RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS
One phase of the new discovery of America following the Civil
War--return to reality, insistence upon things as they are--expressed
itself in nature study. While the new local color school was ransacking
the odd corners of the land for curious types of humanity, these
writers were calling attention to the hitherto unnoticed phenomena of
fields and meadows and woodlands. Handbooks of birds and trees, nature
guides and charts of all varieties were multiplied. Nature study became
an art, and it ranged all the way from a fad for dilettantes to a
solemn exercise in the public school curriculum.
I
The creator and inspirer and greatest figure of this school of nature
writers was Henry David Thoreau. In point of time he was of the
mid-century school that gathered about Emerson. He was born in 1817,
two years earlier than Lowell, and he died in 1862, the first to break
the earlier group, yet in spirit and influence and indeed in everything
that makes for the final fixing of an author's place in the literary
history of his land, he belongs to the period after 1870.
His own generation rejected Thoreau. They could see in him only an
imitator of Emerson and an exploiter of newnesses in an age grown weary
of newnesses. They did not condemn him: they ignored him. Of his first
book, _A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers_, 1849, printed at
Thoreau's expense, only two hundred and nineteen copies had been sold
in 1853 when the remainder of the edition was returned to the author.
_Walden; or, Life in the Woods_ fared somewhat better because of the
unique social experiment which it recorded, but not enough better to
encourage its author ever to publish another book. After the death of
Thoreau, Emerson undertook to give him permanence by editing four or
five posthumous volumes made up of his scattered magazine articles and
papers, but even this powerful influence could not arouse enthusiasm.
The _North American Review_, which in 1854 had devoted seven
patronizing lines to _Walden_, took no note of Emerson's editings until
the _Letters to Various Persons_ appeared in 1865. Then it awoke in
anger. To publish the letters of an author is to proclaim that author's
importance, and what had Thoreau done save to live as a hermit for two
years in the woods? He was a mere eccentric, a "Diogenes in his barrel,
reducing his wants to a little sunlight"; one of "the pistillate
plants kindled to fruitage by the Emersonian pollen." "It is something
eminently fitting that his posthumous works should be offered us by
Emerson, for they are strawberries from his own garden." He was an
egotist, a poser for effect, a condemner of what he could not himself
attain to. "He condemns a world, the hollowness of whose satisfactions
he had never had the means of testing." "He had no humor"; "he had
little active imagination"; "he was not by nature an observer." "He
turns commonplaces end for end, and fancies it makes something new of
them." His nature study was only "one more symptom of the general liver
complaint." "I look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism
about Nature as a mark of disease."
The review was from no less a pen than Lowell's and it carried
conviction. Its author spread it widely by republishing it in _My
Study Windows_, 1871, and including it in his collected works. It was
the voice of Thoreau's generation, and to England at least it seems
to have been the final word. Stevenson after reading the essay was
emboldened to sum up the man in one word, a "skulker." The effect was
almost equally strong in America. During the period from 1868 to 1881,
not one of the author's volumes was republished in a new edition. When
in 1870 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, his foremost champion in the dark
period, had attempted to secure the manuscript journal for possible
publication, he was met by Judge Hoar, the latter-day guardian of
Concord, with the question: "Why should any one wish to have Thoreau's
journal printed?"
That was the attitude of the seventies. Then had come the slow revival
of the eighties. At the beginning of the decade H. G. O. Blake, into
whose hands Thoreau's papers had fallen, began to publish extracts
from the journals grouped according to days and seasons: _Early Spring
in Massachusetts_, 1881. _Summer_, 1884, and _Winter_, 1888. The
break came in the nineties. Between 1893 and 1906 were published, in
addition to many individual reprints of Thoreau's books, the Riverside
edition in ten volumes, the complete journal in fourteen volumes, and
the definitive Walden edition in twenty volumes. A Thoreau cult had
arisen that hailed him as leader and master. After all the years he had
arrived at his own. In the case of no other American has there been so
complete and overwhelming a reversal of the verdict of an author's own
generation.
Lowell devoted his whole essay to a criticism of Thoreau as a
Transcendental theorist and social reformer. To-day it is recognized
that fundamentally he was neither of these. His rehabilitation has
come solely because of that element condemned by Lowell as a certain
"modern sentimentalism about Nature." It is not alone because he was
a naturalist that he has lived, or because he loved and lived with
Nature: it was because he brought to the study of Nature a new manner,
because he created a new nature sentiment, and so added a new field
to literature. Instead of having been an imitator of Emerson, he is
now seen to have been a positive original force, the most original,
perhaps, save Whitman, that has contributed to American literature.
The first fact of importance about Thoreau is the fact that he wrote
day after day, seldom a day omitted for years, the 6,811 closely
printed pages of his journal, every part done with thoroughness and
finish, with no dream that it ever was to be published. It is a fact
enormously significant; it reveals to us the naked man; it furnishes a
basis for all constructive criticism. "My journal," he wrote November
16, 1850, "should be the record of my love. I would write in it only
of the things I love, my affection for an aspect of the world, what
I love to think of." And again, "Who keeps a journal is purveyor to
the gods." And still again, February 8, 1841, "My journal is that of
me which would else spill over and run to waste, gleanings from the
field which in action I reap. I must not live for it, but, in it, for
the gods. They are my correspondents, to whom daily I send off this
sheet, post-paid. I am clerk in their counting house, and at evening
transfer the account from day-book to ledger." He was not a poser for
effect, for it is impossible for one to pose throughout 6,811 printed
pages wrought for no eyes save his own and the gods. His power came
rather from the fact that he did not pose; that he wrote spontaneously
for the sheer love of the writing. "I think," he declares in one
place, "that the one word that will explain the Shakespeare miracle
is unconsciousness." The word explains also Thoreau. Again he adds,
"There probably has been no more conscious age than the present."
The sentence is a key: in a conscious age, a classical age building
on books, watchful of conventions and precedents, Thoreau stood true
only to himself and Nature. Between him and the school of Taylor and
Stoddard there was the whole diameter. He was affected only by the
real, by experience, by the testimony of his own soul. "The forcible
writer," he wrote February 3, 1852, "stands boldly behind his words
with his experience. He does not make books out of books, but he has
been _there_ in person."
In his nature observations Thoreau was not a scientist. It was not his
object to collect endless data for the purpose of arriving at laws
and generalizations. He approached Nature rather as a poet. There was
in him an innate love for the wild and elemental. He had, moreover, a
passion for transcending, or peering beyond, those bounds of ordinary
experience and capturing the half-divined secrets that Nature so
jealously guards. His attitude was one of perpetual wonder, that wonder
of the child which has produced the mythology of the race. Always was
he seeking to catch Nature for an instant off her guard. His eyes were
on the strain for the unseen, his ears for the unheard.
I was always conscious of sounds in Nature which my ears could
not hear, that I caught but a prelude to a strain. She always
retreats as I advance. Away behind and behind is she and her
meaning. Will not this faith and expectation make itself ears
at length? I never saw to the end, nor heard to the end, but
the best part was unseen and unheard.--February 21, 1842.
Nature so absorbed him that he lived constantly in an eager, expectant
atmosphere. "I am excited by this wonderful air," he writes, "and go,
listening for the note of the bluebird or other comer." It was not what
he saw in Nature that was important; it was what he felt. "A man has
not seen a thing who has not felt it." He took stock of his sensations
like a miser. "As I came home through the woods with my string of fish,
trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a
woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage
delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not
that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented."
It was by this watchfulness for the elemental, this constant scrutiny
of instincts and savage outcroppings, that he sought to master the
secret that baffled him. He would keep himself constantly in key,
constantly sensitive to every fleeting glimpse of harmony that Nature
might vouchsafe him.
Nature stirred him always on the side of the imagination. He loved
Indian arrow-heads, for they were fragments of a mysterious past; he
loved twilight effects and midnight walks, for the mystery of night
challenged him and brought him nearer to the cosmic and the infinite:
I have returned to the woods and ... spent the hours of
midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls
and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of
some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very
memorable and valuable to me--anchored in forty feet of water,
and twenty or thirty rods from the shore ... communicating
by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which
had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging
sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle
night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along
it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of
dull uncertain blundering purpose there.... It was very queer,
especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to
vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint
jerk which came ... to link you to Nature again.
Burroughs, like most scientists, slept at night. His observations
were made by day: there is hardly a night scene in all his works; but
Thoreau abounds in night scenes as much even as Novalis or Longfellow.
He was at heart a mystic and he viewed Nature always from mystic
standpoints. In "Night and Moonlight" he writes:
Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we
not tempted to explore it--to penetrate to the shores of its
lake Tchad, and discover the sources of the Nile, perchance the
Mountains of the Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty,
moral and natural, are there to be found? In the Mountains of
the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is where
all Niles have their hidden heads.
It was to discover these Mountains of the Moon, these mysterious
sources of the Nile, forever so far away and yet forever so near, that
Thoreau went to Nature. He went not to gather and to classify facts;
he went to satisfy his soul. Burroughs is inclined to wonder and even
laugh because of the many times he speaks of hearing the voice of
unknown birds. To Burroughs the forest contained no unknown birds; to
Thoreau the forest was valuable only because it _did_ contain unknown
birds. His straining for hidden melodies, his striving for deeper
meanings, his dreaming of Mountains of the Moon that might become
visible at any moment just beyond the horizon--it is in these things
that he differs from all other nature writers. He was not a reporter;
he was a prophet. "My profession is always to be on the alert, to find
God in nature, to know His lurking places, to attend all the oratorios,
the operas in nature. Shall I not have words as fresh as my thought?
Shall I use any other man's word?"
To him Nature was of value only as it furnished message for humanity.
"A fact," he declared, "must be the vehicle of some humanity in order
to interest us." He went to Nature for tonic, not for fact; he sought
only truth and freedom and spontaneousness of soul. He had no desire to
write a botany, or an ornithology; rather would he learn of Nature the
fundamentals of human living. "I went into the woods because I wished
to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and
see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to
die, discover that I had not lived." Burroughs went into the woods to
know and to make others to know, Thoreau went in to think and to feel;
Burroughs was a naturalist, Thoreau a _super_naturalist.
Thoreau belongs completely to the later period: he is as thoroughly
of American soil as even Mark Twain or Lincoln or Whitman. While
Longfellow and Lowell, Taylor and Aldrich, and the rest of their school
were looking eagerly to Europe, Thoreau was completely engrossed with
his own land. "No truer American ever existed than Thoreau," wrote
Emerson in his essay. "His preference of his country and condition
was genuine, and his aversion from English and European manners and
tastes almost reached contempt.... He wished to go to Oregon, not to
London." It was this new-worldness, this freshness, this originality
that made him the man of the new era. He went always to the sources;
his work is redolent at every point of American soil. His images, his
illustrations, his subject matter, all are American. His style, after
he had outgrown an early fondness for Carlyle, is peculiarly his own,
wonderfully simple and limpid and individual. Often it flows like
poetry:
The sun is near setting away beyond Fair Haven. A bewitching
stillness reigns through all the woodland, and over all the
snowclad landscape. Indeed, the winter day in the woods or
fields has commonly the stillness of twilight. The pond is
perfectly smooth and full of light. I hear only the strokes of
a lingering woodchopper at a distance and the melodious hooting
of an owl.--December 9, 1856.
And what is this but poetry?
On the morning when the wild geese go over, I, too, feel
the migratory instinct strong within me, and anticipate the
breaking up of winter. If I yielded to this impulse, it would
surely guide me to summer haunts. This indefinite restlessness
and fluttering on the perch no doubt prophesy the final
migration of souls out of nature to a serener summer, in long
harrows and waving lines, in the spring weather, over that
fair uplands and fertile Elysian meadows, winging their way at
evening, and seeking a resting place with loud cackling and
uproar.--January 29, 1859.
Thoreau was one of the most tonic forces of the later period. His
inspiration and his spirit filled all the later school of Nature
writers. One cannot read him long, especially in his later and more
unconscious work, and find oneself unmoved. He inspires to action,
to restlessness of soul. Take an entry like that of January 7, 1857,
made during one of the most tumultuous of New England winter storms:
"It is bitter cold, with a cutting N.W. wind.... All animate things
are reduced to their lowest terms. This is the fifth day of cold,
blowing weather," and so on and on till one fairly hears the roaring
of the storm. Yet, despite the blast and the piercing cold, Thoreau
goes out for his walk as usual and battles with the elements through
miles of snow-smothered wilderness. "There is nothing so sanative, so
poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none
abroad for pleasure. Nothing so inspires me, and excites such serene
and profitable thought." His battle with the wind and the cold and the
wilderness grips us as we read. We too would rush into the storm and
breast it and exult in it; we too would walk with Nature under the open
skies, in the broad, wholesome places, and view the problems of life
with serene soul. It is this dynamic element of Thoreau that has given
him his following. He is sincere, he is working from the impulses of
his soul, he is genuine. He is not a scientist: he is a poet and a
seer. When we walk with Burroughs, we see as with new eyes; when with
Thoreau, we feel. With Burroughs we learn of signs and seasons and
traits; with Thoreau we find ourselves straining ears to catch the
deeper harmonies, the mysterious soul of Nature, that somehow we feel
to be intertwined eternally with the soul of man.
II
The transition from Thoreau to John Burroughs was through Thomas
Wentworth Higginson. Wilson Flagg (1805-1884) had contributed to the
early volumes of the _Atlantic_ a series of bird studies Irving-like in
atmosphere and sentiment, but he had made little impression. He was too
literary, too much the child of the mid century. In his study of the
owl, for instance, he could write: "I will not enter into a speculation
concerning the nature and origin of those agreeable emotions which are
so generally produced by the sight of objects that suggest the ideas
of decay and desolation. It is happy for us, that, by the alchemy of
poetry, we are able to turn some of our misfortunes into sources of
melancholy pleasure, after the poignancy of grief has been assuaged
by time," and so on and on till he got to midnight and the owl. It is
a literary effort. There is lack of sincerity in it: the author is
thinking too exclusively of his reader. The difference between it and a
passage from Thoreau is the difference between a reverie in the study
and a battle in the woods. Higginson, who followed in the _Atlantic_
with "April Days," "The Life of Birds," and the other studies which he
issued as _Out-Door Papers_ in 1863, avoided the over-literary element
on one hand and the over-scientific on the other and so became the
first of what may be called the modern school of nature writers.
As we read Higginson's book to-day we find style and method curiously
familiar. For the first time in American literature we have that
chatty, anecdotal, half-scientific, half-sentimental treatment of
out-door things that soon was to become so common. It is difficult
to persuade oneself that a paper like "The Life of Birds," for
instance, was not written by the Burroughs of the earlier period.
_Out-Door Papers_ and _Wake-Robin_ are pitched in the same key. Who
could be positive of the authorship of a fragment like this, were not
Higginson's name appended:
To a great extent, birds follow the opening foliage northward,
and flee from its fading, south; they must keep near the food
on which they live, and secure due shelter for their eggs. Our
earliest visitors shrink from trusting the bare trees with
their nests; the song-sparrow seeks the ground; the blue-bird
finds a box or hole somewhere; the red-wing haunts the marshy
thickets, safer in the spring than at any other season; and
even the sociable robin prefers a pine-tree to an apple-tree,
if resolved to begin housekeeping prematurely. The movements of
birds are chiefly timed by the advance of vegetation; and the
thing most thoroughly surprising about them is not the general
fact of the change of latitude, but their accuracy in hitting
the precise locality. That the same cat-bird should find its
way back, every spring, to almost the same branch of yonder
larch-tree--that is the thing astonishing to me.
The most notable thing, however, about Higginson's out-door papers was
their ringing call for a return to reality. It was he who more than any
one else created interest in Thoreau; and it was he who first gained
attention with the cry, "Back to nature." "The American temperament,"
he declared, "needs at this moment nothing so much as that wholesome
training of semi-rural life which reared Hampden and Cromwell to
assume at one grasp the sovereignty of England.... The little I have
gained from colleges and libraries has certainly not worn so well as
the little I learned in childhood of the habits of plant, bird, and
insect.... Our American life still needs, beyond all things else, the
more habitual cultivation of out-door habits.... The more bent any
man is on action, the more profoundly he needs the calm lessons of
Nature to preserve his equilibrium." To the new generation of writers
he flung a challenge: "Thoreau camps down by Walden Pond and shows us
that absolutely nothing in Nature has ever yet been described--not a
bird or a berry of the woods, not a drop of water, not a spicula of
ice, nor winter, nor summer, nor sun, nor star." And again, "What do we
know, for instance, of the local distribution of our birds? I remember
that in my latest conversation with Thoreau last December, he mentioned
most remarkable facts in this department, which had fallen under his
unerring eyes."
This was published in the _Atlantic_, September, 1862. In May, 1865, as
if in answer to the challenge, there appeared in the same magazine John
Burroughs's "With the Birds," a paper which he had written two years
before. The army life of Higginson and later his humanitarian work
in many fields put an end to his out-door writings, but not to his
influence.
III
John Burroughs was born on a farm in Roxbury, New York, just below the
Otsego County made famous by Cooper and the Leather-stocking Tales. His
boyhood until he was seventeen "was mainly occupied," to quote his own
words, "with farm work in the summer, and with a little study, offset
by much hunting and trapping of wild animals in winter." One must study
this boyhood if one is to understand the man's work:
From childhood I was familiar with the homely facts of the
barn, and of cattle and horses; the sugar-making in the maple
woods in early spring; the work of the corn-field, hay-field,
potato-field; the delicious fall months with their pigeon
and squirrel shootings; threshing of buckwheat, gathering of
apples, and burning of fallows; in short, everything that
smacked of, and led to, the open air and its exhilarations. I
belonged, as I may say, to them; and my substance and taste, as
they grew, assimilated them as truly as my body did its food.
I loved a few books much; but I loved Nature, in all those
material examples and subtle expressions, with a love passing
all the books of the world.[81]
Of schooling he had little. "I was born," he once wrote, "of and among
people who neither read books nor cared for them, and my closest
associations since have been alien to literature and art." The usual
winter term in his native district, a year or two in academy courses
after he was seventeen--that was the extent of his formal education. At
twenty he was married, at twenty-seven, after having drifted about as a
school teacher, he settled at Washington in a position in the Treasury
Department that held him closely for nine years.
It was a period of self-discipline. His intellectual life had been
awakened by Emerson, and he had followed him into wide fields. He read
enormously, he studied languages, he trained himself with models of
English style. His love of the country, legacy of the boyhood which he
never outgrew, impelled him to a systematic study of ornithology. Birds
were his avocation, his enthusiasm; by and by they were to become his
vocation.
In 1861, when he was twenty-four, he came for the first time in contact
with _Leaves of Grass_, and it aroused him like a vision.
It produced the impression upon me in my moral consciousness
that actual Nature did in her material forms and shows; ... I
shall never forget the strange delight I had from the following
passage, as we sat there on the sunlit border of an autumn
forest:
I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the
reasons of things;
They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen.
I cannot say to any person what I hear--I cannot say it to
myself--it is very wonderful;
It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe, moving so
exactly in its orbit forever and ever, without one jolt,
or the untruth of a single second;
I do not think it was made in six days, nor in ten thousand
years, nor in ten billions of years;
Nor planned and built one thing after another, as an architect
plans and builds a house.
It was the touch that he needed. There was in him a strain of wildness
even as in Thoreau, an almost feminine shrinking from the crowd, a
thinking of Nature as something apart from man, a retreat and an
antidote; Whitman added the human element, the sympathetic touch, the
sense of the value of man.
Burroughs's first work appeared that same year in the New York
_Leader_, a series of papers under the heading "From the Back
Country"--crude things compared with Higginson's polished work, yet
filled with a genuineness and a freshness that were notable. All of
his earlier sketches were the work of a careful observer who wrote
from sheer love of Nature. Moreover, they were the work of a dreamer
and a poet. As the years took him farther from that marvelous boyhood,
the light upon it grew softer and more golden. He dreamed of it in the
spring when the bluebird called and the high-hole; he dreamed of it on
his walks in the city suburbs when the swallows greeted him and the
warblers. His _Atlantic_ paper "With the Birds," now the first chapter
of his published works, begins with the sentence, now suppressed, "Not
in the spirit of exact science, but rather with the freedom of love and
old acquaintance, would I celebrate some of the minstrels of the field
and forest." And years later, when he wrote the general introduction to
his works, he could say:
My first book, _Wake-Robin_, was written while I was a
government clerk in Washington. It enabled me to live over
again the days I had passed with the birds and in the scenes
of my youth. I wrote the book sitting at a desk in front of
an iron wall. I was keeper of a vault in which many millions
of bank notes were stored. During my long periods of leisure I
took refuge in my pen. How my mind reacted from the iron wall
in front of me and sought solace in memories of the birds and
of summer fields and woods! Most of the chapters of _Winter
Sunshine_ were written at the same desk. The sunshine there
referred to is of a richer quality than is found in New York
and New England.
That was the secret of the early work of John Burroughs: to him Nature
was a part of his boyhood, with boyhood's light upon it. He dreamed
of her when the city homesickness was upon him and when he wrote of
her he wrote from a full heart. He felt every line of it; the light
that plays over it is indeed of "richer quality" than is found over
any actual hills. A part of his early popularity came undoubtedly from
the sentiment which he freely mingled with his studies of field and
woodland.
There is something almost pathetic in the fact that the birds
remain forever the same. You grow old, your friends die or
remove to distant lands, events sweep on and all things are
changed. Yet there in your garden or orchard are the birds
of your boyhood, the same notes, the same calls, and, to
all intents and purposes, the identical birds endowed with
perennial youth. The swallows, that built so far out of your
reach beneath the eaves of your father's barn, the same ones
now squeak and chatter beneath the eaves of your barn. The
warblers and shy wood birds you pursued with such glee ever so
many summers ago, and whose names you taught to some beloved
youth who now, perchance, sleeps amid his native hills, no
marks of time or change cling to them; and when you walk out
to the strange woods, there they are, mocking you with their
ever renewed and joyous youth. The call of the high-holes, the
whistle of the quail, the strong piercing note of the meadow
lark, the drumming of the grouse--how these sounds ignore the
years, and strike on the ear with the melody of that springtime
when the world was young, and life was all holiday and
romance.[82]
The twenty years following his first _Atlantic_ paper were the years
of his professional life. He left his clerkship at Washington in 1873
to become a national bank inspector, and until 1884, when he finally
retired to rural life, he was busy with his duties as receiver of
broken banks, examiner of accounts, and financial expert. During
the two decades he published his most distinctive nature volumes:
_Wake-Robin_, _Winter Sunshine_, _Birds and Poets_, _Locusts and Wild
Honey_, and _Pepacton_, a small output for a man between the years of
twenty-six and forty-six, yet one that is significant. Not a page of
it had been written in haste, not a page that his later hand had found
it necessary to revise. The primal freshness of youth is upon the
books; they are as full of vitality and sweetness as a spring morning.
Doubtless they are all the better for being the enthusiasms of hours
stolen from a dry profession. It is tonic to read them. They are never
at fault either in fact or in influence; they are the work of a trained
observer, a scientist indeed, yet one who has gone to Nature like a
priest to the holy of holies with the glow in his heart and the light
on his face.
During the following decade, or, more exactly, the period between 1884
and 1894, he added four more books, three of them, _Fresh Fields_,
_Signs and Seasons_, and _Riverby_, devoted to Nature, though with
more and more of the coldly scientific spirit. These with the five
earlier volumes stand alone as Burroughs's contribution to the field
that he has made peculiarly his own. They contain his freshest and most
spontaneous work.
To read these volumes is like going out ourselves into the forest
with an expert guide who sees everything and who has at his command
an unlimited store of anecdote and chatty reminiscence of birds and
animals and even plants. To Burroughs, Nature was sufficient in
herself. He loved her for the feelings she could arouse within him,
for the recollections she could stir of the springtime of his life,
for the beauty and the harmony that everywhere he found, and for the
elemental laws that he saw on all sides at work and that stirred his
curiosity. He had no desire to study Nature to secure evidences of a
governing personality. He would draw no moral and offer no solutions
of the problem of good and evil. Of the fortunes of the spirit of man
he cared but little; as for himself, serene, he would fold his hands
and wait. He was no mystic like Thoreau, listening for higher harmonies
and peering eagerly beyond every headland to discover perchance the
sources of the Nile. Upon him there was no necessity save to observe,
to record, to discover new phenomena, to enlarge the store of facts,
to walk flat-footed upon the material earth and observe the working of
the physical mechanics about him and to teach others to observe them
and to enjoy them. To appreciate the difference between Burroughs and
Thoreau one has but to read them side by side. For instance, on March
21, 1853, Thoreau makes this entry:
As I was rising this crowning road, just beyond the old lime
kiln, there leaked into my open ear the first peep of a hyla
from some far pool ... a note or two which scarcely rends the
air, does no violence to the zephyr, but yet leaks through all
obstacles and far over the downs to the ear of the listening
naturalist, as it were the first faint cry of the new-born
year, notwithstanding the notes of birds. Where so long I have
heard the prattling and moaning of the wind, what means this
tenser, far-piercing sound?
Burroughs writes of the same subject in this way:
From what fact or event shall we really date the beginning of
spring? The little piping frogs usually furnish a good starting
point. One spring I heard the first note on the 6th of April;
the next on the 27th of February; but in reality the latter
season was only about two weeks earlier than the former.... The
little piper will sometimes climb a bullrush to which he clings
like a sailor to a mast, and send forth his shrill call. There
is a Southern species, heard when you have reached the Potomac,
whose note is far more harsh and crackling. To stand on the
verge of a swamp vocal with these, pains and stuns the ear.
Then in a foot-note:
The Southern species is called the green hyla. I have since
heard them in my neighborhood on the Hudson.
Never was there writer who kept his feet more firmly on solid earth. He
takes nothing for granted; he is satisfied only with the testimony of
the senses, and his own senses. Everything--example, allusion, figure
of speech, subject and predicate--comes from him in the concrete.
Everything is specific, localized, dated. He was in accord with his era
that demanded only reality. It is the task of the writer, he declared,
"to pierce through our callousness and indifference and give us fresh
impressions of things as they really are."
How permanent is such work? How valuable is it? Is Nature then a
thing simply to be observed and classified and reduced to formulae? To
determine the average day on which the bluebird comes, or the wild
geese fly, or the hyla calls, is there virtue in that? To Burroughs,
Nature was a thing to be observed accurately for new facts to add to
the known. Of Thoreau he wrote: "Ten years of persistent spying and
inspecting of Nature and no new thing found out." Do we ask of the poet
and the seer simply for mere new material phenomena found out to add to
our science? The supreme test that must come at last to all literature
is the question: How much of human life is there in it? How much "Thus
saith the Lord"? Who seeks for material things with eyes, however keen,
and dreams of no sources of the Nile, no vision that may come perchance
from supernatural power latent in bird and leaf and tendril, is a
scientist, however charming he make his subject or however sympathetic
be his attitude. Judged by such a standard, Burroughs falls short, far
short of a place with the highest. He must decrease, while Thoreau
increases. He must be placed at last among the scientists who have
added facts and laws, while Thoreau is seated with the poets and the
prophets.
But though he be thus without vision and without message, save as
an invitation to come to material Nature and learn to observe is a
message, Burroughs has a charm of manner and a picturesqueness of
material that are to be found in few other writers of the period. His
power lies in his simplicity and his sincerity. He is more familiar
with his reader than Thoreau. He is never literary, never affected;
he talks in the most natural way in the world; he tells story after
story in the most artless way of homely little happenings that
have passed under his own eye, and so charming is his talk that we
surrender ourselves like children to listen as long as he will. When
we read Thoreau we are always conscious of Thoreau. His epithets,
his distinction of phrase, his sudden glimpses, his unexpected turns
and climaxes, his humor, for in spite of Lowell's dictum, he is full
of humor, keep us constantly in the presence of literature; but with
Burroughs we are conscious of nothing save the birds and the season
and the fields. We are walking with a delightful companion who knows
everything and who points out new wonders at every step.
The poetry of Burroughs faded more and more from his work with every
book, and the spirit of the scientist, of the trained observer
impatient of everything not demonstrable by the senses, grew upon
him, until at length it took full control and expressed itself as
criticism, as scientific controversy, and as philosophical discussion.
_Riverby_, 1894, with its prefatory note stating that the volume was
"probably my last collection of out-of-door papers," marks the point of
division between the two periods. If we follow the Riverside edition,
at present [1914] the definitive canon, eight books preceded _Riverby_
and eight followed it. The groups are not homogeneous; it is not to be
gathered that on a certain date Burroughs abandoned one form of essay
and devoted himself exclusively to another, but it is true that the
work of his last period is prevailingly scientific and critical. His
_Indoor Studies_, 1889, _Whitman, a Study, and Literary Values_ are
as distinctively works of literary criticism as Arnold's _Essays in
Criticism_; his _Light of Day_ discusses religion from the standpoint
of the scientist; his _Ways of Nature_ is scientific controversy; and
his _Time and Change_ and _The Summit of the Years_ are philosophy.
It is in this second period that Burroughs has done his most
distinctive work, though not perhaps his most spontaneous and
delightful. By temperament and training he is a critic, a scientific
critic, an analyzer and comparer. Only men of positive character,
original forces, attract him: Emerson and Whitman, and later
Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Arnold, men who molded the intellectual life
of their age. His first published book had been a critical study,
_Notes on Walt Whitman_, 1867, a work the most wonderful in many ways
of his whole output. It came at a critical moment, in those pregnant
closing years of the sixties, and it struck clear and full the note of
the new period. Burroughs's later studies of Whitman are more finished
and more mature than this never-republished volume, but they lack
its clarion quality. It is more than a defense and an explanation of
Whitman: it is a call to higher levels in literature and art, a call
for a new definition of poetry, a condemnation of that softness and
honey sweetness of song that had lured to weakness poets like Taylor
and Stoddard. Poetry henceforth must be more than mere beauty for
beauty's sake: it must have a message; it must come burning from a
man's soul; it must thrill with human life.
And it is here that Burroughs stands as a dominating figure. He was
the first of American critics to insist without compromise that poetry
is poetry only when it is the voice of life--genuine, spontaneous,
inevitable. "How rare," he complained in later years, "are real
poems--poems that spring from real feeling, a real throb of emotion,
and not from a mere surface itching for expression." This has been the
key to all his criticism: literature is life, the voicing of a man's
soul. Moreover, it is a voicing of the national life, the expression of
a nation's soul:
All the great imaginative writers of our century have felt,
more or less, the stir and fever of the century, and have
been its priests and prophets. The lesser poets have not felt
these things. Had Poe been greater or broader he would have
felt them, so would Longfellow. Neither went deep enough to
touch the formative currents of our social or religious or
national life. In the past the great artist has always been at
ease in Zion; in our own day only the lesser artists are at
ease, unless we except Whitman, a man of unshaken faith, who
is absolutely optimistic, and whose joy and serenity come from
the breadth of his vision and the depth and universality of his
sympathies.[83]
The literary criticism of Burroughs--four volumes of it in the final
edition, or nearly one-fourth of his whole output--may be classed with
the sanest and most illuminating critical work in American literature.
Lowell's criticism, brilliant as it is at times, is overloaded with
learning. He belongs to the school of the early reviewers, ponderous
and discursive. He makes use of one-third of his space in his essay on
Thoreau before he even alludes to Thoreau. He is self-conscious, and
self-satisfied; he poses before his reader and enjoys the sensation
caused by his brilliant hit after hit. Stedman, too, is often more
literary than scientific. Often he uses epithet and phrase that have
nothing to commend them save their prettiness, their affectation of
the odd or the antique. He is an appreciator of literature rather
than critic in the modern sense. Burroughs, however, is always simple
and direct. He is a scientific critic who compares and classifies and
seeks causes and effects. He works not on the surface but always in the
deeper currents and always with the positive forces, those writers who
have turned the direction of the literature and the thinking of their
generation. In marked contrast with Stedman, he can place Longfellow
and Landor among the minor singers: "Their sympathies were mainly
outside their country and their times." He demands that the poet have a
message for his age. He says of Emerson: "Emerson is a power because he
partakes of a great spiritual and intellectual movement of his times;
he is unequivocally of to-day and New England."
Burroughs's nature essays, charming as they are and full as they are of
a delightful personality, will be superseded by others as careful and
as charming; Burroughs's criticism was the voice of an era, and it will
stand with the era. It was in his later years that he put forth his
real message.
IV
John Burroughs is the historian of a small area; he has the home
instinct, the hereditary farmer's love for his own fields and woods,
and the haunts of his childhood. He is contemplative, tranquil,
unassertive. John Muir was restless, fervid, Scotch by temperament
as by birth, the very opposite of Burroughs. He was telescopic, not
microscopic; his units were glaciers and Yosemites, Sierras and Gardens
of the Gods.
The childhood of Muir was broken at eleven by the migration of his
family from their native Scotland to the wilderness of Wisconsin, near
the Fox River. After a boyhood in what literally was a new world to
him, he started on his wanderings. By accident he found himself in the
University of Wisconsin, where he studied for four years, the first
author of note to be connected with the new state college movement,
the democratizing of education. He pursued no regular course, but
devoted himself to chemistry, botany, and other natural sciences that
interested him, and then, to quote his own words, "wandered away on a
glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly
fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and
rich, without thought of a diploma, of making a name, urged on and on
through endless, inspiring, Godful beauty."
First he went to Florida, walking all the way, and sleeping on the
ground wherever night overtook him; then he crossed to Cuba, with
visions of South America and the Amazon beyond; but malarial fever,
caused by sleeping on swampy ground, turned him away from the tropics
toward California, where he arrived in 1868. The tremendous scenery
of this west coast, those American Alps edging a continent from the
Sierras to the Alaskan glaciers, so gripped his imagination and held
him that he forgot everything save to look and wonder and worship. For
years he explored the region, living months at a time in the forests of
the Yosemite, in the wild Alpine gardens and glacial meadows of the
Sierra, in passes and canyons, moving as far north as Alaska, where he
was the first to see the great glacier now called by his name, sleeping
where night overtook him, disdaining blanket or shelter, and returning
to civilization only when driven by necessity. After years of such
wandering he became as familiar with the mighty region, the tremendous
western wall of a continent, as Thoreau was with Concord or Burroughs
was with the banks of the Pepacton.
Unlike Burroughs, Muir sent down no roots during his earlier formative
period; he was a man without a country, anchored to no past, a soul
unsatisfied, restless, bursting eagerly into untrodden areas, as hungry
of heart as Thoreau, but with none of Thoreau's provincialism and
transcendental theories. In 1869 in the Big Tuolumne Meadows he was
told of a marvelous, but dangerous, region beyond, and his account of
the episode illumines him as with a flash-light:
Recognizing the unsatisfiable longings of my Scotch Highland
instincts, he threw out some hints concerning Bloody Canyon, and
advised me to explore it. "I have never seen it myself," he
said, "for I never was so unfortunate as to pass that way. But
I have heard many a strange story about it, and I warrant you
will at least find it wild enough." Next day I made up a bundle
of bread, tied my note-book to my belt, and strode away in the
bracing air, full of eager, indefinite hope.
His first out-of-doors article, a paper on the Yosemite glaciers, was
published in the New York _Tribune_ in 1871. Later he contributed
to the _Overland Monthly_, to _Harper's_, and _Scribner's Monthly_
articles that have in them an atmosphere unique in literature. What
sweep and freedom, what vastness of scale, what abysses and gulfs,
what wildernesses of peaks. It is like sweeping over a continent in a
balloon. One is ever in the vast places: one thrills with the author's
own excitement:
How boundless the day seems as we revel in these storm-beaten
sky-gardens amidst so vast a congregation of onlooking
mountains.... From garden to garden, ridge to ridge, I drifted
enchanted, now on my knees gazing into the face of a daisy, now
climbing again and again among the purple and azure flowers
of the hemlocks, now down among the treasuries of the snow,
or gazing afar over domes and peaks, lakes and woods, and the
billowy glaciated fields of the upper Tuolumne, and trying to
sketch them. In the midst of such beauty, pierced with its
rays, one's body is all a tingling palate. Who wouldn't be a
mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing.--July
26, 1869.
I chose a camping ground on the brink of one of the lakes,
where a thicket of hemlock spruce sheltered me from the night
wind. Then after making a tin cupful of tea, I sat by my
campfire reflecting on the grandeur and significance of the
glacial records I had seen. As the night advanced, the mighty
rock-walls of my mountain mansion seemed to come nearer, while
the starry sky in glorious brightness stretched across like a
ceiling from wall to wall, and fitted closely down into all
the spiky irregularities of the summits. Then, after a long
fireside rest, and a glance at my note-book, I cut a few leafy
branches for a bed, and fell into the clear, death-like sleep
of the mountaineer.
No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no
fear of the future. These blessed mountains are so compactly
filled with God's beauty, no petty personal hope or experience
has room to be.... Perched like a fly on this Yosemite dome, I
gaze and sketch and bask, oftentimes settling down into dumb
admiration without definite hope of ever learning much, yet
with the longing, unresisting effort that lies at the door of
hope, humbly prostrate before the vast display of God's power,
and eager to offer self-denial and renunciation with eternal
toil to learn any lesson in the divine manuscript.--July 20,
1869.
To read Muir is to be in the presence not of a tranquil, chatty
companion like Burroughs, who saunters leisurely along the spring
meadows listening for the birds just arrived the night before and
comparing the dates of the hyla's first cry; it is rather to be with a
tempestuous soul whose units are storms and mountain ranges and mighty
glacial moraines, who strides excitedly along the bare tops of ragged
peaks and rejoices in their vastness and awfulness, who cries, "Come
with me along the glaciers and see God making landscapes!" One gets
at the heart of Muir in an episode like this, the description of a
terrific storm in the Yuba region in December, 1874:
The force of the gale was such that the most steadfast monarch
of them all rocked down to its roots with a motion plainly
perceptible when one leaned against it. Nature was holding high
festival, and every fiber of the most rigid giants thrilled
with glad excitement. I drifted on through the midst of this
passionate music and motion across many a glen, from ridge
to ridge; often falling in the lee of a rock for shelter, or
to gaze and listen. Even when the glad anthem had swelled to
its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones
of individual trees--spruce, and fir, and pine, and leafless
oak. ... Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble
through copses of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of
the highest ridge in the neighborhood; and then it occurred
to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees
to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the Aeolian
music of its topmost needles.... Being accustomed to climb
trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty
in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy
so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly
flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and
swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing
indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves,
while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a
reed.
He had more humor than Burroughs, more even than Thoreau, a sly Scotch
drollery that was never boisterous, never cynical. In the Bloody Canyon
he meets the Mono Indians and finds little in them that is romantic:
The dirt on their faces was fairly stratified and seemed so
ancient in some places and so undisturbed as almost to possess
a geological significance. The older faces were, moreover,
strangely blurred and divided into sections by furrows that
looked like cleavage joints, suggesting exposure in a castaway
condition on the mountains for ages. Viewed at a little
distance they appeared as mere dirt specks on the landscape.
Like Thoreau, he was a mystic and a poet. He inherited mysticism with
his Scotch blood as he inherited wildness and the love of freedom. He
was not a mere naturalist, a mere scientist bent only on facts and
laws: he was a searcher after God, even as Thoreau. As one reads him,
one feels one's soul expanding, one's horizons widening, one's hands
reaching out for the infinite. The message of Muir is compelling and
eager:
Next to the light of the dawn on high mountain-tops, the
alpenglow is the most impressive of all the terrestrial
manifestations of God;... stay on this good fire mountain and
spend the night among the stars. Watch their glorious bloom
until dawn, and get one more baptism of light. Then, with fresh
heart, go down to your work, and whatever your fate, under
whatever ignorance or knowledge you may afterwards chance to
suffer, you will remember these fine, wild views, and look back
with joy.
And again after his joyous study of the water ouzel, a prose lyric,
rapturous and infectious, he cries:
And so I might go on, writing words, words, words; but to what
purpose? Go see him and love him, and through him as through a
window look into Nature's warm heart.
The output of Muir, especially of books, has been small. To one who
cares nothing for money and who is indifferent to fame, it is hard to
offer inducements. He wrote only to please himself; he would not be
commanded or bribed or begged, for why should one write words when the
Sierras are in bloom and the winds are calling in the upper peaks?
The public at large knows little of him, compared with what it knows
of Burroughs or even of Thoreau. His influence, therefore, has been
small. Though he had published many magazine articles, it was not until
1894 that he published _The Mountains of California_, his first book.
_Our National Parks_ came in 1901, and _My First Summer in the Sierra_
in 1911. The last is Muir's journal, kept on the spot, full of the
thrill and the freshness of the original day. If it be a sample of the
journal which we have reason to believe that he kept with Thoreau-like
thoroughness almost to the time of his death--he died in December,
1914--the best work of John Muir may even yet be in store.
Muir was more gentle than Thoreau or Burroughs, and more sympathetic
with everything alive in the wild places which he loved. Unlike
Burroughs, he has named the birds without a gun, and, unlike Thoreau,
he has refused to kill even fish or rattlesnakes. He could look on even
the repulsive lizards of his region, some of them veritable monsters in
size and hideousness, with real affection:
Small fellow-mortals, gentle and guileless, they are easily
tamed, and have beautiful eyes, expressing the clearest
innocence, so that, in spite of prejudices brought from cool,
lizardless countries, one must soon learn to like them. Even
the horned toad of the plains and foothills, called horrid, is
mild and gentle, with charming eyes, and so are the snake-like
species found in the underbrush of the lower forests.... You
will surely learn to like them, not only the bright ones,
gorgeous as the rainbow, but the little ones, gray as lichened
granite, and scarcely bigger than grasshoppers; and they will
teach you that scales may cover as fine a nature as hair or
feather or anything tailored.
And there is no more sympathetic, interpretative study among all the
work of the nature-writers than his characterization of the Douglas
squirrel of the Western mountains:
One never tires of this bright chip of Nature, this brave
little voice crying in the wilderness, observing his many works
and ways, and listening to his curious language. His musical,
piney gossip is savory to the ear as balsam to the palate; and
though he has not exactly the gift of song, some of his notes
are sweet as those of a linnet--almost flute-like in softness;
while others prick and tingle like thistles. He is the
mocking-bird of squirrels, pouring forth mixed chatter and song
like a perennial fountain, barking like a dog, screaming like a
hawk, whistling like blackbirds and sparrows; while in bluff,
audacious noisiness he is a jay.
Emerson visited Muir during his trip to the West Coast, climbed the
precarious ladder that led to his room in the Yosemite sawmill, and
passed a memorable afternoon. "He is more wonderful than Thoreau," he
said, and he tried long to induce him to leave the mountains for the
East, and to live in the midst of men. But to Muir the leaving of the
Yosemite and the Sierra was like leaving God Himself. To him the city
was the place of unnatural burdens, of money that dulls and kills the
finest things of the soul, of separation from all that is really vital
in the life of man.
His style is marked by vividness and fervid power. He makes a scene
stand out with sharpness. He is original; there are in his work no
traces of other writings save those of the Bible, with which he
was saturated, and at rare intervals of Thoreau. Often there is a
rhetorical ring to his page, a resonant fullness of tone that can be
described only by the word eloquent. In passages describing storm or
mountain majesty there is a thrill, an excitement, that are infectious.
The prose of John Muir may be summed up as sincere and vigorous,
without trace of self-consciousness or of straining for effect. Few
writers of any period of American literature have within their work
more elements of promise as they go down to the generations to come.
V
Beginning with the late sixties, out-of-door themes more and more
took possession of American literature. Burroughs was only one in
an increasing throng of writers; he was the best known and most
stimulating, and soon, therefore, the leader and inspirer. The
mid-nineteenth century had been effeminate in the bulk of its
literary product; it had been a thing of indoors and of books: the
new after-the-war spirit was masculine even at times to coarseness
and brutality. Maurice Thompson (1844-1901), one of the earliest of
the new period, perceived the bent of the age with clearness. "We
are nothing better than refined and enlightened savages," he wrote
in 1878. "The wild side of the prism of humanity still offers its
pleasures to us.... Sport, by which is meant pleasant physical and
mental exercise combined--play in the best sense--is a requirement of
this wild element, this glossed over heathen side of our being, and the
bow is its natural implement."[84] It was the apology of the old school
for the new era of sport. Thompson would direct these heathen energies
toward archery, since it was a sport that appealed to the imagination
and that took its devotees into the forests and the swamps, but there
was no directing of the resurging forces. Baseball and football
sprang up in the seventies and grew swiftly into hitherto unheard-of
proportions. Yachting, camping, mountaineering, summer tramping in
the woods and the borders of civilization swiftly became popular. The
Adirondacks and the Maine forests and the White Mountains sprang into
new prominence. As early as 1869 Stedman had complained that _The
Blameless Prince_ lay almost dead on the shelves while such books as
Murray's _Adventures in the Wilderness_ sold enormously. For a time
indeed W. H. H. Murray--"Adirondack Murray"--did vie even with Bonner's
_Ledger_ in popularity. He threw about the wilderness an alluring,
half romantic atmosphere that appealed to the popular imagination and
sent forth, eager and compelling, what in later days came to be known
as "the call of the wild." His books have not lasted. There is about
them a declamatory, artificial element that sprang too often from the
intellect rather than the heart. Charles Dudley Warner in his _In the
Wilderness_, 1878, and William H. Gibson in such books as _Camp Life in
the Woods_, sympathetically illustrated by their author, were far more
sincere and wholesome. Everywhere for a decade or more there was appeal
for a return to the natural and the free, to the open-air games of the
old English days, to hunting and trapping and camping--a masculine,
red-blooded resurgence of the savage, a return to the wild. The earlier
phase of the period may be said to have culminated in 1882 with the
founding of _Outing_, a magazine devoted wholly to activities in the
open air.
The later eighties and the nineties are the period of the bird books.
C. C. Abbott's _A Naturalist's Rambles About Home_, 1884; Olive Thorne
Miller's _Bird Ways_, 1885; Bradford Torrey's _Birds in the Bush_,
1885; and Florence Merriam Bailey's _Birds Through an Opera Glass_,
1889, may be taken as representative. Bird life and bird ways for a
period became a fad; enthusiastic observers sprang up everywhere;
scientific treatises and check lists and identification guides like
Chapman's _Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America_, began to appear
in numbers. What the novelists of locality were doing for the unusual
human types in isolated corners of the land, the nature writers were
doing for the birds.
Of all the later mass of Nature writings, however, very little is
possessed of literary distinction. Very largely it is journalistic
in style and scientific in spirit. Only one out of the later group,
Bradford Torrey, compels attention. Beyond a doubt it is already safe
to place him next in order after Burroughs and Muir. He is more of
an artist than Burroughs, and he is more literary and finished than
Muir. In his attitude toward Nature he is like Thoreau--sensitive,
sympathetic, reverent. It was he who edited the journals of Thoreau in
their final form, and it was he also who after that experience wrote
what is undoubtedly the most discriminating study that has yet been
made of the great mystic naturalist.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
JOHN BURROUGHS. (1837----.) _Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and
Person_, New York, 1867; _Wake-Robin_, 1871; _Winter Sunshine_,
1875; _Birds and Poets_, 1877; _Locusts and Wild Honey_, 1879;
_Pepacton_, 1881; _Fresh Fields_, 1884; _Signs and Seasons_,
1886; _Indoor Studies_, 1889; _Riverby_, 1894; _Whitman, a
Study_, 1896; _The Light of Day_, 1900; _Literary Values_, 1904;
_Far and Near_, 1904; _Ways of Nature_, 1905; _Leaf and Tendril_,
1908; _Time and Change_, 1912; _The Summit of the Years_, 1913;
_Our Friend John Burroughs_. By Clara Barrus. 1914.
JOHN MUIR. (1838-1914.) "Studies in the Sierras," a series
of papers in _Scribner's Monthly_, 1878; _The Mountains of
California_, 1894; _Our National Parks_, 1901; _Stickeen, the
Story of a Dog_, 1909; _My First Summer in the Sierra_, 1911;
_The Story of My Boyhood and Youth_, 1913; _Letters to a Friend_,
1915.
WILLIAM HAMILTON GIBSON. (1850-1896.) _Camp Life in the Woods and
the Tricks of Trapping and Trap-Making_, 1876; _Pastoral Days,
or Memories of a New England Year_, 1882; _Highways and Byways,
or Saunterings in New England_, 1883; _Happy Hunting Grounds, a
Tribute to the Woods and Fields_, 1886; _Strolls by Starlight and
Sunshine_, 1890; _Sharp Eyes_, 1891; _Our Edible Toadstools and
Mushrooms_, 1895.
CHARLES CONRAD ABBOTT. (1843----.) _The Stone Age in New
Jersey_, 1876; _Primitive Industry_, 1881; _A Naturalist's
Rambles About Home_, 1884; _Upland and Meadow_, 1886; _Wasteland
Wanderings_, 1887; _Days out of Doors_, 1889; _Outings at Odd
Times_, 1890; _Recent Rambles_, 1892; _Outings in a Tree-Top_,
1894; _The Birds About Us_, 1894; _Notes of the Night_, 1895;
_Birdland Echoes_, 1896; _The Freedom of the Fields_, 1898;
_Clear Skies and Cloudy_, 1899; _In Nature's Realm_, 1900.
"OLIVE THORNE MILLER"--HARRIET MANN MILLER. (1831----.) _Little
Folks in Feathers and Fur_, 1879; _Queer Pets at Marcy's_,
1880; _Bird Ways_, 1885; _In Nesting Time_, 1888; _Four Handed
Folk_, 1890; _Little Brothers of the Air_, 1890; _Bird-Lover in
the West_, 1894; _Upon the Tree Tops_, 1896; _The First Book
of Birds_, 1899; _True Bird Stories_, 1903; _With the Birds in
Maine_, 1904; and others.
BRADFORD TORREY. (1843-1912.) _Birds in the Bush_, 1885; _A
Rambler's Lease_, 1889; _The Foot-Path Way_, 1892; _A Florida
Sketch-Book_, 1894; _Spring Notes from Tennessee_, 1896; _A World
of Green Hills_, 1898; _Every-Day Birds_, 1900; _Footing It in
Franconia_, 1900; _The Clerk of the Woods_, 1903; _Nature's
Invitation_, 1904; _Friends on the Shelf_, 1906.
FLORENCE MERRIAM BAILEY. (1863----.) _Birds Through an Opera
Glass_, 1889; _My Summer in a Mormon Village_, 1895; _A Birding
on a Bronco_, 1896; _Birds of Village and Field_, 1898; _Handbook
of Birds of Western United States_, 1902.
FRANK BOLLES. (1856-1894.) _Land of the Lingering Snow_, 1891;
_At the North of Bearcamp Water: Chronicles of a Stroller in New
England from July to December_, 1893; _From Blomidon to Smoky_,
1895.