We are coming more and more to like the savor of the wild and the
unconventional. Perhaps it is just this savor or suggestion of free
fields and woods, both in his life and in his books, that causes so many
persons to seek out John Burroughs in his retreat among the trees and
rocks on the hills that skirt the western bank of the Hudson. To Mr.
Burroughs more perhaps than to any other living American might be
applied these words in Genesis: "See, the smell of my son is as the
smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed"--so redolent of the soil
and of the hardiness and plenitude of rural things is the influence that
emanates from him. His works are as the raiment of the man, and to them
adheres something as racy and wholesome as is yielded by the fertile
soil.
We are prone to associate the names of our three most prominent literary
naturalists,--Gilbert White, of England, and Thoreau and John Burroughs,
of America,--men who have been so _en rapport_ with nature that, while
ostensibly only disclosing the charms of their mistress, they have at
the same time subtly communicated much of their own wide knowledge of
nature, and permanently enriched our literature as well.
In thinking of Gilbert White one invariably thinks also of Selborne,
his open-air parish; in thinking of Thoreau one as naturally recalls
his humble shelter on the banks of Walden Pond; and it is coming to pass
that in thinking of John Burroughs one thinks likewise of his hidden
farm high on the wooded hills that overlook the Hudson, nearly opposite
Poughkeepsie. It is there that he has built himself a picturesque
retreat, a rustic house named Slabsides. I find that, to many, the word
"Slabsides" gives the impression of a dilapidated, ramshackle kind of
place. This impression is an incorrect one. The cabin is a well-built
two-story structure, its uneuphonious but fitting name having been given
it because its outer walls are formed of bark-covered slabs. "My friends
frequently complain," said Mr. Burroughs, "because I have not given my
house a prettier name, but this name just expresses the place, and the
place just meets the want that I felt for something simple, homely,
secluded--something with the bark on."
Both Gilbert White and Thoreau became identified with their respective
environments almost to the exclusion of other fields. The minute
observations of White, and his records of them, extending over forty
years, were almost entirely confined to the district of Selborne. He
says that he finds that "that district produces the greatest variety
which is the most examined." The thoroughness with which he examined his
own locality is attested by his "Natural History of Selborne." Thoreau
was such a stay-at-home that he refused to go to Paris lest he miss
something of interest in Concord. "I have traveled a good deal in
Concord," he says in his droll way. And one of the most delicious
instances of provinciality that I ever came across is Thoreau's remark
on returning Dr. Kane's "Arctic Explorations" to a friend who had lent
him the book--"Most of the phenomena therein recorded are to be observed
about Concord." In thinking of John Burroughs, however, the thought of
the author's mountain home as the material and heart of his books does
not come so readily to consciousness. For most of us who have felt
the charm, of his lyrical prose, both in his outdoor books and in his
"Indoor Studies," were familiar with him as an author long before we
knew there was a Slabsides--long before there was one, in fact, since
he has been leading his readers to nature for fifty years, while the
picturesque refuge we are now coming to associate with him has been in
existence only about fifteen years.
Our poet-naturalist seems to have appropriated all outdoors for his
stamping-ground. He has given us in his limpid prose intimate glimpses
of the hills and streams and pastoral farms of his native country; has
taken us down the Pepacton, the stream of his boyhood; we have traversed
with him the "Heart of the Southern Catskills," and the valleys of the
Neversink and the Beaverkill; we have sat upon the banks of the Potomac,
and sailed down the Saguenay; we have had a glimpse of the Blue Grass
region, and "A Taste of Maine Birch" (true, Thoreau gave us this, also,
and other "Excursions" as well); we have walked with him the lanes of
"Mellow England"; journeyed "In the Carlyle Country"; marveled at
the azure glaciers of Alaska; wandered in the perpetual summerland
of Jamaica; camped with him and the Strenuous One in the Yellowstone;
looked in awe and wonder at that "Divine Abyss," the Grand Canon of the
Colorado; felt the "Spell of Yosemite," and idled with him under the
sun-steeped skies of Hawaii and by her morning-glory seas.
Our essayist is thus seen not to be untraveled, yet he is no wanderer.
No man ever had the home feeling stronger than has he; none is more
completely under the spell of a dear and familiar locality. Somewhere he
has said: "Let a man stick his staff into the ground anywhere and say,
'This is home,' and describe things from that point of view, or as they
stand related to that spot,--the weather, the fauna, the flora,--and
his account shall have an interest to us it could not have if not thus
located and defined."
(Illustration of Riverby from the Orchard. From a photograph by Charles
S. Olcott)
Before hunting out Mr. Burroughs in his mountain hermitage, let us
glance at his conventional abode, Riverby, at West Park, Ulster County,
New York. This has been his home since 1874. Having chosen this place
by the river, he built his house of stone quarried from the neighboring
hills, and finished it with the native woods; he planted a vineyard
on the sloping hillside, and there he has successfully combined the
business of grape-culture with his pursuits and achievements as a
literary naturalist. More than half his books have been written since
he has dwelt at Riverby, the earlier ones having appeared when he was a
clerk in the Treasury Department in Washington, an atmosphere supposedly
unfriendly to literary work. It was not until he gave up his work in
Washington, and his later position as bank examiner in the eastern part
of New York State, that he seemed to come into his own. Business life,
he had long known, could never be congenial to him; literary pursuits
alone were insufficient; the long line of yeoman ancestry back of him
cried out for recognition; he felt the need of closer contact with the
soil; of having land to till and cultivate. This need, an ancestral one,
was as imperative as his need of literary expression, an individual
one. Hear what he says after having ploughed in his new vineyard for the
first time: "How I soaked up the sunshine to-day! At night I glowed all
over; my whole being had had an earth bath; such a feeling of freshly
ploughed land in every cell of my brain. The furrow had struck in; the
sunshine had photographed it upon my soul." Later he built him a little
study somewhat apart from his dwelling, to which he could retire and
muse and write whenever the mood impelled him. This little one-room
study, covered with chestnut bark, is on the brow of a hill which slopes
toward the river; it commands an extended view of the Hudson. But
even this did not meet his requirements. The formality and routine of
conventional life palled upon him; the expanse of the Hudson, the noise
of railway and steamboat wearied him; he craved something more
retired, more primitive, more homely. "You cannot have the same kind of
attachment and sympathy for a great river; it does not flow through your
affections like a lesser stream," he says, thinking, no doubt, of the
trout-brooks that thread his father's farm, of Montgomery Hollow Stream,
of the Red Kill, and of others that his boyhood knew. Accordingly
he cast about for some sequestered spot in which to make himself a
hermitage.
(Illustration of The Study, Riverby. From a photograph by Charles S.
Olcott)
During his excursions in the vicinity of West Park, Mr. Burroughs had
lingered oftenest in the hills back of, and parallel with, the Hudson,
and here he finally chose the site for his rustic cabin. He had fished
and rowed in Black Pond, sat by its falls in the primitive forest,
sometimes with a book, sometimes with his son, or with some other hunter
or fisher of congenial tastes; and on one memorable day in April, years
agone, he had tarried there with Walt Whitman. There, seated on a
fallen tree, Whitman wrote this description of the place which was later
printed in "Specimen Days":--
I jot this memorandum in a wild scene of woods and hills where we have
come to visit a waterfall. I never saw finer or more copious hemlocks,
many of them large, some old and hoary. Such a sentiment to them,
secretive, shaggy, what I call weather-beaten, and let-alone--a rich
underlay of ferns, yew sprouts and mosses, beginning to be spotted with
the early summer wild flowers. Enveloping all, the monotone and liquid
gurgle from the hoarse, impetuous, copious fall--the greenish-tawny,
darkly transparent waters plunging with velocity down the rocks, with
patches of milk-white foam--a stream of hurrying amber, thirty
feet wide, risen far back in the hills and woods, now rushing with
volume--every hundred rods a fall, and sometimes three or four in that
distance. A primitive forest, druidical, solitary, and savage--not
ten visitors a year--broken rocks everywhere, shade overhead, thick
underfoot with leaves--a just palpable wild and delicate aroma.
"Not ten visitors a year" may have been true when Whitman described the
place, but we know it is different now. Troops of Vassar girls come
to visit the hermit of Slabsides, and are taken to these falls;
nature-lovers, and those who only think themselves nature-lovers, come
from far and near; Burroughs clubs, boys' schools, girls' schools,
pedestrians, cyclists, artists, authors, reporters, poets,--young and
old, renowned and obscure,--from April till November seek out this lover
of nature, who is a lover of human nature as well, who gives himself and
his time generously to those who find him. When the friends of Socrates
asked him where they should bury him, he said: "You may bury me if you
can _find_ me." Not all who seek John Burroughs really find him; he does
not mix well with every newcomer; one must either have something of Mr.
Burroughs's own cast of mind, or else be of a temperament capable of
genuine sympathy with him, in order to find the real man. He withdraws
into his shell before persons of uncongenial temperament; to such he can
never really speak--they see Slabsides, but they don't see Burroughs. He
is, however, never curt or discourteous to any one. Unlike Thoreau, who
"put the whole of nature between himself and his fellows," Mr. Burroughs
leads his fellows to nature, although it is sometimes, doubtless, with
the feeling that one can lead a horse to water, but can't make him
drink; for of all the sightseers that journey to Slabsides there must of
necessity be many that "Oh!" and "Ah!" a good deal, but never really get
further in their study of nature than that. Still, it can scarcely fail
to be salutary even to these to get away from the noise and the strife
in city and town, and see how sane, simple, and wholesome life is when
lived in a sane and simple and wholesome way. Somehow it helps one
to get a clearer sense of the relative value of things, it makes
one ashamed of his petty pottering over trifles, to witness this
exemplification of the plain living and high thinking which so many
preach about, and so few practice.
"The thing which a man's nature calls him to do--what else so well worth
doing?" asks this writer. One's first impression after glancing about
this well-built cabin, with the necessities of body and soul close at
hand, is a vicarious satisfaction that here, at least, is one who has
known what he wanted to do and has done it. We are glad that Gilbert
White made pastoral calls on his outdoor parishioners,--the birds, the
toads, the turtles, the snails, and the earthworms,--although we
often wonder if he evinced a like conscientiousness toward his human
parishioners; we are glad that Thoreau left the manufacture of lead
pencils to become, as Emerson jocosely complained, "the leader of a
huckleberry party",--glad because these were the things their natures
called them to do, and in so doing they best enriched their fellows.
They literally went away that they might come to us in a closer, truer
way than had they tarried in our midst. It must have been in answer to
a similar imperative need of his own that John Burroughs chose to hie
himself to the secluded yet accessible spot where his mountain cabin is
built.
"As the bird feathers her nest with down plucked from her own breast,"
says Mr. Burroughs in one of his early essays, "so one's spirit must
shed itself upon its environment before it can brood and be at all
content." Here at Slabsides one feels that its master does brood and
is content. It is an ideal location for a man of his temperament; it
affords him the peace and seclusion he desires, yet is not so remote
that he is shut off from human fellowship. For he is no recluse; his
sympathies are broad and deep. Unlike Thoreau, who asserts that "you
cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature," and that "those
qualities that bring you near to the one estrange you from the other,"
Mr. Burroughs likes his kind; he is doubtless the most accessible of all
notable American writers,--a fact which is perhaps a drawback to him in
his literary work, his submission to being hunted out often being
taken advantage of, no doubt, by persons who are in no real sense
nature-lovers, but who go to his retreat merely to see the hermit in
hiding there.
After twelve years' acquaintance with his books I yielded to the
impulse, often felt before, to tell Mr. Burroughs what a joy his
writings had been to me. In answering my letter he said: "The genuine
responses that come to an author from his unknown readers, judging
from my own experience, are always very welcome. It is no intrusion but
rather an inspiration." A gracious invitation to make him a visit came
later.
The visit was made in the "month of tall weeds," in September, 1901.
Arriving at West Park, the little station on the West Shore Railway,
I found Mr. Burroughs in waiting. The day was gray and somewhat
forbidding; not so the author's greeting; his almost instant recognition
and his quiet welcome made me feel that I had always known him. It was
like going home to hear him say quietly, "So you are here--really here,"
as he took my hand. The feeling of comradeship that I had experienced
in reading his books was realized in his presence. With market-basket
on arm, he started off at a brisk pace along the country road, first
looking to see if I was well shod, as he warned me that it was quite a
climb to Slabsides.
His kindly face was framed with snowy hair. He was dressed in
olive-brown clothes, and "his old experienced coat" blended in color
with the tree-trunks and the soil with which one felt sure it had often
been in close communion.
We soon left the country road and struck into a woodland path, going
up through quiet, cathedral-like woods till we came to an abrupt rocky
stairway which my companion climbed with ease and agility despite his
five-and-sixty years.
I paused to examine some mushrooms, and, finding a species that I
knew to be edible, began nibbling it. "Don't taste that," he said
imperatively; but I laughed and nibbled away. With a mingling of anxiety
and curiosity he inquired: "Are you sure it's all right? Do you really
like them? I never could; they are so uncanny--the gnomes or evil genii
or hobgoblins of the vegetable world--give them a wide berth."
He pointed to a rock in the distance where he said he sometimes sat and
sulked. "_You_ sulk, and own up to it, too?" I asked. "Yes, and own up
to it, too. Why not? Don't you?"
"Are there any bee-trees around here?" I questioned, remembering that
in one of his essays he has said: "If you would know the delight of
bee-hunting, and how many sweets such a trip yields besides honey, come
with me some bright, warm, late September or early October day. It is
the golden season of the year, and any errand or pursuit that takes
us abroad upon the hills, or by the painted woods and along the
amber-colored streams at such a time is enough." Here was a September
day if not a bright one, and here were the painted woods, and somehow I
felt half aggrieved that he did not immediately propose going in quest
of wild honey. Instead he only replied: "I don't know whether there are
bee-trees around here now or not. I used to find a good deal of wild
honey over at a place that I spoke of casually as Mount Hymettus, and
was much surprised later to find they had so put it down on the maps of
this region. Wild honey is delectable, but I pursued that subject till
I sucked it dry. I haven't done much about it these later years." So
we are not to gather wild honey, I find; but what of that?--am I not
actually walking in the woods with John Burroughs?
Up, up we climb, an ascent of about a mile and a quarter from the
railway station. Emerging from the woods, we come rather suddenly upon a
reclaimed rock-girt swamp, the most of which is marked off in long green
lines of celery. This swamp was formerly a lake-bottom; its rich black
soil and three perennial springs near by decided Mr. Burroughs to drain
and reclaim the soil and compel it to yield celery and other garden
produce.
Nestling under gray rocks, on the edge of the celery garden, embowered
in forest trees, is the vine-covered cabin, Slabsides. What a feeling
of peace and aloofness comes over one in looking up at the encircling
hills! The few houses scattered about on other rocks are at a just
comfortable distance to be neighborly, but not too neighborly. Would one
be lonesome here? Aye, lonesome, but--
"Not melancholy,--no, for it is green
And bright and fertile, furnished in itself
With the few needful things that life requires;
In rugged arms how soft it seems to lie,
How tenderly protected!"
Mr. Burroughs has given to those who contemplate building a house some
sound advice in his essay "Roof-Tree." There he has said that a man
makes public proclamation of what are his tastes and his manners, or
his want of them, when he builds his house; that if we can only keep our
pride and vanity in abeyance and forget that all the world is looking
on, we may be reasonably sure of having beautiful houses. Tried by his
own test, he has no reason to be ashamed of his taste or his manners
when Slabsides is critically examined. Blending with its surroundings,
it is coarse, strong, and substantial without; within it is snug and
comfortable; its wide door bespeaks hospitality; its low, broad
roof, protection and shelter; its capacious hearth, cheer; all its
appointments for the bodily needs express simplicity and frugality; and
its books and magazines, and the conversation of the host--are they not
there for the needs that bread alone will not supply?
"Mr. Burroughs, why don't you PAINT things?" asked a little boy of four,
who had been spending a happy day at Slabsides, but who, at nightfall,
while nestling in the author's arms, seemed suddenly to realize that
this rustic house was very different from anything he had seen before.
"I don't like things painted, my little man; that is just why I came up
here--to get away from paint and polish--just as you liked to wear your
overalls to-day and play on the grass, instead of keeping on that pretty
dress your mother wanted you to keep clean." "Oh!" said the child in
such a knowing tone that one felt he understood. But that is another
story.
The time of which I am speaking--that gray September day--what a
memorable day it was! How cheery the large, low room looked when the
host replenished the smouldering fire! "I sometimes come up here even
in winter, build a fire, and stay for an hour or more, with long, sad,
sweet thoughts and musings," he said. He is justly proud of the huge
stone fireplace and chimney which he himself helped to construct; he
also helped to hew the trees and build the house. "What joy went into
the building of this retreat! I never expect to be so well content
again." Then, musing, he added: "It is a comfortable, indolent life I
lead here; I read a little, write a little, and dream a good deal.
Here the sun does not rise so early as it does down at Riverby. 'Tired
nature's sweet restorer' is not put to rout so soon by the screaming
whistles, the thundering trains, and the necessary rules and regulations
of well-ordered domestic machinery. Here I really 'loaf and invite my
soul.' Yes, I am often melancholy, and hungry for companionship--not in
the summer months, no, but in the quiet evenings before the fire, with
only Silly Sally to share my long, long thoughts; she is very attentive,
but I doubt if she notices when I sigh. She doesn't even heed me when I
tell her that ornithology is a first-rate pursuit for men, but a bad one
for cats. I suspect that she studies the birds with greater care than
I do; for now I can get all I want of a bird and let him remain in the
bush, but Silly Sally is a thorough-going ornithologist; she must engage
in all the feather-splittings that the ornithologists do, and she isn't
satisfied until she has thoroughly dissected and digested her material,
and has all the dry bones of the subject laid bare."
We sat before the fire while Mr. Burroughs talked of nature, of books,
of men and women whose lives or books, or both, have closely touched his
own. He talked chiefly of Emerson and Whitman, the men to whom he seems
to owe the most, the two whom most his soul has loved.
"I remember the first time I saw Emerson," he said musingly; "it was at
West Point during the June examinations of the cadets. Emerson had been
appointed by President Lincoln as one of the board of visitors. I had
been around there in the afternoon, and had been peculiarly interested
in a man whose striking face and manner challenged my attention. I did
not hear him speak, but watched him going about with a silk hat,
much too large, pushed back on his head; his sharp eyes peering into
everything, curious about everything. 'Here,' said I to myself, 'is a
countryman who has got away from home, and intends to see all that is
going on'--such an alert, interested air! That evening a friend came to
me and in a voice full of awe and enthusiasm said, 'Emerson is in town!'
Then I knew who the alert, sharp-eyed stranger was. We went to the
meeting and met our hero, and the next day walked and talked with him.
He seemed glad to get away from those old fogies and talk with us young
men. I carried his valise to the boat-landing--I was in the seventh
heaven of delight."
"I saw him several years later," he continued, "soon after 'Wake-Robin'
was published; he mentioned it and said: 'Capital title, capital!' I
don't suppose he had read much besides the title."
"The last time I saw him," he said with a sigh, "was at Holmes's
seventieth-birthday breakfast, in Boston. But then his mind was like a
splendid bridge with one span missing; he had--what is it you doctors
call it?--_aphasia_, yes, that is it--he had to grope for his words. But
what a serene, godlike air! He was like a plucked eagle tarrying in the
midst of a group of lesser birds. He would sweep the assembly with
that searching glance, as much as to say, 'What is all this buzzing
and chirping about?' Holmes was as brilliant and scintillating as ever;
sparks of wit would greet every newcomer, flying out as the sparks fly
from that log. Whittier was there, too, looking nervous and uneasy and
very much out of his element. But he stood next to Emerson, prompting
his memory and supplying the words his voice refused to utter. When
I was presented, Emerson said in a slow, questioning way,
'Burroughs--Burroughs?' 'Why, thee knows _him_,' said Whittier, jogging
his memory with some further explanation; but I doubt if he then
remembered anything about me."
It was not such a leap from the New England writers to Whitman as one
might imagine. Mr. Burroughs spoke of Emerson's prompt and generous
indorsement of the first edition of "Leaves of Grass": "I give you joy
of your free, brave thought. I have great joy in it." This and much else
Emerson had written in a letter to Whitman. "It is the charter of an
emperor!" Dana had said when Whitman showed him the letter. The poet's
head was undoubtedly a little turned by praise from such a source,
and much to Emerson's annoyance, the letter was published in the next
edition of the "Leaves." Still Emerson and Whitman remained friends to
the last.
"Whitman was a child of the sea," said Mr. Burroughs; "nurtured by the
sea, cradled by the sea; he gave one the same sense of invigoration and
of illimitableness that we get from the sea. He never looked so much at
home as when on the shore--his gray clothes, gray hair, and far-seeing
blue-gray eyes blending with the surroundings. And his thoughts--the
same broad sweep, the elemental force and grandeur and all-embracingness
of the impartial sea!"
"Whitman never hurried," Mr. Burroughs continued; "he always seemed to
have infinite time at his disposal." It brought Whitman very near to
hear Mr. Burroughs say, "He used to take Sunday breakfasts with us in
Washington. Mrs. Burroughs makes capital pancakes, and Walt was very
fond of them; but he was always late to breakfast. The coffee would boil
over, the griddle would smoke, car after car would go jingling by,
and no Walt. Sometimes it got to be a little trying to have domestic
arrangements so interfered with; but a car would stop at last, Walt
would roll off it, and saunter up to the door--cheery, vigorous, serene,
putting every one in good humor. And how he ate! He radiated health
and hopefulness. This is what made his work among the sick soldiers in
Washington of such inestimable value. Every one that came into personal
relations with him felt his rare compelling charm."
It was all very well, this talk about the poets, but climbing
"break-neck stairs" on our way thither had given the guest an appetite,
and the host as well; and these appetites had to be appeased by
something less transcendental than a feast of reason. Scarcely
interrupting his engaging monologue, Mr. Burroughs went about
his preparations for dinner, doing things deftly and quietly, all
unconscious that there was anything peculiar in this sight to the
spectator. Potatoes and onions were brought in with the earth still on
them, their bed was made under the ashes, and we sat down to more talk.
After a while he took a chicken from the market-basket, spread it on a
toaster, and broiled it over the coals; he put the dishes on the hearth
to warm, washed the celery, parched some grated corn over the coals
while the chicken was broiling, talking the while of Tolstoy and of
Maeterlinck, of orioles and vireos, of whatever we happened to touch
upon. He avowed that he was envious of Maeterlinck on account of his
poetic "Life of the Bee." "I ought to have written that," he said; "I
know the bee well enough, but I could never do anything so exquisite."
Parts of Maeterlinck's "Treasures of the Humble," and "Wisdom and
Destiny," he "couldn't stand." I timorously mentioned his chapter on
"Silence."
"'Silence'? Oh, yes; silence is very well--some kinds of it; but _why
make such a noise about silence_?" he asked with a twinkle in his eyes.
When the chicken was nearly ready, I moved toward the dining-table,
on which some dishes were piled. As though in answer to my thought, he
said:
"Yes, if there's anything you can do there, you may." So I began
arranging the table.
"Where are _my_ knife and fork?" "In the cupboard," he answered without
ceremony.
We brought the good things from the hearth, hot and delicious, and
sat down to a dinner that would have done credit to an Adirondack
guide,--and when one has said this, what more need one say?
In helping myself to the celery I took an outside piece. Mine host
reached over and, putting a big white centre of celery on my plate,
said: "What's the use taking the outside of things when one can have the
heart?" This is typical of John Burroughs's life as well as his art--he
has let extraneous things, conventionalities, and non-essentials go; has
gone to the heart of things. It is this that has made his work so vital.
As we arose from the table, I began picking up the dishes.
"You are going to help, are you?"
"Of course," I replied; "where is your dish-cloth? "--a natural
question, as any woman will agree, but what a consternation it evoked!
A just perceptible delay, a fumbling among pots and pans, and he came
toward me with a most apologetic air, and with the sorriest-looking rag
I had ever seen--its narrow circumference encircling a very big hole.
"Is _that_ the best dish-cloth you have?" I asked.
For answer he held it up in front of his face, but the most of it
being hole, it did not hide the eyes that twinkled so merrily that my
housewifely reproof was effectually silenced. I took the sorry remnant
and began washing the dishes, mentally resolving, and carrying out my
resolution the next day, to send him a respectable dish-cloth. Prosaic,
if you will, but does not his own Emerson say something about giving--
"to barrows, trays, and pans,
Grace and glimmer of romance"?
And what graces a dish-pan better than a clean, whole, self-respecting
dish-cloth?
So there we stood, John Burroughs and his humble reader, washing and
wiping dishes, and weighing Amiel and Schopenhauer in the balance at the
same time; and a very novel and amusing experience it was. Yet it did
not seem so strange after all, but almost as though it had happened
before. Silly Sally purred beseechingly as she followed her master about
the room and out to the wood-pile, reminding him that she liked chicken
bones.
While putting the bread in the large tin box that stood on the
stair-landing, I had some difficulty with the clasp. "Never mind that,"
said Mr. Burroughs, as he scraped the potato skins into the fire; "a
Vassar girl sat down on that box last summer, and it's never been the
same since."
The work finished, there was more talk before the fire. It was here
that the author told his guest about Anne Gilchrist, the talented,
noble-hearted Englishwoman, whose ready acceptance of Whitman's message
bore fruit in her penetrating criticism of Whitman, a criticism which
stands to-day unrivaled by anything that has been written concerning the
Good Gray Poet.
Like most of Mr. Burroughs' readers, I cherish his poem "Waiting," and,
like most of them, I told him so on seeing him seated before the fire
with folded hands and face serene, a living embodiment of the faith and
trust expressed in those familiar lines. It would seem natural that
he should write such a poem after the heat of the day, after his ripe
experience, after success had come to him; it is the lesson we expect
one to learn on reaching his age, and learning how futile is the fret
and urge of life, how infinitely better is the attitude of trust that
what is our own will gravitate to us in obedience to eternal laws. But
I there learned that he had written the poem when a young man, life
all before him, his prospects in a dubious and chaotic condition, his
aspirations seeming likely to come to naught.
"I have lived to prove it true," he said,--"that which I but vaguely
divined when I wrote the lines. Our lives are all so fearfully and
wonderfully shot through with the very warp and woof of the universe,
past, present, and to come! No doubt at all that our own--that which
our souls crave and need--does gravitate toward us, or we toward it.
'Waiting' has been successful," he added, "not on account of its poetic
merit, but for some other merit or quality. It puts in simple and happy
form some common religious aspirations, without using the religious
jargon. People write me from all parts of the country that they treasure
it in their hearts; that it steadies their hand at the helm; that it
is full of consolation for them. It is because it is poetry allied
with religion that it has this effect; poetry alone would not do this;
neither would a prose expression of the same religious aspirations do
it, for we often outgrow the religious views and feelings of the past.
The religious thrill, the sense of the Infinite, the awe and majesty of
the universe, are no doubt permanent in the race, but the expression of
these feelings in creeds and forms addressed to the understanding,
or exposed to the analysis of the understanding, is as transient and
flitting as the leaves of the trees. My little poem is vague enough to
escape the reason, sincere enough to go to the heart, and poetic enough
to stir the imagination."
The power of accurate observation, of dispassionate analysis, of keen
discrimination and insight that we his readers are familiar with in his
writings about nature, books, men, and life in general, is here seen to
extend to self-analysis as well,--a rare gift; a power that makes his
opinions carry conviction. We feel he is not intent on upholding any
theory, but only on seeing things as they are, and reporting them as
they are.
A steady rain had set in early in the afternoon, effectually drowning
my hopes of a longer wood-land walk that day, but I was then, and many
a time since then have been, well content that it was so. I learned less
of woodland lore, but more of the woodland philosopher.
In quiet converse passed the hours of that memorable day in the humble
retreat on the wooded hills,--
"Far from the clank of the world,"--
and in the company of the poet-naturalist. So cordial had my host been,
so gracious the admission to his home and hospitality, that I left the
little refuge with a feeling of enrichment I shall cherish while life
lasts. I had sought out a favorite author; I had gained a friend.