He sought the old scenes with eager feet--
The scenes he had known as a boy;
"Oh, for a draught of those fountains sweet,
And a taste of that vanished joy!"
He roamed the fields, he wooed the streams,
His school-boy paths essayed to trace;
The orchard ways recalled his dreams,
The hills were like his mother's face.
Oh, sad, sad hills! Oh, cold, cold hearth!
In sorrow he learned this truth--
One may return to the place of his birth,
He cannot go back to his youth.
But a half-loaf is better than no bread, and Mr. Burroughs has now
yielded to this deep-seated longing for his boyhood scenes, and has gone
back to the place of his birth amid the Catskills; and one who sees him
there during the midsummer days--alert, energetic, curious concerning
the life about him--is almost inclined to think he has literally gone
back to his youth as well, for the boy in him is always coming to the
surface.
It was on the watershed of the Pepacton (the East Branch of the
Delaware), in the town of Roxbury, Delaware County, New York, that John
Burroughs was born, and there that he gathered much of the harvest of
his earlier books; it was there also that most of his more recent books
were written. Although he left the old scenes in his youth, his heart
has always been there. He went back many years ago and named one of his
books ("Pepacton") from the old stream, and he has now gone back and
arranged for himself a simple summer home on the farm where he first saw
the light.
Most of his readers have heard much of Slabsides, the cabin in the
wooded hills back of the Hudson, and of his conventional home, Riverby,
at West Park, New York; but as yet the public has heard little of his
more remote retreat on his native heath.
(Illustration of Woodchuck Lodge and Barn. From a photograph by Charles
S. Olcott)
For several years it has been his custom to slip away to the old home in
Delaware County on one pretext or another--to boil sap in the old
sugar bush and rejoice in the April frolic of the robins; to meander
up Montgomery Hollow for trout; to gather wild strawberries in the June
meadows and hobnob with the bobolinks; to saunter in the hemlocks in
quest of old friends in the tree-tops; and--yes, truth compels me to
confess--to sit in the fields with rifle in hand and wage war against
the burrowing woodchuck which is such a menace to the clover and
vegetables of the farmer.
In the summer of 1908, Mr. Burroughs rescued an old dwelling fast
going to decay which stood on the farm a half-mile from the Burroughs
homestead, and there, with friends, camped out for a few weeks, calling
the place, because of the neighbors who most frequented it, "Camp
Monax," or, in homelier language, "Woodchuck Lodge." In the succeeding
summers he has spent most of his time there. Though repairing and adding
many improvements, he has preserved the simple, primitive character of
the old house, has built a roomy veranda across its front, made tables,
bookcases, and other furniture of simple rustic character, and there in
summer he dwells with a few friends, as contented and serene a man as
can be found in this complicated world of to-day. There his old friends
seek him out, and new ones come to greet him. Artists and sculptors
paint and model him, and photographers carry away souvenirs of their
pilgrimages.
In order to withdraw himself completely during his working hours from
the domestic life, Mr. Burroughs instituted a study in the hay-barn, a
few rods up the hill from the house. A rough box, the top of which
is covered with manilla paper, an old hickory chair, and a hammock
constitute his furnishings. The hay carpet and overflowing haymows yield
a fragrance most acceptable to him, and through the great doorway he
looks out upon the unfrequented road and up to Old Clump, the mountain
in the lap of which his father's farm is cradled, the mountain which he
used to climb to salt the sheep, the mountain which is the haunt of the
hermit thrush. (His nieces and nephews at the old home always speak of
this songster as "Uncle John's bird.")
(Illustration of Mr. Burroughs in the Hay-Barn Study, Woodchuck Lodge.
From a photograph by R. J. H. DeLoach)
As I watched Mr. Burroughs start out morning after morning with his
market-basket of manuscripts on his arm, and briskly walk to his rude
study, I asked myself, "Is there another literary man anywhere, now
that Tolstoy has gone, who is so absolutely simple and unostentatious in
tastes and practice as is John Burroughs?" How he has learned to
strip away the husks and get at the kernels! How superbly he ignores
non-essentials! how free he is from the tyranny of things! There in the
comfort of the hills among which his life began, with his friends around
him, he rejoices in the ever-changing face of Nature, enjoys the fruits
of his garden, his forenoons of work, and the afternoons when friends
from near and far walk across the fields, or drive, or motor up to
Woodchuck Lodge; and best of all, he enjoys the peace that evening
brings--those late afternoon hours when the shadow of Old Clump is
thrown on the broad mountain-slope across the valley, and when the long,
silvery notes of the vesper sparrow chant "Peace, goodwill, and then
good-night." As the shadows deepen, he is wont to carry his Victor
out to the stone wall and let the music from Brahms's "Cradle Song" or
Schubert's "Serenade" float to us as we sit on the veranda, hushed into
humble gratitude for our share in this quiet life.
To see Mr. Burroughs daily amid these scenes; to realize how they are a
part of him, and how inimitably he has transferred them to his books;
to roam over the pastures, follow the spring paths, linger by the stone
walls he helped to build, sit with him on the big rock in the
meadow where as a boy he sat and dreamed; to see him in the everyday
life--hoeing in the garden, tiptoeing about the house preparing
breakfast while his guests are lazily dozing on the veranda; to eat
his corn-cakes, or the rice-flour pudding with its wild strawberry
accompaniment; to see him rocking his grandson in the old blue cradle
in which he himself was rocked; to picnic in the beech woods with him,
climb toward Old Clump at sunset and catch the far-away notes of the
hermit; to loll in the hammocks under the apple trees, or to sit in
the glow of the Franklin stove of a cool September evening while he and
other philosophic or scientific friends discuss weighty themes; to hear
his sane, wise, and often humorous comments on the daily papers, and his
absolutely independent criticism of books and magazines--to witness and
experience all this, and more, is to enjoy a privilege so rare that I
feel selfish unless I try to share it, in a measure, with less fortunate
friends of Our Friend.
(Illustration of Cradle in which John Burroughs was rocked. From a
photograph by Dr. John D. Johnson)
It has been my good fortune to spend many delightful summers with Mr.
Burroughs at his old home, and also at Woodchuck Lodge. On my first
visit he led me to a hilltop and pointed off toward a deep gorge where
the Pepacton, although it is a placid stream near Roxbury, rises amid
scenery wild and rugged. It drains this high pastoral country, where the
farms hang upon the mountainsides or lie across the long, sloping hills.
The look of those farms impressed me as the fields of England impressed
Mr. Burroughs--"as though upon them had settled an atmosphere of ripe
and loving husbandry." I was often reminded in looking upon them of that
line of Emerson's: "The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the wide,
warm fields." There is a fresh, blue, cleansed appearance to the hills,
"like a newly-washed lamp chimney," as Mr. Burroughs sometimes said.
Our writer's overmastering attachment to his birthplace seems due
largely to the fact that the springs, the hills, and the wooded
mountains are inextricably blended with his parents and his youth. As he
has somewhere said, "One's own landscape comes in time to be a sort of
outlying part of him; he has sown himself broadcast upon it... planted
himself in the fields, builded himself in the stone walls, and evoked
the sympathy of the hills in his struggle."
From a hilltop he pointed off to the west and said, "Yonder is the
direction that my grandparents came, in the 1790's, from Stamford,
cutting a road through the woods, and there, over Batavia Hill, Father
rode when he went courting Mother."
Then we went up the tansy-bordered road, past the little graveyard,
and over to the site where his grandfather's first house stood. As
we wandered about the old stone foundations, his reminiscences were
interrupted by the discovery of a junco's nest. On the way back he
pointed across the wide valley to the West Settlement schoolhouse where
he and his brothers used to go, although his first school was in a
little stone building which is still standing on the outskirts of
Roxbury, and known thereabouts as "the old stone jug." Mr. Burroughs
remembers his first day in this school, and the little suit he wore, of
bluish striped cotton, with epaulets on the shoulders which flopped when
he ran. He fell asleep one day and tumbled off the seat, cutting his
head; he was carried to a neighboring farmhouse, and he still vividly
recalls the smell of camphor which pervaded the room when he regained
consciousness. He was about four years of age. He remembers learning
his "A-b ab's," as they were called, and just how the column of letters
looked in the old spelling-book; remembers sitting on the floor under
the desks and being called out once in a while to say his letters:
"Hen Meeker, a boy bigger than I was, stuck on _e_. I can remember the
teacher saying to him; 'And you can't tell that? Why, little Johnny
Burroughs can tell you what it is. Come, Johnny.' And I crawled out and
went up and said it was e, like a little man."
Up the hill a short distance from the old homestead he indicated the
"turn 'n the road," as it passes by the "Deacon Woods"; this, he said,
was his first journey into the world. He was about four years old when,
running away, he got as far as this turn; then, looking back and seeing
how far he was from the house, he became frightened and ran back crying.
"I have seen a young robin," he added, "do the very same thing on its
first journey from the nest."
"One of my earliest recollections," he said, "is that of lying on the
hearth one evening to catch crickets that Mother said ate holes in our
stockings--big, light-colored, long-legged house crickets, with long
horns; one would jump a long way.
"Another early recollection comes to me: one summer day, when I was
three or four years old, on looking skyward, I saw a great hawk sailing
round in big circles. I was suddenly seized with a panic of fear and hid
behind the stone wall.
"The very earliest recollection of my life is that of the 'hired girl'
throwing my cap down the steps, and as I stood there crying, I looked
up on the sidehill and saw Father with a bag slung across his shoulders,
striding across the furrows sowing grain. It was a warm spring day,
and as I looked hillward wistfully, I wished Father would come down
and punish the girl for throwing my cap down the stairs--little
insignificant things, but how they stick in the memory!"
"I see myself as a little boy rocking this cradle," said Mr. Burroughs,
as he indicated the quaint blue wooden cradle (which I had found in
rummaging through the attic at the old home, and had installed in
Woodchuck Lodge), "or minding the baby while Mother bakes or mends
or spins. I hear her singing; I see Father pushing on the work of the
farm."
Most of the soil in Delaware County is decomposed old red sandstone.
Speaking of this soil Mr. Burroughs said, "In the spring when the plough
has turned the turf, I have seen the breasts of these broad hills glow
like the breasts of robins." He is fond of studying the geology of the
region now. I have seen him dig away the earth the better to expose
the old glacier tracings, and then explain to his grandchildren how the
glaciers ages ago made the marks on the rocks. To me one of the finest
passages in his recent book "Time and Change" is one wherein he
describes the look of repose and serenity of his native hills, "as if
the fret and fever of life were long since passed with them." It is
a passage in which he looks at his home hills through the eye of
the geologist, but with the vision of the poet--the inner eye which
assuredly yields him "the bliss of solitude."
One evening as we sat in the kitchen at the old home, he described the
corn-shelling of the olden days: "I see the great splint basket with the
long frying-pan handle thrust through its ears across the top, held
down by two chairs on either end, and two of my brothers sitting in
the chairs and scraping the ears of corn against the iron. I hear the
kernels rattle, a shower of them falling in the basket, with now and
then one flying out in the room. With the cobs that lie in a pile beside
the basket I build houses, carrying them up till they topple, or till
one of the shelters knocks them over. Mother is sitting by, sewing, her
tallow dip hung on the back of a chair. Winter reigns without. How it
all comes up before me!"
He remembers when four or five years old crying over a thing which had
caused him deep chagrin: A larger boy--"the meanest boy I ever knew, and
he became the meanest man," he said with spirit--"found me sulking
under a tree in the corner of the school-yard; he bribed me with a slate
pencil into confessing what I was crying about, but as soon as I had
told him, he ran away with the pencil, shouting my secret to the other
boys."
One day we went 'cross lots after spearmint for jelly for the table at
Woodchuck Lodge, and an abandoned house near the mint-patches recalled
to Mr. Burroughs the first time he had heard the word "taste" used,
except in reference to food. The woman who had lived in this house,
while calling at his home and seeing his attempt at drawing
something, had said, "What taste that boy has!" "It made me open my
eyes--'taste'!--then there was another kind of taste than the one I knew
about--the taste of things I ate!"
At a place in the road near the old stone schoolhouse, he showed me
where, as a lad of thirteen, perhaps, he had stopped to watch some men
working the road, and had first heard the word "antiquities" used. "They
had uncovered and removed a large flat stone, and under it were other
stones, probably arranged by the hands of earlier roadmakers. David
Corbin, a man who had had some schooling, said, as they exposed the
earlier layers, 'Ah! here are antiquities!' The word made a lasting
impression on me."
(Illustration of View of the Catskills from Woodchuck Lodge. From a
photograph by Charles S. Olcott)
One of our favorite walks at sunset was up the hill beyond the old
home where the road winds around a neglected graveyard. From this high
vantage-ground one can see two of the Catskill giants--Double Top and
Mount Graham. It was not a favorite walk of the boy John Burroughs. He
told how, even in his early teens, at dusk, he would tiptoe around the
corner past the graveyard, afraid to run for fear a gang of ghosts would
be at his heels. "When I got down the road a ways, though, how I would
run!" He was always "scairy" if he had to come along the edge of the
woods alone at nightfall, and was even afraid of the big black hole
under the barn in the daytime: "I was tortured with the thought of what
might lurk there in that great black abyss, and would hustle through my
work of cleaning the stable, working like Hercules, and often sending in
'Cuff,' the dog, to scare 'em out."
Fed on stories of ghosts and hobgoblins in childhood, his active,
sensitive imagination became an easy prey to these fears. But we do
outgrow some things. In the summer of 1911 this grown-up boy waxed so
bold that he sat in the barn with its black hole underneath and wrote
of "The Phantoms Behind Us." There was still something Herculean in his
task; he looked boldly down into the black abysms of Time, not without
some shrinking, it is true, saw the "huge first Nothing," faced the
spectres as they rose before him, wrestled with them, and triumphantly
conquered by acknowledging each phantom as a friendly power--a creature
on whose shoulders he had raised himself to higher and higher levels;
he saw that though the blackness was peopled with uncouth and gigantic
forms, out of all these there at last arose the being Man, who could put
all creatures under his feet.
Along the road between the old home and Woodchuck Lodge are some rocks
which were the "giant stairs" of his childhood. On these he played,
and he is fond now of pausing and resting there as he recalls events of
those days.
"Are these rocks very old?" some one asked him one day.
"Oh, yes; they've been here since Adam was a kitten."
Whichever way he turns, memories of early days awaken; as he himself
has somewhere said in print, "there is a deposit of him all over the
landscape where he has lived."
As we have learned, Mr. Burroughs seems to have been more alive than
his brothers and playmates, to have had wider interests and activities.
When, a lad, he saw his first warbler in the "Deacon Woods," the
black-throated blue-back, he was excited and curious as to what the
strange bird could be (so like a visitant from another clime it seemed);
the other boys met his queries with indifference, but for him it was the
event of the day; it was far more, it was the keynote to all his days;
it opened his eyes to the life about him--here, right in the "Deacon
Woods," were such exquisite creatures! It fired him with a desire to
find out about them. That tiny flitting warbler! How far its little
wings have carried it! What an influence it has had on American
literature, and on the lives of readers for the past fifty years,
sending them to nature, opening their eyes to the beauty that is common
and near at hand! One feels like thanking the Giver of all good that
a little barefoot boy noted the warbler that spring day as it flitted
about in the beeches wood. Life has been sweeter and richer because of
it.
Down the road a piece is the place where this boy made a miniature
sawmill, sawing cucumbers for logs. On this very rock where we sit he
used to catch the flying grasshoppers early of an August morning--"the
big brown fellows that fly like birds"; they would congregate here
during the night to avail themselves of the warmth of the rocks, and
here he would stop on his way from driving the cows to pasture, and
catch them napping.
Yonder in the field by a stone wall, under a maple which is no longer
standing, in his early twenties he read Schlemiel's "Philosophy of
History," one of the volumes which, when a youth, he had found in an old
bookstall in New York, on the occasion of his first trip there.
"Off there through what we used to call the 'Long Woods' lies the road
along which Father used to travel in the autumn when he took his butter
to Catskill, fifty miles away. Each boy went in turn. When it came my
turn to go, I was in a great state of excitement for a week beforehand,
for fear my clothes would not be ready, or else it would be too cold, or
that the world would come to an end before the time of starting. Perched
high on a spring-seat, I made the journey and saw more sights and
wonders than I have ever seen on a journey since."
On the drive up from the village he showed me the place, a mile or more
from their haunts on the breezy mountain lands, where the sheep were
driven annually to be washed. It was a deep pool then, and a gristmill
stood near by. He said he could see now the huddled sheep, and the
overhanging rocks with the phoebes' nests in the crevices.
"Down in the Hollow," as they call the village of Robbery, he drew my
attention to the building which was once the old academy, and where
he had his dream of going to school. He remembers as a lad of thirteen
going down to the village one evening to hear a man, McLaurie, talk up
the academy before there was one in Roxbury. "I remember it as if it
were yesterday; a few of the leading men of the village were there. I
was the only boy. I've wondered since what possessed me to go. In
his talk the man spoke of what a blessing it would be to boys of that
vicinity, pointing me out and saying, 'Now, like that boy, there.' I
recall how I dropped my head and blushed. He was a small man, very much
in earnest. When I heard of his death a few years ago, it gave me long,
long thoughts. He finally got the academy going, taught it, and had a
successful school there for several years, but I never got there. The
school in the West Settlement, Father thought, was good enough for me.
But my desire to go, and dreaming of it, impressed it and him upon me
more, perhaps, than the boys who really went were impressed. How outside
of it all I felt when I used to go down there to the school exhibitions!
It was after that that I had my dream of going to Harpersfield
Seminary--the very name had a romantic sound. Though Father had promised
me I might go, when the time came he couldn't afford it; he didn't mean
to go back on his word, but there was very little money--I wonder how
they got along so well as they did with so little."
"As a boy it had been instilled into my mind that God would strike one
dead for mocking him. One day Ras Jenkins and I were crossing this
field when it began to thunder. Ras turned up his lips to the clouds
contemptuously. 'Oh, don't, you'll be struck,' I cried, cringing in
expectation of the avenging thunderbolt. What a revelation it was when
he was not struck! I immediately began to think, 'Now, maybe God isn't
so easily offended as I thought'; but it seemed to me any God with
dignity ought to have been offended by such an act."
Mr. Burroughs showed me the old rosebush in the pasture, all that was
left to mark the site where a house had once stood; even before his
boyhood days this house had become a thing of the past. The roses,
though, had always been a joy to him, and had played such a part in his
early days that he had transplanted some of the old bush to a spot near
his doorsteps at Slabsides. Once when he sent me some of the roses he
wrote of them thus: "The roses of my boyhood! Take the first barefooted
country lad you see with homemade linen trousers and shirt, and ragged
straw hat, and put some of these roses in his hand, and you see me as
I was fifty-five years ago. They are the identical roses, mind you.
Sometime I will show you the bush in the old pasture where they grew."
One day we followed the course he and his brothers and sisters used to
take on their way to school. Leaving the highway near the old graveyard,
we went down across a meadow, then through a beech wood, and on through
the pastures in the valley along which a trout brook used to flow, on
across more meadows and past where a neglected orchard was, till we came
to where the little old schoolhouse itself stood.
How these trout streams used to lure him to play hookey! All the summer
noonings, too, were spent there. He spoke feelingly of the one that
coursed through the hemlocks--"loitering, log-impeded, losing itself in
the dusky, fragrant depths of the hemlocks." They used to play hookey
down at Stratton Falls, too, and get the green streaks in the old red
sandstone rocks to make slate pencils of, trying them on their teeth to
make sure they were soft enough not to scratch their slates. The woods
have been greatly mutilated in which they used to loiter on the way to
school and gather crinkle-root to eat with their lunches,--though they
usually ate it all up before lunch-time came, he said. In one of his
books Mr. Burroughs speaks of a schoolmate who, when dying, said, "I
must hurry, I have a long way to go over a hill and through a wood, and
it is getting dark." This was his brother Wilson, and he doubtless had
in mind this very course they used to take in going to school.
This school (where Jay Gould was his playmate) he attended only until he
was twelve years of age. A rather curious reciprocal help these two lads
gave each other--especially curious in the light of their subsequent
careers as writer and financier. The boy John Burroughs was one day
feeling very uncomfortable because he could not furnish a composition
required of him. Eight lines only were sufficient if the task was
completed on time, but the time was up and no line was written. This
meant being kept after school to write twelve lines. In this extremity.
Jay Gould came to his rescue with the following doggerel:--
"Time is flying past,
Night is coming fast,
I, minus two, as you all know,
But what is more
I must hand o'er
Twelve lines by night,
Or stay and write.
Just eight I've got
But you know that's not
Enough lacking four,
But to have twelve
It wants no more."
"I have never been able to make out what the third line meant," said Mr.
Burroughs. A few years later, when Jay Gould was hard up (he had left
school and was making a map of Delaware County), John Burroughs helped
him out by buying two old books of him, paying him eighty cents. The
books were a German grammar and Gray's "Elements of Geology." The embryo
financier was glad to get the cash, and the embryo writer unquestionably
felt the richer in possessing the books.
Mr. Burroughs loves to look off toward Montgomery Hollow and talk of the
old haunt. "I've taken many a fine string of trout from that stream," he
would say. One day he and his brother Curtis and I drove over there
and fished the stream, and he could hardly stay in the wagon the last
half-mile. "Isn't it time to get out now, Curtis?" he fidgeted every
little while. "Not yet, John,--not yet," said the more phlegmatic
brother. But it was August, and although the rapid mountain brook seemed
just the place for trout, the trout were not in their places. I shall
long remember the enticing stream, the pretty cascades, the high
shelving rocks sheltering the mossy nest of the phoebe, and the glowing
masses of bee-balm blooming beside the stream; yes, and the eagerness of
one of the fishermen as he slipped along ahead of me, dropping his hook
into the pools. Occasionally he would relinquish the rod, putting it
into my hands with a rare self-denial as we came to a promising pool;
but I was more deft at gathering bee-balm than taking trout, and
willingly spared the rod to the eager angler. And even he secured only
two troutling to carry back in his mint-lined creel.
"Trout streams gurgled about the roots of my family tree," he was wont
to say as he told of his grandfather Kelly's ardor for the pastime. One
day, in crossing the fields near the old home, he showed me the stone
wall where he and his grandfather tarried the last time they went
fishing together, he a boy of ten and his grandfather past eighty. As
they rested on the wall, the old man, without noticing it, sat on the
lad's hand as it lay on the wall. "It hurt," Mr. Burroughs said, "but I
didn't move till he got ready to get up."
It was a great pleasure to go through the old sap bush with Mr.
Burroughs, for there he always lives over again the days in early spring
when sugar-making was in progress. He showed where some of the old trees
once stood,--the grandmother trees,--and mourned that they were no more;
but some of the mighty maples of his boyhood are still standing, and
each recalls youthful experiences. He sometimes goes back there now in
early spring to re-create the idyllic days. Their ways of boiling sap
are different now, and he finds less poetry in the process. But the look
of the old trees, the laugh of the robins, and the soft nasal calls
of the nuthatch, he says, are the same as in the old times. "How these
sounds ignore the years!" he exclaimed as a nuthatch piped in the
near-by trees.
Sometimes he would bring over to Woodchuck Lodge from the homestead a
cake of maple sugar from the veteran trees, and some of the maple-sugar
cookies such as his mother used to make; though he eats sparingly of
sweets nowadays. Yet, when he and a small boy would clear the table and
take the food down cellar, it was no uncommon thing to see them emerge
from the stairway, each munching one of those fat cookies, their eyes
twinkling at the thought that they had found the forbidden sweets we had
hidden so carefully.
He and this lad of eleven were great chums; they chased wild bees
together, putting honey on the stone wall, getting a line on the bees;
shelled beechnuts and cracked butternuts for the chipmunks; caught
skunks in a trap, just to demonstrate that a skunk can be carried by the
tail with impunity, if you only do it right (and, though succeeding one
day, got the worst of the bargain the next); and waged war early and
late on the flabby woodchucks which one could see almost any hour in the
day undulating across the fields. We called these boys "John of Woods,"
and "John of Woodchucks"; and it was sometimes difficult to say which
was the veriest boy, the one of eleven or the one of seventy-four.
One morning I heard them laughing gleefully together as they were
doing up the breakfast work. Calling out to learn the cause of their
merriment, I found the elder John had forgotten to eat his egg--he had
just found it in his coat-pocket, having put it in there to carry from
the kitchen to the living-room.
He often amused us by his recital of Thackeray's absurd "Little Billee,"
and by the application of some of the lines to events in the life at
Woodchuck Lodge.
(Illustration of Living-Room, Woodchuck Lodge, with Rustic Furniture
made by Mr. Burroughs. From a photograph by M. H. Fanning)
As the evenings grew longer and cooler, we would gather about the table
and Mr. Burroughs would read aloud, sometimes from Bergson's "Creative
Evolution," under the spell of which he was the entire summer of 1911,
sometimes from Wordsworth, sometimes from Whitman. "No other English
poet has touched me quite so closely," he said, "as Wordsworth.... But
his poetry has more the character of a message, and a message special
and personal, to a comparatively small circle of readers." As he read
"The Poet's Epitaph" one evening, I was impressed with the strong
likeness the portrait there drawn has to Mr. Burroughs:--
"The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.
In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart,--
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart."
What are the books, and notably the later philosophical essays, of Mr.
Burroughs but the "harvest of a quiet eye"? His "Summit of the Years,"
his "Gospel of Nature" (which one of his friends calls "The Gospel
according to Saint John"), his "Noon of Science," his "Long Road"?
And most of this rich harvest he has gathered in his journeys back to
Pepacton, inspired by the scenes amid which he first felt the desire to
write.
Seeing him daily in these scenes, one feels that it may, indeed, be said
of him as Matthew Arnold said of Sophocles, that he sees life steadily,
and sees it whole. What a masterly handling is his of the facts of the
universe, giving his reader the truths of the scientist touched with an
idealism such as is only known to the poet's soul! A friend, writing me
of "The Summit of the Years," spoke of "its splendid ascent by a rapid
crescendo from the personal to the cosmic," and of how gratifying it is
to see our author putting forth such fine work in his advancing years.
Another friend called it "a beautiful record of a beautiful life."
I recall the September morning on which he began that essay. He had
written the first sentence--"The longer I live, the more I am impressed
with the beauty and the wonder of the world"--when he was interrupted
for a time. He spoke of what he had written, and said he hardly knew
what he was going to make of it. Later in the day he brought me a large
part of the essay to copy, and I remember how moved I was at its beauty,
how grateful that I had been present at its inception and birth.
One afternoon he called us from our separate work, the artist from
her canvas and me from my typewriter, to look at a wonderful rainbow
spanning the wide valley below us. The next day he brought me a short
manuscript saying, "If that seems worth while to you, you may copy
it--I don't know whether there is anything in it or not." It was "The
Rainbow," which appeared some months later in a popular magazine--a
little gem, and a good illustration of his ability to throw the witchery
of the ideal around the facts of nature. The lad with us had been
learning Wordsworth's "Rainbow," a favorite of Mr. Burroughs, and it
was no unusual thing of a morning to hear the rustic philosopher while
frying the bacon for breakfast, singing contentedly in a sort of tune of
his own making:--
"And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety."
One afternoon a neighbor came and took him in her automobile a ride of
fifty miles or more, the objective point of which was Ashland, the place
where he had attended a seminary in 1854 and 1855. On his return he said
it seemed like wizard's work that he could be whisked there and back
in one afternoon, to that place which had been the goal of his youthful
dreams! They had also called on a schoolmate whom he had not seen for
forty years. He told us how a possession of that boy's had been a thing
he had coveted for many months--a slate pencil with a shining copper
gun-cap! "How I longed for that pencil! I tried to trade for buttons
(all I had to offer in exchange), but it was too precious for my small
barter, and I coveted it in vain." The wistful Celt began early to sigh
for the unattainable.
We picked wild strawberries in June from the "clover lot" where the boy
John Burroughs and his mother used to pick them. "I can see her now," he
said reminiscently, "her bent figure moving slowly in the summer fields
toward home with her basket filled. She would also go berrying on
Old Clump, in early haying, long after the berries were gone in the
lowlands."
During this summer of which I speak, the fields were a gorgeous mass of
color--buttercups and daisies, and the orange hawkweed--a display that
rivaled the carpet of gold and purple we had seen in the San Joaquin
Valley, in company with John Muir three summers before. Mr. Muir was
done before starting for South America. He had promised to come to the
Catskills, but had to keep putting it off to get copy ready, and the
Laird of Woodchuck Lodge was exasperated that the mountaineer would
stay in that hot Babylon,--he, the lover of the wild,--when we in the
Delectable Mountains were calling him hither. As we looked upon the riot
of color one day, Mr. Burroughs said, "John Muir, confound him! I wish
he was here to see this at its height!"
Returning to the little gray farmhouse in the gathering dusk one late
September day, Mr. Burroughs paused and turned, looking back at the old
home, and up at the cattle silhouetted against the horizon. He gazed
upon the landscape long and long. How fondly his eye dwells upon these
scenes! So I have seen him look when about to part from a friend--as if
he were trying to fix the features and expression in his mind forever.
"The older one grows, the more the later years erode away, as do the
secondary rocks, and one gets down to bed-rock,--youth,--and there he
wants to rest. These scenes make youth and all the early life real to
me, the rest is more like a dream. How incredible it is!--all that is
gone; but here it lives again."
(Illustration of On the Porch at Woodchuck Lodge. From a photograph by
Charles S. Olcott)
And yet, though he is face to face with the past at his old home, his
days there are not so sad as some of his reminiscent talk would seem to
indicate. In truth, he is serenely content, so much so that he sometimes
almost chides himself for living so much in the present. "Oh, the power
of a living reality to veil or blot out the Past!" he sighed. "And yet,
is it not best so? Does not the grass grow above graves? Why should
these lovely scenes always be a cemetery to me? There seems to have been
a spell put upon them that has laid the ghosts, and I am glad." And to
see him bird-nesting with his grandchildren, hunting in the woods for
crooked sticks for his rustic furniture, waking the echo in the "new
barn" (a barn that was new in 1844), routing out a woodchuck from a
stone wall, blackberrying on the steep hillsides, or going a half-mile
across the fields just to smell the fragrance of the buckwheat bloom, is
to know that, wistful Celt that he is, and dominated by the spell of
the Past, he is yet very much alive to the Present, out of which he is
probably getting as full a measure of content as any man living to-day.
He looked about him at the close of his first stay at Woodchuck Lodge
after the completion of the repairs which had made the house so homelike
and comfortable, and said contentedly: "A beautiful dream come true! And
to think I've stayed down there on the Hudson all these years with never
the home feeling, when here were my native hills waiting to cradle me
as they did in my youth, and I so slow to return to them! I've been
homesick for over forty years: I was an alien there; I couldn't take
root there. It was a lucky day when I decided to spend the rest of my
summers here"