"It's the same way with nature and writing about nature. From nature we get not literature, but the raw material for literature. It is very important for us to remember that the bee does not get honey from the flowers; it makes honey from what it gets from the flowers. What it gets from the flowers is nothing but sweet water. The bee gets its sweet water, retires, thinks it over, and by a private process makes it into honey.
"So many nature-writers fail to profit by the example of the bee. They go into the woods and come out again and write about their experience—but they don't give us honey. They don't retire and subject what they find in the woods to a private process. They don't give us honey; they give us just a little sweet water, pretty thoroughly diluted.
"In my own work—if I may mention it in all humbleness—I have tried for years not to give the world just a bare record, but to flavor it, so to speak, with my own personality, as the bee turns the sweet water that it gets into honey by adding its own formic acid.
"If I lived in the city I couldn't do any writing, unless I succeeded in obliterating the city from my consciousness. But I shouldn't try to force my standards on every one. Other men live in the cities and write—Carlyle did most of his work in London. But he lived a secluded life even in the city, and he had to have his yearly pilgrimage to Scotland."
It is some years since John Burroughs has written poetry, although all his prose is clearly the work of a poet. And it is safe to say that better known than any of his intimate prose studies of the out-of-door world—better known even than Wake Robin and that immortal A Hunt for the Nightingale and In Fresh Fields—is one of his poems, Waiting, the poem that begins:
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.
"I wrote Waiting," he said, "in 1862, when I was reading medicine in the office of a country physician. It was a dingy afternoon, and I was feeling pretty blue. But the thought came to me—I suppose I got it from Goethe or some of the Orientals, probably by way of Emerson—that what belonged to me would come to me in time, if I waited—and if I also hustled. So I waited and I hustled, and my little poem turned out to be a prophecy. My own has come to me, as I never expected it to come. The best friends I have were seeking me all the while. There's Henry Ford; he had read all my books, and he came to me—that great-hearted man, the friend of all the birds, and my friend.
"The poem first appeared in the Knickerbocker Magazine. That magazine was edited by a Cockney named Kinneha Cornwallis. It ran long enough to print one of Cornwallis's novels, and then it died. I remember that the Knickerbocker Magazine never paid me for Waiting, and the poem didn't attract any attention until Whittier printed it in his Songs of Three Centuries.
"It has been changed and tampered with and had all sorts of things done to it. It was found among the manuscripts of a poet down South after his death, and his literary executor was going to print it in his book. He wrote to me and asked if I could show a date for it earlier than 1882. I said, 'Yes, 1862!' and that settled that matter.
"There was a man in Boston that I wanted to kick! He wrote to me and asked if he could print Waiting on a card and circulate it among his friends. I told him he could, and sent him an autographed copy to make sure he'd get it straight. He sent me a package of the printed cards, and I found that he had added a stanza to it—a religious stanza, all about Heaven's gate! He had left out the second stanza, and added this religious stanza. He was worried because God had been left out of my poem—poor God, ignored by a little atom like me!