not prove best suited for his literary work and he built a small bark covered study only a few yards from Riverby in which he has done most of his literary work. The most active period of his literary career was when he settled at West Park. Mention has already been made of Birds and Poets (1877). The magazines are full of his essays at this time and the volumes come thick in the blast: Locust and Wild Honey (1879), Pepacton and Other Sketches (1881), Fresh Fields (1884), Signs and Seasons (1886). The increased revenue from his books and literary work, supplemented by his little grape farm, enabled him to resign as Bank examiner in 1885, as above suggested, and he has never held office of any kind since. It was about at the age of fifty that Mr. Burroughs seems to have developed a considerable consciousness of literature as an art, as a consequence of which we find him beginning to write papers on literary criticism and Indoor Studies (1889). From this time on his nature books are written in a different key, just as interesting but not quite as enthusiastic, and in most of them a touch of nature philosophy. In 1886 there appeared in the Popular Science Monthly an essay by him under the caption, Science and Theology, which showed pretty clearly the deeper currents of his mind. This paper was followed by others of its kind for several years until they were collected into a volume, The Light of Day, Religious Discussions and Criticism from the Naturalist's Point of View (1900). Studies on such themes are the logical outcome of the growth and development of a mind like that of Burroughs', and in the present case the papers are accompanied with that "unqualified weight of conscience" referred to in Mr. Benton's article and are valuable discussions on themes that never grow old.