JOHN BURROUGHS
1837–1919
JOHN MUIR
1838–1914
“The two Johns,” as they were affectionately known by their comrades
on the Harriman Expedition to Alaska, were alike in their Christian
names, in their love of nature, and, to a certain extent, in their
powers of expression, but they were profoundly different in every
other respect. I had the privilege of knowing John Muir much more
intimately than I knew John Burroughs. I learned through
correspondence and through long and intimate conversations thoroughly
to understand his Scotch soul, which had a strong Norse element in it
and a moral fervor drawn from the Bible of the Covenanters. It is
interesting to contrast this Scotch type of soul with the English type
of soul seen in John Burroughs.
I had in mind for some time this idea of the racial soul as something
more profound in its influence than either the racial temperament or
the racial mind. If the body had a long history in the past, so has
the soul of man. In reading Wordsworth’s noble “Ode on the Intimations
of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” it flashed
across my mind that along an entirely different path I had reached the
same conclusion as Wordsworth: namely, that the human soul is full of
reminiscences and that it responds to conditions and experiences long
bygone.