(1837-)
John Burroughs was born in Roxbury, New York, April 3d, 1837, and like
many other American youths who later in life became distinguished, he
went to school winters and worked on the farm in summer. He grew up
among people who neither read books nor cared for them, and he considers
this circumstance best suited to his development. Early intercourse with
literary men would, he believes, have dwarfed his original faculty.
[Illustration: JOHN BURROUGHS]
He began to write essays at the age of fourteen, but these early
literary efforts give little hint of his later work, of that faculty for
seeing, and commenting on all that he saw in nature, which became his
chief characteristic. He was especially fond of essays; one of his first
purchases with his own money was a full set of Dr. Johnson, and for a
whole year he lived on 'The Idler' and 'The Rambler' and tried to
imitate their ponderous prose. His first contributions to literature,
modeled on these essays, were promptly returned. By chance he picked up
a volume of Emerson, the master who was to revolutionize his whole
manner of thinking; and as he had fed on Dr. Johnson he fed on the
'Essays and Miscellanies,' until a paper he wrote at nineteen on
'Expressions' was accepted by the editor of the Atlantic, with a lurking
doubt whether it had not come to him on false pretenses, as it was very
much like an early essay of Emerson.
Mr. Burroughs ascribes to Emerson, who stimulated his religious nature,
his improved literary expression; while Whitman was to him a great
humanizing power, and Matthew Arnold taught him clear thinking and clean
writing. He had passed through these different influences by the time he
was twenty-one or twenty-two; had taught for a while; and from 1863 to
1873 was vault-keeper and afterwards chief of the organization division
of the Bureau of National Banks, in the Treasury Department. For several
years afterward he was a special national bank examiner.
The literary quality of his writings from the first captivates the
reader. He has the interpretive power which makes us see what he sees
and invites us to share his enjoyment in his strange adventures. The
stories of the wary trout and the pastoral bee, the ways of sylvan folk,
their quarrels and their love-making, are so many character sketches on
paper, showing a most intimate acquaintance with nature.
He is a born naturalist. He tells us that from childhood he was familiar
with the homely facts of the barn, the cattle and the horses, the
sugar-making and the work of the corn-field, the hay-field, the
threshing, the planting, the burning of fallows. He "loved nature in
those material examples and subtle expressions, with a love passing all
the books in the world." But he also loved and knew books, and this
other love gives to his works their literary charm.
His account of a bird, a flower, or an open-air incident, however
painstaking and minute the record, teems with literary memories. The
sight of the Scotch hills recalls Shakespeare's line,
"The tufty mountains where lie the nibbling sheep."
The plane-tree vocal with birds' voices recalls Tennyson,--"The pillared
dusk of sounding sycamores"; he hears the English chaffinch, and
remembers with keen delight that Drayton calls it "the throstle with
sharp thrills," and Ben Jonson "the lusty throstle." After much
wondering, he finds out why Shakespeare wrote
"The murmuring surge
That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes,"
his own experience being that sea-shores are sandy; but the pebbled
cliffs of Folkestone, with not a grain of sand on the chalk foundation,
justified the poet.
This lover of nature loves not only the beautiful things he sees, but he
loves what they suggest, what they remind him of, what they bid him
aspire to. Like Wordsworth, he "looks on the hills with tenderness, and
makes deep friendship with the streams and groves." He notes what he
divines by observation. And what an observer he is! He discovers that
the bobolink goes south in the night. He scraped an acquaintance with a
yellow rumpled warbler who, taking the reflection of the clouds and blue
sky in a pond for a short cut to the tropics, tried to cross it; with
the result of his clinging for a day and night to a twig that hung down
in the water.
Burroughs has found that whatever bait you use in a trout
stream,--grasshopper, grub, or fly,--there is one thing you must always
put on your hook; namely, your heart. It is a morsel they love above
everything else. He tells us that man has sharper eyes than a dog, a
fox, or any of the wild creatures except the birds, but not so sharp an
ear or a nose; he says that a certain quality of youth is indispensable
in the angler, a certain unworldliness and readiness to invest in an
enterprise that does not pay in current coin. He says that nature loves
to enter a door another hand has opened: a mountain view never looks
better than when one has been warmed up by the capture of a big trout.
Like certain wary game, she is best taken by seeming to pass her by,
intent on other matters. What he does not find out for himself, people
tell him. From a hedge-cutter he learns that some of the birds take an
earth-bath and some a water-bath, while a few take both; a farmer boy
confided to him that the reason we never see any small turtles is
because for two or three years the young turtles bury themselves in the
ground and keep hidden from observation. From a Maine farmer he heard
that both male and female hawks take part in incubation. A barefooted
New Jersey boy told him that "lampers" die as soon as they have built
their nests and laid their eggs. How apt he is in similes! The pastoral
fields of Scotland are "stall-fed," and the hill-sides "wrinkled and
dimpled, like the forms of fatted sheep."
And what other bird-lover has such charming fancies about birds, in whom
he finds a hundred human significances? "The song of the bobolink," he
says, "expresses hilarity; the sparrow sings faith, the bluebird love,
the catbirds pride, the white-eyed fly-catchers self-consciousness, that
of the hermit thrush spiritual serenity, while there is something
military in the call of the robin." Mr. Burroughs has been compared with
Thoreau, but he seems closer to White of Selborne, whom he has
commemorated in one of his most charming essays. Like White, he is a
literary man who is a born naturalist in close intimacy with his brute
neighbors and "rural nature's varied shows." In both, the moral element
is back of nature and the source of her value and charm. Never nature
for her own sake, but for the sake of the soul that is above all and
over all. Like White, too, though by nature solitary, Burroughs is on
cordial terms with his kind. He is an accurate observer, and he takes
Bryant to task for giving an odor to the yellow violet, and Coleridge
for making a lark perch on the stalk of a foxglove. He gloats over a
felicitous expression, like Arnold's "blond meadow-sweet" and Tennyson's
"little speedwell's darling blue"; though in commenting on another poet
he waives the question of accuracy, and says "his happy literary talent
makes up for the poverty of his observation."
And again as with White, he walks through life slowly and in a
ruminating fashion, as though he had leisure to linger with the
impression of the moment. Incident he uses with reserve, but with
picturesque effects; figures do not dominate his landscape but humanize
it.
As a critic Mr. Burroughs most fully reveals his personality. In his
sketches of nature we see what he sees; in his critiques, what he feels
and thinks. The cry of discovery he made when 'Leaves of Grass' fell
into his hands found response in England and was re-echoed in this
country till Burroughs's strange delight in Whitman seemed no longer
strange, but an accepted fact in the history of poetry. The essay on
Emerson, his master, shows the same discriminating mind. But as a
revelation of both author and subject there are few more delightful
papers than Burroughs's essay on Thoreau. In manner it is as pungent and
as racy as Thoreau's writings, and as epigrammatic as Emerson's; and his
defense of Thoreau against the English reviewer who dubbed him a
"skulker" has the sound of the trumpet and the martial tread of soldiers
marching to battle.