You once asked me how, considering my antecedents and youthful
environment, I accounted for myself; what sent me to Nature, and to
writing about her, and to literature generally. I wish I could answer
you satisfactorily, but I fear I cannot. I do not know, myself; I can
only guess at it.
I have always looked upon myself as a kind of sport; I came out of
the air quite as much as out of my family. All my weaknesses and
insufficiencies--and there are a lot of them--are inherited, but of
my intellectual qualities, there is not much trace in my immediate
forbears. No scholars or thinkers or lovers of books, or men of
intellectual pursuits for several generations back of me--all obscure
farmers or laborers in humble fields, rather grave, religiously inclined
men, I gather, sober, industrious, good citizens, good neighbors,
correct livers, but with no very shining qualities. My four brothers
were of this stamp--home-bodies, rather timid, non-aggressive men,
somewhat below the average in those qualities and powers that insure
worldly success--the kind of men that are so often crowded to the
wall. I can see myself in some of them, especially in Hiram, who had
daydreams, who was always going West, but never went; who always wanted
some plaything--fancy sheep or pigs or poultry; who was a great lover of
bees and always kept them; who was curious about strange lands, but who
lost heart and hope as soon as he got beyond the sight of his native
hills; and who usually got cheated in every bargain he made. Perhaps
it is because I see myself in him that Hiram always seemed nearer to me
than any of the rest. I have at times his vagueness, his indefiniteness,
his irresolution, and his want of spirit when imposed upon.
Poor Hiram! One fall in his simplicity he took his fancy Cotswold sheep
to the State Fair at Syracuse, never dreaming but that a farmer entirely
outside of all the rings and cliques, and quite unknown, could get the
prize if his stock was the best. I can see him now, hanging about the
sheep-pens, homesick, insignificant, unnoticed, living on cake and pie,
and wondering why a prize label was not put upon his sheep. Poor Hiram!
Well, he marched up the hill with his sheep, and then he marched down
again, a sadder and, I hope, a wiser man.
Once he ordered a fancy rifle, costing upwards of a hundred dollars, of
a gunsmith in Utica. When the rifle came, it did not suit him, was not
according to specifications; so he sent it back. Not long after that the
man failed and no rifle came, and the money was not returned. Then Hiram
concluded to make a journey out there. I was at home at the time, and
can see him yet as he started off along the road that June day, off for
Utica on foot. Again he marched up the hill, and then marched down, and
no rifle or money ever came.
For years he had the Western fever, and kept his valise under his bed
packed ready for the trip. Once he actually started and got as far as
White Pigeon, Michigan. There his courage gave out, and he came back.
Still he kept his valise packed, but the end of his life's journey came
before he was ready to go West again.
Hiram, as you know, came to live with me at Slabsides during the last
years of his life. He had made a failure of it on the old farm, after
I had helped him purchase it; nearly everything had gone wrong, indoors
and out; and he was compelled to give it up. So he brought his forty or
more skips of bees to West Park and lived with me, devoting himself, not
very successfully, to bee-culture. He loved to "fuss" with bees. I think
the money he got for his honey looked a little more precious to him than
other money, just as the silver quarters I used to get when a boy for
the maple sugar I made had a charm and a value no quarters have ever had
in my eyes since.
That thing in Hiram that was so appealed to by his bee-culture, and
by any fancy strain of sheep or poultry, is strong in me, too, and
has played an important part in my life. If I had not taken it out in
running after wild nature and writing about it I should probably have
been a bee-man, or a fancy-stock farmer. As it is, I have always been
a bee-lover, and have usually kept several swarms. Ordinary farming
is prosy and tiresome compared with bee-farming. Combined with
poultry-raising, it always had special attractions for me. When I was a
farm boy of twelve or thirteen years, one of our neighbors had a breed
of chickens with large topknots that filled my eye completely. My
brother and I used to hang around the Chase henyard for hours, admiring
and longing for those chickens. The impression those fowls made upon
me seems as vivid to-day as it was when first made. The topknot was
the extra touch--the touch of poetry that I have always looked for in
things, and that Hiram, in his way, craved and sought for, too.
There was something, too, in my maternal grandfather that probably
foreshadowed the nature-lover and nature-writer. In him it took the form
of a love of angling, and a love for the Bible. He went from the Book to
the stream, and from the stream to the Book, with great regularity. I do
not remember that he ever read the newspapers, or any other books than
the Bible and the hymn-book. When he was over eighty years, old he would
woo the trout-streams with great success, and between times would pore
over the Book till his eyes were dim. I do not think he ever joined the
church, or ever made an open profession of religion, as was the wont
in those days; but he had the religious nature which he nursed upon
the Bible. When a mere boy, as I have before told you, he was a soldier
under Washington, and when the War of 1812 broke out, and one of his
sons was drafted, he was accepted and went in his stead. The half-wild,
adventurous life of the soldier suited him better than the humdrum of
the farm. From him, as I have said, I get the dash of Celtic blood in my
veins--that almost feminine sensibility and tinge of melancholy that, I
think, shows in all my books. That emotional Celt, ineffectual in some
ways, full of longings and impossible dreams, of quick and noisy
anger, temporizing, revolutionary, mystical, bold in words, timid
in action--surely that man is in me, and surely he comes from my
revolutionary ancestor, Grandfather Kelly.
I think of the Burroughs branch of my ancestry as rather retiring,
peace-loving, solitude-loving men--men not strongly sketched in on
the canvas of life, not self-assertive, never roistering or
uproarious--law-abiding, and church-going. I gather this impression from
many sources, and think it is a correct one.
Oh, the old farm days! how the fragrance of them still lingers in my
heart! the spring with its farm, the returning birds, and the full,
lucid trout-streams; the summer with its wild berries, its haying,
its cool, fragrant woods; the fall with its nuts, its game, its
apple-gathering, its holidays; the winter with its school, its sport
on ice and snow, its apple-bins in the cellar, its long nights by the
fireside, its voice of fox-bounds on the mountains, its sound of flails
in the barn--how much I still dream about these things!
But I am slow in keeping my promise to try to account for myself. Yet
all these things are a part of my antecedents; they entered into my very
blood--father and mother and brothers and sisters, and the homely life
of the farm, all entered into and became a part of that which I am.
I am certain, as I have told you before, that I derived more from
my mother than from my father. I have more of her disposition--her
yearning, breeding nature, her subdued and neutral tones, her curiosity,
her love of animals, and of wild nature generally. Father was neither a
hunter nor a fisherman, and, I think, was rarely conscious of the beauty
of nature around him. The texture of his nature was much less fine than
that of Mother's, and he was a much easier problem to read; he was as
transparent as glass. Mother had more of the stuff of poetry in her
soul, and a deeper, if more obscure, background to her nature. That
which makes a man a hunter or a fisherman simply sent her forth in quest
of wild berries. What a berry-picker she was! How she would work to get
the churning out of the way so she could go out to the berry lot! It
seemed to heal and refresh her to go forth in the hill meadows for
strawberries, or in the old bushy bark-peelings for raspberries. The
last work she did in the world was to gather a pail of blackberries as
she returned one September afternoon from a visit to my sister's, less
than a mile away.
I am as fond of going forth for berries as my mother was, even to this
day. Every June I must still make one or two excursions to distant
fields for wild strawberries, or along the borders of the woods for
black raspberries, and I never go without thinking of Mother. You could
not see all that I bring home with me in my pail on such occasions;
if you could, you would see the traces of daisies and buttercups and
bobolinks, and the blue skies, with thoughts of Mother and the Old Home,
that date from my youth. I usually eat some of the berries in bread and
milk, as I was wont to do in the old days, and am, for the moment, as
near a boy again as it is possible for me to be.
(Illustration of One of Mr. Burroughs's Favorite Seats, Roxbury, New
York. From a photograph by Clifton Johnson)
No doubt my life as a farm boy has had much to do with my subsequent
love of nature, and my feeling of kinship with all rural things. I feel
at home with them; they are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. It
seems to me a man who was not born and reared in the country can hardly
get Nature into his blood, and establish such intimate and affectionate
relations with her, as can the born countryman. We are so susceptible
and so plastic in youth; we take things so seriously; they enter into
and color and feed the very currents of our being. As a child I think I
must have been more than usually fluid and impressionable, and that
my affiliations with open-air life and objects were very hearty and
thorough. As I grow old I am experiencing what, I suppose, all men
experience, more or less; my subsequent days slough off, or fade away,
more and more, leaving only the days of my youth as a real and lasting
possession.
When I began, in my twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year, to write about
the birds, I found that I had only to unpack the memories of the farm
boy within me to get at the main things about the common ones. I had
unconsciously absorbed the knowledge that gave the life and warmth to my
page. Take that farm boy out of my books, out of all the pages in which
he is latent as well as visibly active, and you have robbed them of
something vital and fundamental, you have taken from the soil much of
its fertility. At least, so it seems to me, though in this business of
self-analysis I know one may easily go far astray. It is probably
quite impossible correctly to weigh and appraise the many and complex
influences and elements that have entered into one's life.
When I look back to that twilight of early youth, to that half-mythical
borderland of the age of six or seven years, or even earlier, I can
see but few things that, in the light of my subsequent life, have much
significance. One is the impression made upon me by a redbird which the
"hired girl" brought in from the woodpile, one day with a pail of chips.
She had found the bird lying dead upon the ground. That vivid bit of
color in the form of a bird has never faded from my mind, though I could
not have been more than three or four years old.
Another bird incident, equally vivid, I have related in "Wake-Robin,"
in the chapter called "The Invitation,"--the vision of the small bluish
bird with a white spot on its wing, one Sunday when I was six or seven
years old, while roaming with my brothers in the "Deacon woods" near
home. The memory of that bird stuck to me as a glimpse of a world of
birds that I knew not of.
Still another bird incident that is stamped upon my memory must have
occurred about the same time. Some of my brothers and an older boy
neighbor and I were walking along a road in the woods when a brown
bird flew down from a bush upon the ground in front of us. "A brown
thrasher," the older boy said. It was doubtless either the veery, or the
hermit thrush, and this was my first clear view of it. Thus it appears
that birds stuck to me, impressed me from the first. Very early in my
life the coming of the bluebird, the phoebe, the song sparrow, and the
robin, in the spring, were events that stirred my emotions, and gave a
new color to the day. When I had found a bluebird's nest in the cavity
of a stump or a tree, I used to try to capture the mother bird by
approaching silently and clapping my hand over the hole; in this I
sometimes succeeded, though, of course, I never harmed the bird. I used
to capture song sparrows in a similar way, by clapping my hat over the
nest in the side of the bank along the road.
I can see that I was early drawn to other forms of wild life, for I
distinctly remember when a small urchin prying into the private affairs
of the "peepers" in the marshes in early spring, sitting still a long
time on a log in their midst, trying to spy out and catch them in the
act of peeping. And this I succeeded in doing, discovering one piping
from the top of a bulrush, to which he clung like a sailor to a mast; I
finally allayed the fears of one I had captured till he sat in the palm
of my hand and piped--a feat I have never been able to repeat since.
I studied the ways of the bumblebees also, and had names of my own
for all the different kinds. One summer I made it a point to collect
bumblebee honey, and I must have gathered a couple of pounds. I found it
very palatable, though the combs were often infested with parasites. The
small red-banded bumblebees that lived in large colonies in holes in
the ground afforded me the largest yields. A large bee, with a broad
light-yellow band, was the ugliest customer to deal with. It was a
fighter and would stick to its enemy like grim death, following me
across the meadow and often getting in my hair, and a few times up my
trousers leg, where I had it at as great a disadvantage as it had me.
It could stab, and I could pinch, and one blow followed the other pretty
rapidly.
As a child I was always looked upon and spoken of as an "odd one" in the
family, even by my parents. Strangers, and relatives from a distance,
visiting at the house, would say, after looking us all over, "That is
not your boy," referring to me, "who is he?" And I am sure I used to
look the embarrassment I felt at not being as the others were. I did not
want to be set apart from them or regarded as an outsider. As this was
before the days of photography, there are no pictures of us as children,
so I can form no opinion of how I differed in my looks from the
others. I remember hearing my parents say that I showed more of the
Kelly--Mother's family.
I early "took to larnin'," as Father used to say, differing from my
brothers and sisters in this respect. I quickly and easily distanced
them all in the ordinary studies. I had gone through Dayball's
Arithmetic while two of my older brothers were yet in addition.
"Larnin'" came very hard to all of them except to Hiram and me, and
Hiram did not have an easy time of it, though he got through his
Dayball, and studied Greenleaf's Grammar.
There was a library of a couple of dozen of volumes in the district, and
I used to take home books from it. They were usually books of travel or
of adventure. I remember one, especially, a great favorite, "Murphy,
the Indian Killer." I must have read this book several times. Novels, or
nature books, or natural-history books, were unknown in that library. I
remember the "Life of Washington," and I am quite certain that it was a
passage in this book that made a lasting impression upon me when I was
not more than six or seven years old. I remember the impression, though
I do not recall the substance of the passage. The incident occurred
one Sunday in summer when Hiram and a cousin of ours and I were playing
through the house, I carrying this book in my hand. From time to time
I would stop and read this passage aloud, and I can remember, as if
it were but yesterday, that I was so moved by it, so swept away by its
eloquence, that, for a moment, I was utterly oblivious to everything
around me. I was lifted out of myself, caught up in a cloud of feeling,
and wafted I know not whither. My companions, being much older than I
was, regarded not my reading.
These exalted emotional states, similar to that just described, used
occasionally to come to me under other conditions about this time, or
later. I recall one such, one summer morning when I was walking on
the top of a stone wall that ran across the summit of one of those
broad-backed hills which you yourself know. I had in my hand a bit of a
root of a tree that was shaped much like a pistol. As I walked along the
toppling stones, I flourished this, and called and shouted and exulted
and let my enthusiasm have free swing. It was a moment of supreme
happiness. I was literally intoxicated; with what I do not know. I only
remember that life seemed amazingly beautiful--I was on the crest of
some curious wave of emotion, and my soul sparkled and flashed in the
sunlight. I have haunted that old stone wall many times since that day,
but I have never been able again to experience that thrill of joy and
triumph. The cup of life does not spontaneously bead and sparkle in
this way except in youth, and probably with many people it does not
even then. But I know from what you have told me that you have had the
experience. When one is trying to cipher out his past, and separate the
factors that have played an important part in his life, such incidents,
slight though they are, are significant.
The day-dreams I used to indulge in when twelve or thirteen, while at
work about the farm, boiling sap in the spring woods, driving the cows
to pasture, or hoeing corn,--dreams of great wealth and splendor, of
dress and equipage,--were also significant, but not prophetic. Probably
what started these golden dreams was an itinerant quack phrenologist
who passed the night at our house when I was a lad of eight or nine.
He examined the heads of all of us; when he struck mine, he grew
enthusiastic. "This is the head for you," he said; "this boy is going
to be rich, very rich"; and much more to that effect. Riches was the one
thing that appealed to country people in those times; it was what all
were after, and what few had. Hence the confident prophesy of the old
quack made an impression, and when I began to indulge in day-dreams I
was, no doubt, influenced by it. But, as you know, it did not come true,
except in a very limited sense. Instead of returning to the Old Home in
a fine equipage, and shining with gold,--the observed of all observers,
and the envy of all enviers,--as I had dreamed, and as had been
foretold, I came back heavy-hearted, not indeed poor, but far from rich,
walked up from the station through the mud and snow unnoticed, and took
upon myself the debts against the old farm, and so provided that it
be kept in the family. It was not an impressive home-coming; it was to
assume burdens rather than to receive congratulations; it was to bow my
head rather than to lift it up. Out of the golden dreams of youth had
come cares and responsibilities. But doubtless it was best so. The
love that brought me back to the old home year after year, that made me
willing to serve my family, and that invested my native hills with such
a charm, was the best kind of riches after all.
As a youth I never went to Sunday-school, and I was not often seen
inside the church. My Sundays were spent rather roaming in the woods and
fields, or climbing to "Old Clump," or, in summer, following the streams
and swimming in the pools. Occasionally I went fishing, though this was
to incur parental displeasure--unless I brought home some fine trout, in
which case the displeasure was much tempered. I think this Sunday-school
in the woods and fields was, in my case, best. It has always seemed,
and still seems, as if I could be a little more intimate with Nature
on Sunday than on a week-day; our relations were and are more ideal, a
different spirit is abroad, the spirit of holiday and not of work, and
I could in youth, and can now, abandon myself to the wild life about me
more fully and more joyously on that day than on any other.
The memory of my youthful Sundays is fragrant with wintergreens, black
birch, and crinkle-root, to say nothing of the harvest apples that grew
in our neighbor's orchard; and the memory of my Sundays in later years
is fragrant with arbutus, and the showy orchid, and wild strawberries,
and touched with the sanctity of woodland walks and hilltops. What day
can compare with a Sunday to go to the waterfalls, or to "Piney Ridge,"
or to "Columbine Ledge," or to stroll along "Snake Lane"? What sweet
peace and repose is over all! The snakes in Snake Lane are as free from
venom as are grasshoppers, and the grasshoppers themselves fiddle and
dance as at no other time. Cherish your Sundays. I think you will read
a little deeper in "Nature's infinite book of secrecy" on Sunday than on
Monday. I once began an essay the subject of which was Sunday, but never
finished it. I must send you the fragment.
But I have not yet solved my equation--what sent me to nature? What made
me take an intellectual interest in outdoor things? The precise value of
the _x_ is hard to find. My reading, no doubt, had much to do with it.
This intellectual and emotional interest in nature is in the air in our
time, and has been more or less for the past fifty years. I early read
Wordsworth, and Emerson and Tennyson and Whitman, and Saint-Pierre's
"Studies of Nature," as I have before told you. But the previous
question is, why the nature poets and nature books appealed to me. One
cannot corner this unknown quantity. I suppose I was simply made that
way--the love of nature was born in me. I suppose Emerson influenced me
most, beginning when I was about nineteen; I had read Pope and Thomson
and Young and parts of Shakespeare before that, but they did not kindle
this love of nature in me. Emerson did. Though he did not directly treat
of outdoor themes, yet his spirit seemed to blend with Nature, and to
reveal the ideal and spiritual values in her works. I think it was this,
or something like it, that stimulated me and made bird and tree and sky
and flower full of a new interest. It is not nature for its own sake
that has mainly drawn me; had it been so, I should have turned out a
strict man of science; but nature for the soul's sake--the inward world
of ideals and emotions. It is this that allies me to the poets; while it
is my interest in the mere fact that allies me to the men of science.
I do not read Emerson much now, except to try to get myself back
into the atmosphere of that foreworld when a paradox, or a startling
affirmation, dissolved or put to flight a vast array of commonplace
facts. What a bold front he did put on in the presence of the tyrannies
of life! He stimulated us by a kind of heavenly bragging and saintly
flouting of humdrum that ceases to impress us as we grow old. Do we
outgrow him?--or do we fall away from him? I cannot bear to hear Emerson
spoken of as a back-number, and I should like to believe that the young
men of to-day find in him what I found in him fifty years ago, when he
seemed to whet my appetite for high ideals by referring to that hunger
that could "eat the solar system like gingercake." But I suspect they do
not. The world is too much with us. We are prone to hitch our wagon to
a star in a way, or in a spirit, that does not sanctify the wagon, but
debases the star. Emerson is perhaps too exceptional to take his place
among the small band of the really first-class writers of the world.
Shear him of his paradoxes, of his surprises, of his sudden inversions,
of his taking sallies in the face of the common reason, and appraise him
for his real mastery over the elements of life and of the mind, as we
do Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Carlyle, and he will be found wanting. And
yet, let me quickly add, there is something more precious and divine
about him than about any or all the others. He prepares the way for
a greater than he, prepares the mind to accept the new man, the new
thought, as none other does.
But how slow I am in getting at my point! Emerson took me captive. For
a time I lived and moved and had my intellectual being in him. I think I
have always had a pretty soft shell, so to speak, hardly enough lime and
grit in it, and at times I am aware that such is the fact to this day.
Well, Emerson found my intellectual shell very plastic; I took the form
of his mould at once, and could not get away from him; and, what is
more, did not want to get away from him, did not see the need of getting
away from him. Nature herself seemed to speak through him. An intense
individuality that possesses the quality of lovableness is apt to impose
itself upon us in this way. It was under this spell, as you know, that
I wrote "Expression," of which I have told you. The "Atlantic," by the
way, had from the first number been a sort of university to me. It had
done much to stimulate and to shape my literary tastes and ambitions. I
was so eager for it that when I expected it in the mail I used to run
on my way to the post office for it. So, with fear and trembling, I sent
that essay to its editor. Lowell told a Harvard student who was an old
schoolmate of mine that when he read the paper he thought some young
fellow was trying to palm off an early essay of Emerson's upon him as
his own, and that he looked through the "Dial" and other publications in
the expectation of finding it. Not succeeding in doing so, he concluded
the young man had written it himself. It was published in November,
1860, and as the contributors' names were not given at that time, it was
ascribed to Emerson by the newspaper reviewers of that number. It went
into Poole's Index as by Emerson, and later. Professor Hill
(Some years ago I took it upon myself to let Professor Hill know the
real author of "Expression." He appeared grateful, though some what
chagrined, and said the error should be corrected in the next edition.
Mr. Burroughs smiled indulgently when he learned of my zeal in the
matter: "Emerson's back is broad; he could have afforded to continue to
shoulder my early blunders," he said. C. B.)
of Harvard, quoted a line from it in a footnote in his "Rhetoric," and
credited it to Emerson. So I had deceived the very elect. The essay had
some merit, but it reeked with the Emersonian spirit and manner. When
I came to view it through the perspective of print, I quickly saw that
this kind of thing would not do for me. I must get on ground of my own.
I must get this Emersonian musk out of my garments at all hazards. I
concluded to bury my garments in the earth, as it were, and see what my
native soil would do toward drawing it out. So I took to writing on all
manner of rural themes--sugar-making, cows, haying, stone walls. These,
no doubt, helped to draw out the rank suggestion of Emerson. I wrote
about things of which I knew, and was, therefore, bound to be more
sincere with myself than in writing upon the Emersonian themes. When a
man tells what he knows, what he has seen or felt, he is pretty sure to
be himself. When I wrote upon more purely intellectual themes, as I
did about this time for the "Leader," the Emersonian influence was more
potent, though less so than in the first "Atlantic" essay.
Any man progresses in the formation of a style of his own in proportion
as he gets down to his own real thoughts and feelings, and ceases to
echo the thoughts and moods of another. Only thus can he be sincere; and
sincerity is the main secret of style. What I wrote from "the push of
reading," as Whitman calls it, was largely an artificial product; I had
not made it my own; but when I wrote of country scenes and experiences,
I touched the quick of my mind, and it was more easy to be real and
natural.
I also wrote in 1860 or 1861 a number of things for the "Saturday Press"
which exhaled the Emersonian perfume. If you will look them over,
you will see how my mind was working in the leading-strings of
Analogy--often a forced and unreal Analogy.