I am, as you know, the son of a farmer. My father was the son of a
farmer, as was his father, and his. There is no break, so far as I know,
in the line of farmers back into the seventeenth century. There was a
Rev. George Burroughs who was hanged (in 1692) for a witch in Salem. He
was a Harvard graduate. I know of no other Harvard graduate by our name
until Julian (Mr. Burroughs's son) graduated in 1901 from Harvard. My
father's cousin, the Rev. John C. Burroughs, the first president of
Chicago University, was graduated from Yale sometime in the early
forties.
The first John Burroughs of whom I have any trace came from the West
Indies, and settled in Stratford, Connecticut, where he married in 1694.
He had ten children, of whom the seventh was John, born in August, 1705.
My descent does not come from this John, but from his eldest brother,
Stephen, who was born at Stratford in February, 1695. Stephen had eight
children, and here another John turns up--his last child, born in 1745.
His third child, Stephen Burroughs (born in 1729), was a shipbuilder and
became a noted mathematician and astronomer, and lived at Bridgeport,
Connecticut. My descent is through Stephen's seventh child, Ephraim,
born in 1740.
Ephraim, my great-grandfather, also had a large family, six sons and
several daughters, of which my grandfather Eden was one. He was born in
Stratford, about 1770. My great-grandfather Ephraim left Stratford near
the beginning of the Revolution and came into New York State, first into
Dutchess County, when Grandfather was a small boy, and finally settled
in what is now the town of Stamford, Delaware County, where he died in
1818. He is buried in a field between Hobart and Stamford.
My grandfather Eden married Rachael Avery, and shortly afterward moved
over the mountain to the town of Roxbury, cutting a road through the
woods and bringing his wife and all their goods and chattels on a sled
drawn by a yoke of oxen. This must have been not far from the year 1795.
He cleared the land and built a log house with a black-ash bark roof,
and a great stone chimney, and a floor of hewn logs. Grandmother said it
was the happiest day of her life when she found herself the mistress of
this little house in the woods. Great-grandmother Avery lived with
them later. She had a petulant disposition. One day when reproved for
something, she went off and hid herself in the bushes and sulked--a
family trait; I'm a little that way, I guess.
Grandfather Burroughs was religious,--an Old-School Baptist,--a
thoughtful, quiet, exemplary man who read his Bible much. He was of
spare build, serious, thrifty after the manner of pioneers, and a kind
husband and father. He died, probably of apoplexy, when I was four years
old. I can dimly remember him. He was about seventy-two.
Grandmother Burroughs had sandy hair and a freckled face, and from her
my father and his sister Abby got their red hair. From this source I
doubtless get some of my Celtic blood. Grand-mother Burroughs had nine
children; the earliest ones died in infancy; their graves are on
the hill in the old burying-ground. Two boys and five girls
survived--Phoebe, Betsy, Mary, Abby, Olly, Chauncey (my father), and
Hiram.
I do not remember Grandmother at all. She died, I think, in 1838, of
consumption; she was in the seventies. Father said her last words were,
"Chauncey, I have but a little while to live." Her daughter Oily and
also my sister Oily died of consumption. Grandmother used to work with
Grandfather in the fields, and help make sugar. I have heard them tell
how in 1812 they raised wheat which sold for $2.50 a bushel--a great
thing.
Father told me of his uncle, Chauncey Avery, brother of Grandmother
Burroughs, who, with his wife and seven children, was drowned near
Shandaken, by a flood in the Esopus Creek, in April, 1814, or 1816. The
creek rose rapidly in the night; retreat was cut off in the morning.
They got on the roof and held family prayers. Uncle Chauncey tried to
fell a tree and make a bridge, but the water drove him away. The house
was finally carried away with most of the family in it. The father
swam to a stump with one boy on his back and stood there till the water
carried away the stump, then tried to swim with the boy for shore, but
the driftwood soon engulfed him and all was over. Two of the bodies were
never found. Their bones doubtless rest somewhere in the still waters of
the lower Esopus.
(Here follow details concerning one paternal and one maternal aunt,
which, though picturesque, would better be omitted. It is to be noted,
however, that in this simple homely narrative of his ancestors (which,
by the way, gives a vivid picture of the early pioneer days) and later
in his own personal history, there is no attempt to conceal or
gloss over weaknesses or shortcomings; all is set down with engaging
candor.--C. B.)
Father's sister Abby married a maternal cousin, John Kelly. He was of
a scholarly turn. He worked for Father the year I was born, and I was
named after him. I visited him in Pennsylvania in 1873, and while there,
when he was talking with me about the men of our family named John
Burroughs, he said, "One was a minister in the West, one was Uncle
Hiram's son, you are the third, and there is still another I have heard
of,--a writer." And I was silly enough not to tell him that I was that
one. After I reached home, some of my people sent him "Winter Sunshine,"
and when he found that I was its author, he wrote that he "set great
store by it." I don't know why I should have been so reticent about my
books--they were a foreign thing, I suppose; it was not natural to speak
of them among my kinsfolk.
(In this connection let me quote from an early letter of Mr. Burroughs
to me. It was written in 1901 after the death of his favorite sister:
"She was very dear to me, and I had no better friend. More than the rest
of my people she aspired to understand and appreciate me, and with a
measure of success. My family are plain, unlettered farmer folk, and the
world in which you and I live iss a sealed book to them. The have never
read my books. What they value in me is what I have in common with them,
which is, no doubt, the larger part of me. But I love them all just the
same. They are a part of father and mother, of the old home, and of my
youthful days."--C. B.)
Mother's father. Grandfather Kelly, was a soldier of 1776, of Irish
descent, born in Connecticut, I think. His name was Edmund Kelly. He
went into the war as a boy and saw Washington and La Fayette. He was at
Valley Forge during that terrible winter the army spent there. One
day Washington gave the order to the soldiers to dress-parade for
inspection; some had good clothes, some scarcely any, and no shoes. He
made all the well-dressed men go and cut wood for the rest, and excused
the others.
Grandfather was a small man with a big head and quite pronounced Irish
features. He was a dreamer. He was not a good provider; Grandmother did
most of the providing. He wore a military coat with brass buttons, and
red-top boots. He believed in spooks and witches, and used to tell us
spook stories till our hair would stand on end.
He was an expert trout fisherman. Early in the morning I would dig
worms for bait, and we would go fishing over in West Settlement, or in
Montgomery Hollow. I went fishing with him when he was past eighty.
He would steal along the streams and "snake" out the trout, walking as
briskly as I do now. From him I get my dreamy, lazy, shirking ways.
In 1848 he and Grandmother came to live near us. He had a severe fit of
illness that year. I remember we caught a fat coon for him. He was
fond of game. I was there one morning when they entertained a colored
minister overnight, probably a fugitive slave. He prayed--how lustily he
prayed!
I have heard Grandfather tell how, when he was a boy in Connecticut, he
once put his hand in a bluebird's nest and felt, as he said, "something
comical"; he drew out his hand, which was followed by the head and neck
of a black snake; he took to his heels, and the black snake after him.
(I rather think that's a myth.) He said his uncle, who was ploughing,
came after the black snake with a whip, and the snake slunk away. He
thought he remembered that. It may be a black snake might pursue one,
but I doubt it.
(Mr. Burroughs's ingrained tendency to question reports of improbable
things in nature shows even in these reminiscences of his grandfather.
His instinct for the truth is always on the qui vive.--C. B.)
Grandmother Kelly lived to be past eighty. She was a big woman--thrifty
and domestic--big enough to take "Granther" up in her arms and walk
off with him. She did more to bring up her family than he did; was a
practical housewife, and prolific. She had ten children and made every
one of them toe the mark. I don't know whether she ever took "Granther"
across her knee or not, but he probably deserved it. She was quite
uneducated. Her maiden name was Lavinia Minot. I don't know where her
people came from, or whether she had any brothers and sisters. They
lived in Red Kill mostly, in the eastern part of the town of Roxbury,
and also over on the edge of Greene County. I remember, when Grandfather
used to tell stories of cruelty in the army, and of the hardships of the
soldiers, she would wriggle and get very angry. All her children were
large. They were as follows: Sukie, Ezekiel, Charles, Martin, Edmund,
William, Thomas, Hannah, Abby, and Amy (my mother). Aunt Sukie was a
short, chubby woman, always laughing. Uncle Charles was a man of strong
Irish features, like Grandfather. He was a farmer who lived in Genesee
County. Uncle Martin was a farmer of fair intelligence; Ezekiel was
lower in the scale than the others; was intemperate, and after losing
his farm became a day-laborer. He would carry a gin-bottle into the
fields, and would mow the stones as readily as he would the grass--and
I had to turn the grindstone to sharpen his scythe. Uncle Edmund was a
farmer and a pettifogger. Uncle William died comparatively young; he
had nurseries near Rochester. Uncle Thomas was a farmer, slow and canny,
with a quiet, dry humor. Aunt Hannah married Robert Avery, who drank a
good deal; I can't remember anything about her. Aunt Abby was large and
thrifty; she married John Jenkins, and had a large family.... Amy, my
mother, was her mother's tenth child.
Mother was born in Rensselaer County near Albany, in 1808. Her father
moved to Delaware County when she was a child, driving there with an
ox-team. Mother "worked out" in her early teens. She was seventeen or
eighteen when she married, February, 1827.
Father and Mother first went to keeping house on Grandfather Burroughs's
old place--not in the log house, but in the frame house of which you saw
the foundations. Brother Hiram was born there.
(Mr. Burroughs's last walk with his father was to the crumbling
foundations of this house. I have heard him tell how his father stood
and pointed out the location of the various rooms--the room where they
slept the first night they went there; the one where the eldest child
was born; that in which his mother died. I stood (one August day
in 1902) with Mr. Burroughs on the still remaining joists of his
grandfather's house--grass-grown, and with the debris of stones and
beams mingling with weeds and bushes. He pointed out to me, as his
father had done for him, the location of the various rooms, and mused
upon the scenes enacted there; he showed where the paths led to the barn
and to the spring, and seemed to take a melancholy interest in picturing
the lives of his parents and grandparents. A sudden burst of gladness
from a song sparrow, and his musings gave way to attentive pleasure, and
the sunlit Present claimed him instead of the shadowy Past. He was soon
rejoicing in the discovery of a junco's nest near the foundations of the
old house.--C.B.)
My father, Chauncey Burroughs, was born December 20, 1803. He received a
fair schooling for those times--the three R's--and taught school one or
two winters. His reading was the Bible and hymn-book, his weekly secular
paper, and a monthly religious paper.
He used to say that as a boy he was a very mean one, saucy, quarrelsome,
and wicked, liked horse-racing and card-playing--both alike disreputable
in those times. In early manhood he "experienced religion" and joined
the Old-School Baptist Church, of which his parents were members, and
then all his bad habits seem to have been discarded. He stopped swearing
and Sabbath-breaking, and other forms of wickedness, and became an
exemplary member of the community. He was a man of unimpeachable
veracity; bigoted and intolerant in his religious and political views,
but a good neighbor, a kind father, a worthy citizen, a fond husband,
and a consistent member of his church. He improved his farm, paid his
debts, and kept his faith. He had no sentiment about things and was
quite unconscious of the beauties of nature over which we make such an
ado. "The primrose by the river's brim" would not have been seen by him
at all. This is true of most farmers; the plough and the hoe and the
scythe do not develop their aesthetic sensibilities; then, too, in the
old religious view the beauties of this world were vain and foolish.
I have said that my father had strong religious feeling. He took "The
Signs of the Times" for over forty years, reading all those experiences
with the deepest emotion. I remember when a mere lad hearing him pray in
the hog-pen. It was a time of unusual religious excitement with him, no
doubt; I heard, and ran away, knowing it was not for me to hear.
Father had red hair, and a ruddy, freckled face. He was tender-hearted
and tearful, but with blustering ways and a harsh, strident voice.
Easily moved to emotion, he was as transparent as a child, with a
child's lack of self-consciousness. Unsophisticated, he had no art to
conceal anything, no guile, and, as Mother used to say, no manners. "All
I ever had," Father would rejoin, "for I've never used any of them." I
doubt if he ever said "Thank you" in his life; I certainly never heard
him. He had nothing to conceal, and could not understand that others
might have. I have heard him ask people what certain things cost, men
their politics, women their ages, with the utmost ingenuousness. One day
when he and I were in Poughkeepsie, we met a strange lad on the street
with very red hair, and Father said to him, "I can remember when my hair
was as red as yours." The boy stared at him and passed on.
Although Father lacked delicacy, he did not lack candor or directness.
He would tell a joke on himself with the same glee that he would on
any one else.... I have heard him tell how, in 1844, at the time of the
"anti-renters," when he saw the posse coming, he ran over the hill to
Uncle Daniel's and crawled under the bed, but left his feet sticking
out, and there they found him. He had not offended, or dressed as an
Indian, but had sympathized with the offenders.
He made a great deal of noise about the farm, sending his voice over the
hills (we could hear him calling us to dinner when we were working on
the "Rundle Place," half a mile away), shouting at the cows, the pigs,
the sheep, or calling the dog, with needless expenditure of vocal power
at all times and seasons. The neighbors knew when Father was at home; so
did the cattle in the remotest field. His bark was always to be dreaded
more than his bite. His threats of punishment were loud and severe, but
the punishment rarely came. Never but once did he take a gad to me, and
then the sound was more than the substance. I deserved more than I got:
I had let a cow run through the tall grass in the meadow when I might
easily have "headed her off," as I was told to do. Father used to say
"No," to our requests for favors (such as a day off to go fishing or
hunting) with strong emphasis, and then yield to our persistent coaxing.
One day I was going to town and asked him for money to buy an algebra.
"What is an algebra?" He had never heard of an algebra, and couldn't
see why I needed one; he refused the money, though I coaxed and Mother
pleaded with him. I had left the house and had got as far as the big
hill up there by the pennyroyal rock, when he halloed to me that I might
get the algebra--Mother had evidently been instrumental in bringing him
to terms. But my blood was up by this time, and as I trudged along to
the village I determined to wait until I could earn the money myself
for the algebra, and some other books I coveted. I boiled sap and
made maple-sugar, and the books were all the sweeter by reason of the
maple-sugar money.
When I wanted help, as I did two or three times later, on a pinch.
Father refused me; and, as it turned out, I was the only one of his
children that could or would help him when the pinch came--a curious
retribution, but one that gave me pleasure and him no pain. I was better
unhelped, as it proved, and better for all I could help him. But he was
a loving father all the same. He couldn't understand my needs, but love
outweighs understanding.
He did not like my tendency to books; he was afraid, as I learned later,
that I would become a Methodist minister--his pet aversion. He never
had much faith in me--less than in any of his children; he doubted if
I would ever amount to anything. He saw that I was an odd one, and had
tendencies and tastes that he did not sympathize with. He never alluded
to my literary work; apparently left it out of his estimate of me.
My aims and aspirations were a sealed book to him, as his peculiar
religious experiences were to me, yet I reckon it was the same leaven
working in us both.
I remember, on my return from Dr. Holmes's seventieth birthday
breakfast, in 1879, a remark of father's. He had overheard me telling
sister Abigail about the breakfast, and he declared: "I had rather go to
hear old Elder Jim Mead preach two hours, if he was living, than attend
all the fancy parties in the world." He said he had heard him preach
when he did not know whether he was in the body or out of the body. The
elder undoubtedly had a strong natural eloquence.
Although Father never spoke to me of my writings, Abigail once told me
that when she showed him a magazine with some article of mine in, and
accompanied by a photograph of me, he looked at it a long time; he said
nothing, but his eyes filled with tears.
He went to school to the father of Jay Gould, John Gould--the first
child born in the town of Roxbury (about 1780 or 1790).
He married Amy Kelly, my mother, in 1827. He was six years her senior.
She lived over in Red Kill where he had taught school, and was one of
his pupils. I have often heard him say: "I rode your Uncle Martin's old
sorrel mare over to her folks' when I went courting her." When he
would be affectionate toward her before others, Mother would say, "Now,
Chauncey, don't be foolish."
Father bought the farm of 'Riah Bartram's mother, and moved on it in
1827. In a house that stood where the Old Home does now, I was born,
April 3, 1837. It was a frame house with three or four rooms below and
one room "done off" above, and a big chamber. I was the fifth son and
the seventh child of my parents.
(Illustration of Birthplace of John Burroughs, Roxbury, New York. From a
photograph by Charles S. Olcott)
Mother was in her twenty-ninth year when she was carrying me. She had
already borne four boys and two girls; her health was good and her life,
like that of all farmers' wives in that section, was a laborious one.
I can see her going about her work--milking, butter-making, washing,
cooking, berry-picking, sugar-making, sewing, knitting, mending, and the
thousand duties that fell to her lot and filled her days. Both she and
Father were up at daylight in summer, and before daylight in winter.
Sometimes she had help in the kitchen, but oftener she did not. The work
that housewives did in those times seems incredible. They made their own
soap, sugar, cheese, dipped or moulded their candles, spun the flax and
wool and wove it into cloth, made carpets, knit the socks and mittens
and "comforts" for the family, dried apples, pumpkins, and berries, and
made the preserves and pickles for home use.
Mother went about all these duties with cheerfulness and alacrity. She
more than kept up her end of the farm work. She was more strenuous than
father. How many hours she sat up mending and patching our clothes,
while we were sleeping! Rainy days meant no let-up in her work, as they
did in Father's.
The first suit of clothes I remember having, she cut and made. Then the
quilts and coverlids she pieced and quilted! We used, too, in my boyhood
to make over two tons of butter annually, the care of which devolved
mainly upon her, from the skimming of the pans to the packing of the
butter in the tubs and firkins, though the churning was commonly done by
a sheep or a dog. We made our own cheese, also. As a boy I used to help
do the wheying, and I took toll out of the sweet curd. One morning I
ate so much of the curd that I was completely cloyed, and could eat none
after that.
I can remember Mother's loom pounding away hour after hour in the
chamber of an outbuilding where she was weaving a carpet, or cloth. I
used to help do some of the quilling--running the yarn or linen thread
upon spools to be used in the shuttles. The distaff, the quill-wheel,
the spinning-wheel, the reel, were very familiar to me as a boy; so was
the crackle, the swingle, the hetchel, for Father grew flax which Mother
spun into thread and wove into cloth for our shirts and summer trousers,
and for towels and sheets. Wearing those shirts, when new, made a boy's
skin pretty red. I dare say they were quite equal to a hair shirt to do
penance in; and wiping on a new home-made linen towel suggested wiping
on a brier bush. Dear me! how long it has been since I have seen any
tow, or heard a loom or a spinning-wheel, or seen a boy breaking in his
new flax-made shirt! No one sees these things any more.
Mother had but little schooling; she learned to read, but not to write
or cipher; hence, books and such interests took none of her time. She
was one of those uneducated countrywomen of strong natural traits and
wholesome instincts, devoted to her children; she bore ten, and
nursed them all--an heroic worker, a helpful neighbor, and a provident
housewife, with the virtues that belonged to so many farmers' wives in
those days, and which we are all glad to be able to enumerate in our
mothers.
She had not a large frame, but was stout; had brown hair and blue eyes,
a fine strong brow, and a straight nose with a strong bridge to it. She
was a woman of great emotional capacity, who felt more than she thought.
She scolded a good deal, but was not especially quick-tempered. She was
an Old-School Baptist, as was Father.
She was not of a vivacious or sunny disposition--always a little in
shadow, as it seems to me now, given to brooding and to dwelling upon
the more serious aspects of life. How little she knew of all that has
been done and thought in the world! and yet the burden of it all was,
in a way, laid upon her. The seriousness of Revolutionary times, out
of which came her father and mother, was no doubt reflected in her own
serious disposition. As I have said, her happiness was always shaded,
never in a strong light; and the sadness which motherhood, and the care
of a large family, and a yearning heart beget was upon her. I see myself
in her perpetually. A longing which nothing can satisfy I share
with her. Whatever is most valuable in my books comes from her--the
background of feeling, of pity, of love comes from her.
She was of a very different temperament from Father--much more
self-conscious, of a more breeding, inarticulate nature. She was richly
endowed with all the womanly instincts and affections. She had a decided
preference for Abigail and me among her children, wanted me to go to
school, and was always interceding with Father to get me books.
She never read one of my books. She died in 1880, at the age of
seventy-three. I had published four of my books then.
She had had a stroke of apoplexy in the fall of 1879, but lived till
December of the following year, dying on father's seventy-seventh
birthday. (He lived four years more.) We could understand but little of
what she said after she was taken ill. She used to repeat a line from an
old hymn--"Only a veil between."
She thought a good deal of some verses I wrote--"My Brother's Farm"--and
had them framed. (You have seen them in the parlor at the Old Home. I
wrote them in Washington the fall that you were born. I was sick and
forlorn at the time.)
I owe to Mother my temperament, my love of nature, my brooding,
introspective habit of mind--all those things which in a literary man
help to give atmosphere to his work. In her line were dreamers and
fishermen and hunters. One of her uncles lived alone in a little house
in the woods. His hut was doubtless the original Slabsides. Grandfather
Kelly was a lover of solitude, as all dreamers are, and Mother's
happiest days, I think, were those spent in the fields after berries.
The Celtic element, which I get mostly from her side, has no doubt
played an important part in my life. My idealism, my romantic
tendencies, are largely her gift.
On my father's side I find no fishermen or hermits or dreamers. I find a
marked religious strain, more active and outspoken than on Mother's. The
religion of the Kellys was, for the most part, of the silent, meditative
kind, but there are preachers and teachers and scholars on Father's
side--one of them, Stephen Burroughs (b. 1765), a renegade preacher.
Doubtless most of my own intellectual impetus comes from this side of
the family. There are also cousins and second cousins on this side who
became preachers, and some who became physicians, but I recall none on
the Kelly side.
In size and physical make-up I am much like my father. I have my
father's foot, and I detect many of his ways in my own. My loud and
harmless barking, when I am angered, I get from him. The Kellys are
more apt to bite. I see myself, too, in my brothers, in their looks and
especially in their weaknesses. Take from me my special intellectual
equipment, and I am in all else one of them.
(Speaking of their characteristics as a family, Mr. Burroughs says that
they have absolute inability to harbor resentment (a Celtic trait); that
they never have "cheek" to ask enough for what they have to sell, lack
decision, and are easily turned from their purpose. Commenting on this,
he has often said: "We are weak as men--do not make ourselves felt in
the community. But this very weakness is a help to me as a writer upon
Nature. I don't stand in my own light. I get very close to bird and
beast. My thin skin lets the shy and delicate influences pass. I can
surrender myself to Nature without effort. I am like her.... That which
hinders me with men, makes me strong with impersonal Nature, and admits
me to her influences.... I am lacking in moral fibre, but am tender and
sympathetic.")
To see Mr. Burroughs stand and fondly gaze upon the fruitful,
well-cultivated fields that his father had cared for so many years, to
hear him say that the hills are like father and mother to him, was to
realize how strong is the filial instinct in him--that and the home
feeling. As he stood on the crest of the big hill by the pennyroyal
rock, looking down on the peaceful homestead in the soft light of a
midsummer afternoon, his eye roamed fondly over the scene:--
"How fertile and fruitful it is now, but how lonely and bleak the old
place looked in that winter landscape the night I drove up from the
station in the moonlight after hearing of Father's death! There was a
light in the window, but I knew Father would not meet me at the door
this time--beleaguering winter without, and Death within!
"Father and Mother! I think of them with inexpressible love and
yearning, wrapped in their last eternal sleep. They had, for them,
the true religion, the religion of serious, simple, hard-working.
God-fearing lives. To believe as they did, to sit in their pews, is
impossible to me--the Time-Spirit has decreed otherwise; but all I am or
can be or achieve is to emulate their virtues--my soul can be saved only
by a like truthfulness and sincerity."
The following data concerning his brothers and sisters were given me by
Mr. Burroughs in conversation:--
Hiram, born in 1827, was an unpractical man and a dreamer; he was a
bee-keeper. He showed great aptitude in the use of tools, could make
axe-handles, neck-yokes, and the various things used about the farm, and
was especially skilled in building stone walls. But he could not elbow
his way in a crowd, could not make farming pay, and was always pushed
to the wall. He cared nothing for books, and although he studied
grammar when a boy, and could parse, he never could write a grammatical
sentence. He died at the age of seventy-five.
Olly Ann was about two years younger than Hiram. Mr. Burroughs remembers
her as a frail, pretty girl, with dark-brown eyes, a high forehead, and
a wasp-like waist. She had a fair education for her time, married and
had two children, and died in early womanhood of phthisis.
Wilson was a farmer, thrifty and economical. He married but had no
children. He was evidently somewhat neurotic; as a child, even when
well, he would groan and moan in his sleep, and he died, at the age of
twenty-eight, after a short illness, of a delirious fever.
Curtis also was a farmer, but lacked judgment; could not look ahead;
thought if he gave his note a debt was canceled, and went on piling up
other indebtedness. He had a very meagre schooling, but was apt at witty
remarks. He was temperate; was much given to reading "The Signs of the
Times," like his father before him. He married and had five children.
For many years previous to his death he lived at the homestead, dying
there in his eightieth year, in the summer of 1912. Two of his unmarried
children still live at the Old Home,--of all places on the earth the one
toward which Mr. Burroughs turns with the most yearning fondness.
Edmund died in infancy.
Jane, a tender-hearted, old-fashioned woman, who cried and fretted
easily, and worried over trifles, was a good housekeeper, and a fond
mother--a fat, dumpy little woman with a doleful voice. She was always
urging her brother not to puzzle his head about writing; writing and
thinking, she said, were "bad for the head." When he would go away on
a journey of only a hundred miles, she would worry incessantly lest
something happen to him. She married and had five daughters. Her death
occurred in May, 1912, at the age of seventy-seven. "Poor Jane!" said
Mr. Burroughs one day, when referring to her protests against his
writing; "I fear she never read a dozen printed words of mine--or shall
I say 'lucky Jane'?"
John, born in 1837, was always "an odd one." (One is reminded of what
William R. Thayer said of the Franklin family: "Among the seventeen
Franklin children one was a Benjamin, and the rest nobodies.")
Eden was born in 1839. Frail most of his life, in later years he has
become robust, and now (1913) is the only surviving member of the family
besides Mr. Burroughs. He is cheery and loquacious, methodical and
orderly, and very punctilious in dress. (One day, in the summer of 1912,
when he was calling at "Woodchuck Lodge,"--the summer home where Mr.
Burroughs has lived of late years, near the old place where he
was born,--this brother recounted some of their youthful exploits,
especially the one which yielded the material for the essay "A White Day
and a Red Fox." "I shot the fox and got five dollars for it," said
Mr. Eden Burroughs, "and John wrote a piece about it, and got
seventy-five.")
Abigail, the favorite sister of our author, appreciated her brother's
books and his ideals more than any other member of the family. She
married and had two children. At the time of her death, in 1901, of
typhoid fever (at the age of fifty-eight) the band of brothers and
sisters had been unbroken by death for more than thirty-seven years.
Her loss was a severe blow to her brother. He had always shared his
windfalls with her; she had read some of his essays, and used to talk
with him about his aspirations, encouraging him timidly, before he had
gained recognition.
Eveline died at the age of five years.
The death of his brother Hiram, in 1904, made the past bleed afresh for
Mr. Burroughs. "He was next to Father and Mother in my affections,"
he wrote. "Oh! if I had only done more for him--this is my constant
thought. If I could only have another chance! How generous death makes
us! Go, then, and make up by doing more for the living."
As I walked with him about the Old Home, he said, "I can see Hiram in
everything here; in the trees he planted and grafted, in these stone
walls he built, in this land he so industriously cultivated during the
years he had the farm."
So large a place in his affections did this brother hold, and yet how
wide apart were these two in their real lives! I know of no one who has
pictured the pathos of lives so near and yet so far apart as has George
Eliot when she says: "Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it.
Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and
muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning
and repulsion, and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar
us at every moment. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our
own uttering the thoughts we despise; we see eyes--ah! so like our
mother's--averted from us in cold alienation."
We cannot tell why one boy in a family turns out a genius, while the
others stay in the ancestral ruts and lead humdrum, placid lives, any
more than we can tell why one group of the hepaticas we gather in the
April woods has the gift of fragrance, while those of a sister group in
the same vicinity are scentless. A caprice of fate, surely, that "mate
and mate beget such different issues."
"Hiram was with me at Slabsides," said Mr. Burroughs, "much of the time
when I was writing the Whitman book, but never referred to it in any
way. When it came from the press, I said to him, 'Hiram, here is the
book you have heard me speak about as having cost me nearly four years'
work, and which I rewrote four times.'"
"'That's the book, is it?' he replied, showing no curiosity about it, or
desire to look into it, but kept drumming on the table--a habit of his
that was very annoying to me at times, but of which he was not aware.
When 'A Year in the Fields' came out, he looked at some of the pictures,
but that was all."
There is something very pathetic in all this--these two brothers living
in that isolated cabin in the woods, knit together by the ties of
kinship, having in common a deep and yearning love for each other,
and for the Old Home in the Catskills,--their daily down-sittings and
up-risings outwardly the same, yet so alienated in what makes up one's
real existence. The one, the elder, intent on his bees, his thoughts
by day revolving about his hives, or concerned with the weather and the
daily happenings; at night, as he idly drums with his fingers, dreaming
of the old days on the farm--of how he used to dig out rocks to build
the fences, of the sugar-making, of cradling the oats in July; while the
other--ah! the other, of what was he not thinking!--of the little
world of the hives (his thoughts yielding the exquisite "Idyl of the
Honey-Bee"), of boyhood days upon the farm, of the wild life around his
cabin, of the universe, and of the soul of the poet Whitman, that then
much misunderstood man, than whom no one so much as he has helped us to
appreciate. Going out and in, attending to his homely tasks (for these
brothers did their own housework), the younger brother was all the time
thinking of that great soul, of all that association with him had meant
to him, and of all that Whitman would mean to America, to the world,
as poet, prophet, seer--thinking how out of his knowledge of Whitman as
poet and person he could cull and sift and gather together an adequate
and worthy estimate of one whom his soul loved as Jonathan loved David!
The mystery of personality--how shall one fathom it? I asked myself this
one rainy afternoon, as I sat in the Burroughs homestead and looked from
one brother to another, the two so alike and yet so unlike. The one
a simple farmer whose interests are circumscribed by the hills which
surround the farm on which as children they were reared; the other,
whose interests in the early years were seemingly just as circumscribed,
but who felt that nameless something--that push from within--which first
found its outlet in a deeper interest in the life about him than his
brothers ever knew; and who later felt the magic of the world of books;
and, still later, the need of expression, an expression which finally
showed itself in a masterly interpretation of country life and
experiences. The same heredity here, the same environment, the same
opportunities--yet how different the result! The farmer has tended and
gathered many a crop from the old place since they were boys, but has
been blind and deaf to all that has there yielded such a harvest to
the other. That other, a plain, unassuming man, "standing at ease
in nature," has become a household word because of all that he has
contributed to our intellectual and emotional life.
A man who as a lad had roamed the Roxbury hills with John Burroughs and
his brothers, and had known the boy John as something of a dreamer,
and thought of him in later years as perhaps of less account than his
brothers (since they had settled down, owned land, and were leading
industrious lives), was traveling in Europe in the eighties. On the
top of a stage-coach in the Scottish Highlands he sat next a
scholarly-looking man whose garb, he thought, betokened a priest. From
some question which the traveler put, the Englishman learned that the
stranger was from America. Immediately he showed a lively interest.
"From America! Do you, then, know John Burroughs?"
Imagine the surprise of the Delaware County farmer at being questioned
about his schoolmate, the dreamer, who, to be sure, "took to books"; but
what was he that this Englishman should inquire about him as the one man
in America he was eager to learn about! Doubtless Mr. Burroughs was
the one literary man the Delaware County farmer did know, though his
knowledge was on the personal and not on the literary side. And imagine
the surprise of the priest (if priest it was) to find that he had
actually lighted upon a schoolmate of the author!--C. B.)