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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 43846 ***
+
+Transcriber's note:
+    Minor spelling and punctuation inconsistencies have been
+    harmonized. Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.
+    Obvious typos have been corrected.
+
+
+
+
+THE SEER OF SLABSIDES
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: IN THE DOORWAY, SLABSIDES]
+
+
+
+    THE
+    SEER OF SLABSIDES
+
+    BY
+    DALLAS LORE SHARP
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+    BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+    HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+    The Riverside Press Cambridge
+    1921
+
+
+
+
+    COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
+    COPYRIGHT, 1911 AND 1921, BY DALLAS LORE SHARP
+    ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+
+
+
+    TO
+    HENRY FORD
+    LOVER OF BIRDS
+    FRIEND OF JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+
+
+
+THE SEER OF SLABSIDES
+
+
+
+
+THE SEER OF SLABSIDES
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+This title, "The Seer of Slabsides," does not quite fit John
+Burroughs--the Burroughs I knew. He was a see-er. A lover of nature,
+he watched the ways of bird and beast; a lover of life, he thought
+out and wrought out a serene human philosophy that made him teacher
+and interpreter of the simple and the near at hand rather than of
+such things as are hidden and far off. He was altogether human; a
+poet, not a prophet; a great lover of the earth, of his portion
+of it in New York State, and of everything and everybody dwelling
+there with him. He has added volumes to the area of New York State,
+and peopled them with immortal folk--little folk, bees, bluebirds,
+speckled trout, and wild strawberries. He was chiefly concerned with
+living at Slabsides, or at Woodchuck Lodge, and with writing what
+he lived. He loved much, observed and interpreted much, speculated
+a little, but dreamed none at all. "The Lover of Woodchuck Lodge" I
+might have called him, rather than "The Seer of Slabsides."
+
+Pietro, the sculptor, has made him resting upon a boulder, his
+arm across his forehead, as his eyes, shielded from the sun, peer
+steadily into the future and the faraway. I sat with the old
+naturalist on this same boulder. It was in October, and they laid
+him beside it the following April, on his eighty-fourth birthday. I
+watched him shield his eyes with his arm, as the sculptor has made
+him, and gaze far away over the valley to the rolling hills against
+the sky, where his look lingered, sadly, wearily, for a moment at
+their vaunting youth and beauty; then coming instantly back to the
+field below us, he said: "This field is as full of woodchucks as
+it was eighty years ago. I caught one right here yesterday. How
+eternally interesting life is! I've studied the woodchuck all my
+life, and there's no getting to the bottom of him."
+
+He knew, as I knew, that he might never rest against this rock again.
+He had played upon it as a child. He now sleeps beside it. But so
+interesting was the simplest, the most familiar thing to him, that
+the long, long twilight, already filling the valley and creeping up
+toward him, still gave him a chance, as we sat there, to watch the
+woodchuck slipping from his burrow. Had I been the sculptor, I should
+have made the old naturalist lying flat on the round of that rock,
+his white beard a patch of lichen, his eyes peering from under his
+slouch hat over the top of the boulder at something near at hand--at
+the woodchuck feeding below in the pasture.
+
+He was the simplest man I ever knew, simpler than a child; for
+children are often self-conscious and uninterested, whereas
+Burroughs's interest and curiosity grew with the years, and his
+directness, his spontaneity, his instant pleasure and his constant
+joy in living, his utter naturalness and naïveté amounted to genius.
+They were his genius--and a stumbling-block to many a reader.
+_Similia similibus curantur_, or a thief to catch a thief, as we say;
+and it certainly requires such a degree of simplicity to understand
+Burroughs as few of us possess.
+
+Not every author improves upon personal acquaintance, but an actual
+visit with Burroughs seems almost necessary for the right approach to
+his books. Matter and manner, the virtues and faults of his writings,
+the very things he did not write about, are all explained in the
+presence of a man of eighty-three who brings home a woodchuck from
+the field for dinner, and saves its pelt for a winter coat. And with
+me at dinner that day were other guests, a lover of Whitman from
+Bolton, England, a distinguished American artist, and others.
+
+The country road, hardly more than a farm lane, shies up close to
+Woodchuck Lodge as it goes by. Here on the vine-grown porch was the
+cot of the old naturalist, as close to the road as it could get.
+Burroughs loved those remote ancestral hills, and all the little
+folk who inhabitated them with him. He was as retiring and shy as
+a song sparrow--who nests in the bushes, and sings from the fence
+stake. No man loved his fellow-man more than Burroughs. Here in his
+cot he could watch the stars come out upon the mountain-tops and see
+the fires of dawn kindle where the stars had shone, and here, too,
+he could see every passer-by and, without rising, for he had need
+to rest, he could reach out a hand of welcome to all who stopped on
+their journey past.
+
+And everybody stopped. If he had no fresh woodchuck to serve them,
+he would have one out of a can, for no less in his home than in his
+heart had he made provision for the coming guest. The stores of the
+village were far away, but there was no lack of canned woodchuck and
+hospitality in the Lodge. Few men have had more friends or a wider
+range of friends than Burroughs. And months later, as I sat looking
+over the strange medley of them gathered at his funeral, I wondered
+at them, and asked myself what was it in this simple, childlike man,
+this lover of the bluebird, of the earth on his breast and the sky
+on his back, that drew these great men and little children about him.
+He was elemental. He kept his soul. And through the press men crowded
+up to touch him, and the virtue that went out from him restored to
+them their souls--their bluebird with the earth on its breast and the
+sky, the blue sky, on its back.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+And this same restoration I find in his books. John Burroughs began
+that long line of books by writing an essay for the "Atlantic
+Monthly," entitled "Expression,"--"a somewhat Emersonian Expression,"
+says its author,--which was printed in the "Atlantic" for November,
+1860, sixty-one years ago; and in each of those sixty-one years he
+has not failed to publish one or more essays here where "Expression"
+led the way.
+
+Sixty-one years are not threescore and ten, being nine years short.
+Many men have lived and wrought for more than threescore and ten
+years; but Burroughs's "Atlantic" years are unique. To write without
+a break for sixty-one years, and keep one's eye undimmed, one's
+natural force unabated, one's soul unfagged and as fresh as dawn, is
+of itself a great human achievement.
+
+Only a few weeks before his death he sent me a copy of the last
+book that he should see through the press, and who shall say that
+"Accepting the Universe" lacks anything of the vigor or finish
+or freshness found in his earliest books? It is philosophical,
+theological, indeed, in matter, and rather controversial in style;
+its theme is like that of "The Light of Day," a theme his pen was
+ever touching, but nowhere with more largeness and beauty (and
+inconsistency) than here. For Burroughs, though deeply religious, was
+a poor theologian. He hated cant, and feared the very vocabulary
+of theology as he feared the dark. Life was remarkably single with
+Burroughs and all of a piece. In a little diary, one of the earliest
+he has left us, he asks, under date of October 8, 1860 (a month
+before his first essay appeared in the "Atlantic"):
+
+"Is there no design of analogy in this Universe? Are these striking
+resemblances that wed remote parts, these family traits that break
+out all through nature and that show the unity of the creating mind,
+the work of chance? Are these resemblances and mutual answerings of
+part to part that human intelligence sees and recognizes only in its
+most exalted moments--when its vision is clearest--a mere accident?"
+
+That was written in pencil filling a whole page of his diary for
+1860. On page 220 of "Accepting the Universe," published sixty-one
+years later, and only a short time before his death, we find this
+attempted answer:
+
+"So, when we ask, Is there design in Nature? we must make clear what
+part or phase of Nature we refer to. Can we say that the cosmos as
+a whole shows any design in our human sense of the word? I think
+not. The Eternal has no purpose that our language can compass.
+There can be neither center nor circumference to the Infinite. The
+distribution of land and water on the globe cannot be the result of
+design any more than can the shapes of the hills and mountains, or
+Saturn's rings, or Jupiter's moons. The circular forms and orbits
+of the universe must be the result of the laws of matter and force
+that prevail in celestial mechanics; this is not a final solution of
+the riddle, but is as near as we can come to it. One question stands
+on another question, and that on another, and so on, and the bottom
+question we can never reach and formulate."
+
+It is a beautiful illustration of the continuity, the oneness of
+this singularly simple life; and it is as good an illustration of
+how the vigor of his youth steadies into a maturity of strength
+with age, which in many a late essay--as in "The Long Road," for
+instance--lifts one and bears one down the unmeasured reaches of
+geologic time as none of his earlier chapters do.
+
+Many men have written more than John Burroughs. His twenty-five
+volumes are perhaps nothing remarkable for sixty years of steady
+writing. But it is remarkable to come up to four and eighty with one
+book just off the press, two more books in manuscript to appear after
+the light has failed; for there is still a book of miscellaneous
+papers, and some studies on Emerson and Thoreau yet to be published.
+
+And I think it a rather remarkable lot of books, beginning with
+"Wake-Robin," running down through the titles, with "Winter
+Sunshine," "Birds and Poets," "Locusts and Wild Honey," "Pepacton,"
+"Fresh Fields," "Signs and Seasons," "Riverby," "Far and Near," "Ways
+of Nature," "Leaf and Tendril," "The Summit of the Years," "Time and
+Change," "The Breath of Life," "Under the Apple-Trees," and "Field
+and Study," to "Accepting the Universe," for these books deal very
+largely with nature, and by themselves constitute the largest, most
+significant group of nature-books that have come, perhaps, from any
+single pen.
+
+These sixteen or seventeen volumes are John Burroughs's most
+characteristic and important work. If he has done any desirable
+thing, made any real contribution to American literature, that
+contribution will be found among these books. His other books are
+eminently worth while: there is reverent, honest thinking in his
+religious essays, a creedless but an absolute and joyous faith; there
+is simple and exquisite feeling in his poems; close analysis and an
+unmitigatedness wholly Whitmanesque in his interpretation of Whitman;
+and no saner, happier criticism anywhere than in his "Literary
+Values." There are many other excellent critics, however, many poets
+and religious writers, many other excellent nature-writers, too; but
+is there any other who has written so much upon the ways of nature as
+they parallel and cross the ways of men, upon so great a variety of
+nature's forms and expressions, and done it with such abiding love,
+with such truth and charm?
+
+Yet such a comparison is beyond proof, except in the least of the
+literary values--mere quantity; and it may be with literature as
+with merchandise: the larger the cask the greater the tare. Charm?
+Is not charm that which I chance to like, or _you_ chance to like?
+Others have written of nature with as much love and truth as has
+John Burroughs, and each with his own peculiar charm: Audubon, with
+the spell of wild places and the thrill of fresh wonder; Traherne,
+with the ecstasy of the religious mystic; Gilbert White, with the
+sweetness of the evening and the morning; Thoreau, with the heat
+of noonday; Jefferies, with just a touch of twilight shadowing all
+his pages. We want them severally as they are; John Burroughs as he
+is, neither wandering "lonely as a cloud" in search of poems, nor
+skulking in the sedges along the banks of the Guaso Nyero looking
+for lions. We want him at Slabsides, near his celery fields, or at
+Woodchuck Lodge overlooking the high fields that run down from the
+sky into Montgomery Valley. And whatever the literary quality of our
+other nature-writers, no one of them has come any nearer than John
+Burroughs to that difficult ideal--a union of thought and form, no
+more to be separated than the heart and the bark of a live tree.
+
+Take John Burroughs's work as a whole, and it is beyond dispute the
+most complete, the most revealing, of all our outdoor literature.
+His pages lie open like the surface of a pond, sensitive to every
+wind, or calm as the sky, holding the clouds and the distant blue,
+and the dragon-fly, stiff-winged, and pinned to the golden knob of a
+spatter-dock.
+
+All outdoor existence, all outdoor phenomena, are deeply interesting
+to him. There is scarcely a form of outdoor life, scarcely a piece
+of landscape, or natural occurrence characteristic of the Eastern
+States, which has not been dealt with suggestively in his pages: the
+rabbit under his porch, the paleozoic pebble along his path, the salt
+breeze borne inland by the Hudson, the whirl of a snow-storm, the
+work of the honey bees, the procession of the seasons over Slabsides,
+even the abundant soil out of which he and his grapes grew and which,
+"incorruptible and undefiled," he calls divine.
+
+He devotes an entire chapter to the bluebird, a chapter to the fox,
+one to the apple, another to the wild strawberry. The individual,
+the particular thing, is always of particular interest to him. But
+so is its habitat, the whole of its environment. He sees the gem,
+not cut and set in a ring, but rough in the mine, where it glitters
+on the hand of nature, and glitters all the more that it is worn in
+the dark. Naturally John Burroughs has written much about the birds;
+yet he is not an ornithologist. His theme has not been this or that,
+but nature in its totality, as it is held within the circle of his
+horizon, as it surrounds, supports, and quickens him.
+
+That nature does support and quicken the spiritual of him, no less
+than the physical, is the inspiration of his writing and the final
+comment it requires. Whether the universe was shaped from chaos with
+man as its end, is a question of real concern to John Burroughs,
+but of less concern to him than the problem of shaping himself to
+the universe, of living as long as he can upon a world so perfectly
+adapted to life, if only one be physically and spiritually adaptable.
+To take the earth as one finds it, to plant one's self in it, to
+plant one's roof-tree in it, to till it, to understand it and the
+laws which govern it, and the Perfection which created it, and to
+love it all--this is the heart of John Burroughs's religion, the pith
+of his philosophy, the conclusion of his books.
+
+But if a perfect place for the fit, how hard a place is this world
+for the lazy, the ignorant, the stubborn, the weak, the physically
+and spiritually ill! So hard that a torpid liver is almost a mortal
+handicap, the stars in their courses fighting against the bilious to
+defeat them, to drive them to take exercise, to a copious drinking
+of water, to a knowledge of burdock and calomel--to obedience and
+understanding.
+
+Underlying all of John Burroughs's thought and feeling, framing
+every one of his books, is a deep sense of the perfection of nature,
+the sharing of which is physical life, the understanding of which
+is spiritual life, is knowledge of God himself, in some part of His
+perfection. "I cannot tell what the simple apparition of the earth
+and sky mean to me; I think that at rare intervals one sees that they
+have an immense spiritual meaning, altogether unspeakable, and that
+they are the great helps, after all." How the world was made--its
+geology, its biology--is the great question, for its answer is poetry
+and religion and life itself. John Burroughs was serenely sure as to
+how the world was made; the theological speculation as to _why_ it
+was made, he answered by growing small fruits on it, living upon it,
+writing about it.
+
+Temperamentally John Burroughs was an optimist, as vocationally
+he was a writer, and avocationally a vine-dresser. He planted and
+expected to gather--grapes from his grapevines, books from his
+book-vines, years, satisfactions, sorrows, joys, all that was due him.
+
+    The waters know their own and draw
+      The brook that springs in yonder heights;
+    So flows the good with equal law
+      Unto the soul of pure delights.
+
+And what is it that was due him? Everything; everything essential;
+as everything essential is due the pine-tree, the prairie, the very
+planet. Is not this earth a star? Are not the prairie, the pine-tree,
+and man the dust of stars? each a part of the other? all parts of one
+whole--a universe, round, rolling, without beginning, without end,
+without flaw, without lack, a universe self-sustained, perfect?
+
+    I stay my haste, I make delays,
+      For what avails this eager pace?
+    I stand amid the eternal ways,
+      And what is mine shall know my face.
+
+John Burroughs came naturally by such a view of nature and its
+consequent optimism. It was due partly to his having been born and
+brought up on a farm where he had what was due him from the start.
+Such birth and bringing-up is the natural right of every boy. To know
+and to do the primitive, the elemental; to go barefoot, to drive the
+cows, to fish, and to go to school with not too many books, but with
+"plenty of real things"--these are nominated in every boy's bond.
+
+    Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
+
+is the poem of a childhood on the farm, and the poem of a manhood on
+the farm, in spite of the critic who says:
+
+"We have never ceased to wonder that this friend of the birds,
+this kindly interpreter of nature in all her moods, was born and
+brought up on a farm; it was in that smiling country watered by the
+east branch of the Delaware. No man, as a rule, knows less about
+the colors, songs, and habits of birds, and is more indifferent to
+natural scenery than the man born to the soil, who delves in it and
+breathes its odors. Contact with it and laborious days seem to deaden
+his faculties of observation and deprive him of all sympathy with
+nature."
+
+During the days when the deadening might have occurred, John
+Burroughs was teaching school. Then he became a United States bank
+examiner, and only after that returned to the country--to Riverby and
+Slabsides, and Woodchuck Lodge,--to live out the rest of his years,
+years as full of life and books as his vines along the Hudson are
+full of life and grapes.
+
+Could it be otherwise? If men and grapes are of the same divine
+dust, should they not grow according to the same divine laws? Here
+in the vineyard along the Hudson, John Burroughs planted himself in
+planting his vines, and every trellis that he set has become his own
+support and stay. The very clearing of the land for his vineyard was
+a preparation of himself physically and morally for a more fruitful
+life.
+
+"Before the snow was off in March," he says in "Literary Values," "we
+set to work under-draining the moist and springy places. My health
+and spirits improved daily. I seemed to be under-draining my own life
+and carrying off the stagnant water, as well as that of the land."
+And so he was. There are other means of doing it--taking drugs,
+playing golf, walking the streets; but surely the advantages and the
+poetry are all in favor of the vineyard. And how much fitter a place
+the vineyard to mellow and ripen life, than a city roof of tarry
+pebbles and tin!
+
+Though necessarily personal and subjective, John Burroughs's writing
+is entirely free from self-exploitation and confession. There are
+pages scattered here and there dealing briefly and frankly with his
+own natural history, but our thanks are due to John Burroughs that
+he never made a business of watching himself. Once he was inveigled
+by a magazine editor into doing "An Egotistical Chapter," wherein
+we find him as a boy of sixteen reading essays, and capable at that
+age of feeding for a whole year upon Dr. Johnson! Then we find him
+reading Whipple's essays, and the early outdoor papers of Higginson;
+and later, at twenty-three, settling down with Emerson's essays, and
+getting one of his own into the "Atlantic Monthly."
+
+How early his own began to come to him!
+
+That first essay in the "Atlantic" was followed by a number of
+outdoor sketches in the New York "Leader"--written, Burroughs says,
+"mainly to break the spell of Emerson's influence and get upon
+ground of my own." He succeeded in both purposes; and a large and
+exceedingly fertile piece of ground it proved to be, too, this which
+he got upon! Already the young writer had chosen his field and his
+crop. The out-of-doors has been largely his literary material, as the
+essay has been largely his literary form, ever since. He has done
+other things--volumes of literary studies and criticisms; but his
+theme from first to last has been the Great Book of Nature, a page of
+which, here and there, he has tried to read to us.
+
+Burroughs's work, in outdoor literature, is a distinct species, with
+new and well-marked characteristics. He is the nature-writer, to be
+distinguished from the naturalist in Gilbert White, the mystic in
+Traherne, the philosopher in Emerson, the preacher, poet, critic in
+Thoreau, the humorist in Charles Dudley Warner. As we now know the
+nature-writer we come upon him for the first time in John Burroughs.
+Such credit might have gone to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, had he
+not been something else before he was a lover of nature--of letters
+first, then of flowers, carrying his library into the fields; whereas
+Burroughs brings the fields into the library. The essay whose matter
+is nature, whose moral is human, whose manner is strictly literary,
+belongs to John Burroughs. His work is distinguished by this
+threefold and _even_ emphasis. In almost every other of our early
+outdoor writers either the naturalist or the moralist or the stylist
+holds the pen.
+
+Early or late, this or that, good outdoor writing must be marked,
+first, by fidelity to fact; and, secondly, by sincerity of
+expression. Like qualities mark all good literature; but they
+are themselves the _very_ literature of nature. When we take up a
+nature-book we ask (and it was Burroughs who taught us to ask), "Is
+the record true? Is the writing honest?"
+
+In these many volumes by John Burroughs there are many observations,
+and it is more than likely that some of them may be wrong, but it is
+not possible that any of them could be mixed with observations that
+Burroughs knows he never made. If Burroughs has written a line of
+sham natural history, which line is it? In a preface to "Wake-Robin,"
+the author says his readers have sometimes complained that they do
+not see the things which he sees in the woods; but I doubt if there
+ever was a reader who suspected John Burroughs of not seeing the
+things.
+
+His reply to these complaints is significant, being in no manner a
+defense, but an exquisite explanation, instead, of the difference
+between the nature which anybody may see in the woods and the
+nature that every individual writer, because he is a writer, and an
+individual, must put into his book: a difference like that between
+the sweet-water gathered by the bee from the flowers and the drop of
+acid-stung honey deposited by the bee in the comb. The sweet-water
+undergoes a chemical change in being brought to the hive, as the wild
+nature undergoes a literary change--by the addition of the writer's
+self to the nature, while with the sweet-water it is by the addition
+of the bee.
+
+One must be able to walk to an editorial office and back, and all the
+way walk humbly with his theme, as Burroughs ever does--not entirely
+forgetful of himself, nor of me (because he has invited me along);
+but I must be quiet and not disturb the fishing--if we go by way of a
+trout-stream.
+
+True to the facts, Burroughs is a great deal more than scientific,
+for he loves the things--the birds, hills, seasons--as well as the
+truths about them; and true to himself, he is not by any means a
+simple countryman who has never seen the city, a natural idyl, who
+lisps in books and essays, because the essays come. He is fully aware
+of the thing he wants to do, and by his own confession has a due
+amount of trouble shaping his raw material into finished literary
+form. He is quite in another class from the authors of "The Complete
+Angler" and "New England's Rarities Discovered." In Isaak Walton, to
+quote Leslie Stephen, "_a happy combination of circumstances_ has
+provided us with a true country idyl, fresh and racy from the soil,
+not consciously constructed by the most skillful artistic hand."
+
+Now the skillful artistic hand is everywhere seen in John Burroughs.
+What writer in these days could expect happy combinations of
+circumstances in sufficient numbers for so many volumes?
+
+But being an idyl, when you come to think of it, is not the result
+of a happy combination of circumstances, but rather of stars--of
+horoscope. You are born an idyl or you are not, and where and when
+you live has nothing to do with it.
+
+Who would look for a true country idyl to-day in the city of
+Philadelphia? Yet one came out of there yesterday, and lies here
+open before me, on the table. It is a slender volume, called "With
+the Birds, An Affectionate Study," by Caroline Eliza Hyde. The
+author is discussing the general subject of nomenclature and animal
+distribution, and says:
+
+"When the Deluge covered the then known face of the earth, the birds
+were drowned with every other living thing, except those that Noah,
+commanded by God, took two by two into the Ark.
+
+"When I reflect deeply and earnestly about the Ark, as every one
+should, thoughts crowd my mind with an irresistible force."
+
+[And they crowd my mind, too.]
+
+"Noah and his family had preserved the names of the birds given them
+by Adam. This is assured, for Noah sent a raven and a dove out to see
+if the waters had abated, and we have birds of that name now. Nothing
+was known of our part of the globe, so these birds must have remained
+in the Holy Land for centuries. We do not hear of them until America
+was discovered....
+
+"Bats come from Sur. They are very black mouse-like birds, and
+disagreeable.... The bobolink is not mentioned in the Bible, but it
+is doubtless a primitive bird. The cock that crows too early in the
+morning ... can hardly be classed with the song-birds. The name
+of the humming-bird is not mentioned in the Bible, but as there is
+nothing new under the sun, he is probably a primitive bird."
+
+Burroughs would have agreed that the humming-bird is probably a
+primitive bird; and also that this is a true idyl, and that he could
+not write a true idyl if he tried. No one could write like that by
+trying. And what has any happy combination of circumstances to do
+with it? No, a book essentially is only a personality in type, and
+he who would not be frustrated of his hope to write a true idyl must
+himself be born a true idyl. A fine Miltonic saying!
+
+John Burroughs was not an idyl, but an essayist, with a love for
+books only second to his love for nature; a watcher in the woods,
+a tiller of the soil, a reader, critic, thinker, poet, whose chief
+business these sixty years has been the interpretation of the
+out-of-doors.
+
+Upon him as interpreter and observer, certain of his books, "Ways of
+Nature" and "Leaf and Tendril," are an interesting comment.
+
+Truth does not always make good literature, not when it is stranger
+than fiction, as it often is; and the writer who sticks to the truth
+of nature must sometimes do it at the cost of purely literary ends.
+Have I sacrificed truth to literature? asks Burroughs of his books.
+Have I seen in nature the things that are there, or the strange
+man-things, the "winged creeping things which have four feet," and
+which were an abomination to the ancient Hebrews, but which the
+readers of modern nature-writing do greedily devour--are these the
+things I have seen? And for an answer he sets about a reëxamination
+of all he has written, from "Wake-Robin" to "Far and Near," hoping
+"that the result of the discussion or threshing will not be to make
+the reader love the animals less, but rather to love the truth more."
+
+But the result, as embodied in "Ways of Nature" and in "Leaf and
+Tendril," is quite the opposite, I fear; for these two volumes are
+more scientific in tone than any of his other work; and it is the
+mission, not of science, but of literature, to quicken our love
+for animals, even for truth. Science only adds to the truth. Yet
+here, in spite of himself, Burroughs is more the writer, more the
+interpreter, than the investigator. He is constantly forgetting his
+scientific thesis, as, for instance, in the account of his neighbor's
+errant cow. He succeeds finally, however, in reducing her fairly well
+to a mechanical piece of beef acting to vegetable stimuli upon a
+nerve ganglion located somewhere in the region between her horns and
+her tail.
+
+Now, all this is valuable, and the use made of it is laudable, but
+would we not rather have the account than the cow, especially from
+Burroughs? Certainly, because to us it is the _account_ that he has
+come to stand for. And so, if we do not love his scientific animals
+more, and his scientific findings more, we shall, I think, love all
+his other books more; for we see now that, from the beginning,
+he has regarded the facts of nature as the solid substance of his
+books, to be kept as free from fancy and from false report, as his
+interpretation of them is to be kept free from all exaggeration and
+cant.
+
+Here, then, are a score of volumes of honest seeing, honest
+feeling, honest reporting. Such honesty of itself may not make good
+nature-literature, but without such honesty there can be no good
+nature-literature.
+
+Nature-literature is not less than the truth, but more; how much
+more, Burroughs himself suggests to us in a passage about his
+literary habits.
+
+"For my part," he says, "I can never interview Nature in the reporter
+fashion. I must camp and tramp with her to get any good, and what
+I get I absorb through my emotions rather than consciously gather
+through my intellect.... An experience must lie in my mind a certain
+time before I can put it upon paper--say from three to six months.
+If there is anything in it, it will ripen and mellow by that time.
+I rarely take any notes, and I have a very poor memory, but rely
+upon the affinity of my mind for a certain order of truths or
+observations. What is mine will stick to me, and what is not will
+drop off. We who write about Nature pick out, I suspect, only the
+rare moments when we have had glimpses of her, and make much of them.
+Our lives are dull, our minds crusted over with rubbish like those
+of other people. Then writing about Nature, or about most other
+subjects, is an expansive process; we are under the law of evolution;
+we grow the germ into the tree; a little original observation goes a
+good way." For "when you go to Nature, bring us good science or else
+good literature, and not a mere inventory of what you have seen. One
+demonstrates, the other interprets."
+
+Careful as John Burroughs has been with his facts, so careful
+as often to bring us excellent science, he yet has left us no
+inventory of the out-of-doors. His work is literature; he is not a
+demonstrator, but an interpreter, an expositor who is true to the
+text and true to the whole of the context.
+
+Our pleasure in Burroughs as an interpreter comes as much from
+his wholesome good sense, from his balance and sanity, I think, as
+from the assurance of his sincerity. Free from pose and cant and
+deception, he is free also from bias and strain. There is something
+ordinary, normal, reasonable, companionable, about him; an even tenor
+to all his ways, a deliberateness, naturalness to all his paths, as
+if they might have been made originally by the cows. So they were.
+
+If Burroughs were to start from my door for a tramp over these small
+Hingham hills he would cross the trout-brook by my neighbor's stone
+bridge, and, nibbling a spear of peppermint on the way, would follow
+the lane and the cow-paths across the pasture. Thoreau would pick
+out the deepest hole in the brook and try to swim across; he would
+leap the stone walls of the lane, cut a bee-line through the pasture,
+and drop, for his first look at the landscape, to the bottom of the
+pit in the seam-face granite quarry. Here he would pull out his
+notebook and a gnarly wild apple from his pocket, and, intensely,
+critically, chemically, devouring said apple, make note in the book
+that the apples of Eden were flat, the apples of Sodom bitter, but
+this wild, tough, wretched, impossible apple of the Hingham hills
+united all ambrosial essences in its striking odor of squash-bugs.
+
+Burroughs takes us along with him. Thoreau comes upon us in the
+woods--jumps out at us from behind some bush, with a "_Scat!_"
+Burroughs brings us home in time for tea; Thoreau leaves us tangled
+up in the briars.
+
+It won't hurt us to be jumped at now and then and told to "_scat!_"
+It won't hurt us to be digged by the briars. It is good for us,
+otherwise we might forget that _we_ are beneath our clothes. It is
+good for us and highly diverting,--and highly irritating too.
+
+But Thoreau stands alone. "Walden Pond" is one of America's certain
+contributions to the world's great books.
+
+For my part, when I take up an outdoor book I am glad if there
+is quiet in it, and fragrance, and something of the saneness and
+sweetness of the sky. Not that I always want sweet skies. It is
+ninety-eight degrees in the shade, and three weeks since there fell
+a drop of rain. I could sing like a robin for a sizzling, crackling
+thunder-shower--less for the sizzling and crackling than for the
+shower. Thoreau is a succession of showers--"tempests"; his pages
+are sheet-lightning, electrifying, purifying, illuminating, but not
+altogether conducive to peace. "Walden Pond" is something more than
+a nature book. There is a clear sky to most of Burroughs's pages, a
+rural landscape, wide, gently rolling, with cattle standing here and
+there beneath the trees.
+
+Burroughs's natural history is entirely natural, his philosophy
+entirely reasonable, his religion and ethics very much of the kind we
+wish our minister and our neighbor might possess; and his manner of
+writing is so unaffected that we feel we could write in such a manner
+ourselves. Only we cannot.
+
+Since the time he can be said to have "led" a life, Burroughs has
+led a literary life; that is to say, nothing has been allowed to
+interfere with his writing; yet the writing has not been allowed
+to interfere with a quiet successful business--with his raising of
+grapes.
+
+He has a study and a vineyard.
+
+Not many men ought to live by the pen alone. A steady diet of
+inspiration and words is hard on the literary health. The writing
+should be varied with some good, wholesome work, actual hard work
+for the hands; not so much work, perhaps, as one would find in
+an eighteen-acre vineyard; yet John Burroughs's eighteen acres
+certainly proved to be no check--rather, indeed, a stimulus--to his
+writing. He seems to have gathered a volume out of every acre; and
+he seems to have put a good acre into every volume. "Fresh Fields"
+is the name of one of the volumes, "Leaf and Tendril" of another;
+but the freshness of his fields, the leaves and the tendrils of his
+vineyard, enter into them all. The grapes of the vineyard are in them
+also.
+
+Here is a growth of books out of the soil, books that have been
+trimmed, trained, sprayed, and kept free from rot. Such books may not
+be altogether according to the public taste; they will keep, however,
+until the public acquires a better taste. Sound, ripe, fresh, early
+and late, a full crop! Has the vineyard anything to do with it?
+
+It is not every farmer who should go to writing, nor every writer
+who should go to farming; but there is a mighty waste of academic
+literature, of premature, precocious, lily-handed literature, of
+chicken-licken literature, because the writers do not know a spade
+when they see one, would not call it a spade if they knew. Those
+writers need to do less writing and more farming, more real work with
+their soft hands in partnership with the elemental forces of nature,
+or in comradeship with average elemental men--the only species extant
+of the quality to make writing worth while.
+
+John Burroughs had this labor, this partnership, this comradeship.
+His writing is seasoned and sane. It is ripe, and yet as fresh as
+green corn with the dew in the silk. You have eaten corn on the cob
+just from the stalk and steamed in its own husk? Green corn that _is_
+corn, that has all its milk and sugar and flavor, is corn on the cob,
+and in the husk--is cob and kernel and husk--not a stripped ear that
+is cooked into the kitchen air.
+
+Literature is too often stripped of its human husk, and cut from its
+human cob: the man gone, the writer left; the substance gone, the
+style left--corn that tastes as much like corn as it tastes like
+puffed rice--which tastes like nothing at all. There is the sweetness
+of the husk, the flavor of the cob, the substance of the uncut corn
+to John Burroughs.
+
+There is no lack of cob and husk to Thoreau--of shell and hull, one
+should say, for he is more like a green walnut than an ear of green
+corn. Thoreau is very human, a whole man; but he is almost as much
+a tree, and a mountain, and a pond, and a spell of weather, and a
+state of morals. He is the author of "Walden," and nobody else in
+the world is that; he is a lover of Nature, as ardent a lover as
+ever eloped with her; he is a lover of men, too, loving them with an
+intensity that hates them bag and baggage; he is poetical, prophetic,
+paradoxical, and utterly impossible.
+
+But he knew it. Born in Concord, under the transcendental stars, at
+a time when Delphic sayings and philosophy, romance and poetry ran
+wild in the gardens where Bouncing-Bet and Wayward Charlie now run
+wild, Thoreau knew that he was touched, and that all his neighbors
+were touched, and sought asylum at Walden. But Walden was not distant
+enough. If John Burroughs in Roxbury, New York, found it necessary
+to take to the woods in order to escape from Emerson, then Thoreau
+should have gone to Chicago, or to Xamiltepec.
+
+It is the strain, in Thoreau, that wearies us; his sweating among the
+stumps and woodchucks, for a bean crop netting him eight dollars,
+seventy-one and one half cents. But such beans! Beans with minds
+and souls! Yet, for baking, plain beans are better than these
+transcendental beans, because your transcendental beans are always
+baked without pork. A family man, however, cannot contemplate that
+piddling patch with any patience, even though he have a taste for
+literature as real as his taste for beans. It is better to watch
+John Burroughs pruning his grapevines for a crop to net him one
+thousand, three hundred and twenty-five dollars, and _no_ cents, and
+no half-cents. Here were eighteen acres to be cultivated, whose fruit
+was to be picked, shipped, and sold in the New York markets at a
+profit--a profit plainly felt in John Burroughs's books.
+
+Reading what I have just said, as it appeared in the "Atlantic" for
+November, 1910, Burroughs wrote in the course of a letter to me:
+
+"I feel like scolding you a little for disparaging Thoreau for my
+benefit. Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am. I may be more human,
+but he is as certainly more divine. His moral and ethical value I
+think is much greater, and he has a heroic quality that I cannot
+approach."
+
+Perhaps no truer word will ever be said of these two men than that;
+and certainly no more generous word was ever spoken by one great
+writer of another, his nearest rival. I have not, nor would I,
+disparage Thoreau for Burroughs's benefit. Thoreau dwells apart. He
+is long past all disparagement. "Walden Pond" and "The Week," if not
+the most challenging, most original books in American literature,
+are, with Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and Emerson's "Essays," among
+those books.
+
+Thoreau and Burroughs had almost nothing in common except their love
+of nature, and in that they were farther apart than in anything
+else, Thoreau searching by night and day in all wild places for his
+lost horse and hound while Burroughs quietly worshiped, as his rural
+divinity, the ruminating cow.
+
+The most worthy qualities of good writing are those least
+noticeable--negative qualities of honesty, directness, sincerity,
+euphony; noticeable only by their absence. Yet in John Burroughs they
+amounted to a positive charm. Indeed, are not these same negative
+qualities the very substance of good style? Such style as is had by a
+pair of pruning-shears, as is embodied in the exquisite lines of a
+flying swallow--the style that is perfect, purposeful adaptability?
+
+But there is more than efficiency to John Burroughs's style; there
+are strengths and graces existing in and for themselves. Here is
+a naturalist who has studied the art of writing. "What little
+merit my style has," he declares, "is the result of much study
+and discipline." And whose style, if it be style at all, is not
+the result of much study and discipline? Flourish, fine-writing,
+wordiness, obscurity, and cant are exorcised in no other way; and
+as for the "limpidness, sweetness, freshness," which John Burroughs
+says should characterize outdoor writing, and which do characterize
+his writing, how else than by study and discipline shall they be
+obtained?
+
+Outdoor literature, no less than other types of literature, is both
+form and matter; the two are mutually dependent, inseparably one;
+but the writer is most faithful to the form when he is most careful
+of the matter. It makes a vast difference whether his interest is
+absorbed by what he has to say, or by the possible ways he may say
+it. If John Burroughs wrote in his shirt-sleeves, as a recent critic
+says he did, it was because he went about his writing as he went
+about his vineyarding--for grapes, for thoughts, and not to see how
+pretty he could make a paragraph look, or into what fantastic form he
+could train a vine. The vine is lovely in itself--if it bear fruit.
+
+And so is language. Take John Burroughs's manner in any of its moods:
+its store of single, sufficient words, for instance, especially the
+homely, rugged words and idioms, and the flavor they give, is second
+to the work they do; or take his use of figures--when he speaks of
+De Quincey's "discursive, roundabout style, herding his thoughts as
+a collie dog herds sheep"--and unexpected, vivid, apt as they are,
+they are even more effective. One is often caught up by the poetry of
+these essays and borne aloft, but never on a gale of words; the lift
+and sweep are genuine emotion and thought.
+
+As an essayist--as a nature-writer I ought to say--John Burroughs's
+literary care is perhaps nowhere so plainly seen as in the simple
+architecture of his essay plans, in their balance and finish, a
+quality that distinguishes him from others of the craft, and that
+neither gift nor chance could so invariably supply. The common
+fault of outdoor books is the catalogue--raw data, notes. There are
+paragraphs of notes in John Burroughs, volumes of them in Thoreau.
+The average nature-writer sees not too much of nature, but knows all
+too little of literary values; he sees everything, gets a meaning
+out of nothing; writes it all down; and gives us what he sees, which
+is precisely what everybody may see; whereas, we want also what he
+thinks and feels. Some of our present writers do nothing but feel and
+divine and fathom--the animal psychologists, whatever they are. The
+bulk of nature-writing, however, is journalistic, done on the spot,
+into a notebook, as were the journals of Thoreau--fragmentary, yet
+with Thoreau often exquisite fragments--bits of old stained glass,
+unleaded, and lacking unity and design.
+
+No such fault can be found with John Burroughs. He went pencilless
+into the woods, and waited before writing until his return home,
+until time had elapsed for the multitudinous details of the trip to
+blur and blend, leaving only the dominant facts and impressions for
+his pen. Every part of his work is of selected stock, as free from
+knots and seams and sapwood as a piece of old-growth pine. There is
+plan, proportion, integrity to his essays--the naturalist living
+faithfully up to a sensitive literary conscience.
+
+John Burroughs was a good but not a great naturalist, as Audubon and
+Gray were great naturalists. His claim (and Audubon's in part) upon
+us is literary. He was a watcher in the woods; he made a few pleasant
+excursions into the primeval wilderness, leaving his gun at home, and
+his camera, too, thank Heaven! He broke out no new trail, discovered
+no new animal, no new thing. But he saw all the old, uncommon things,
+saw them oftener, watched them longer, through more seasons, than
+any other writer of our out-of-doors; and though he discovered no
+new thing, yet he made discoveries, volumes of them--contributions
+largely to our stock of literature, and to our store of love for
+the earth, and to our joy in living upon it. He turned a little
+of the universe into literature; translated a portion of the earth
+into human language; restored to us our garden here eastward in
+Eden--apple-tree and all.
+
+For a real taste of fruity literature, try John Burroughs's
+chapter on "The Apple." Try Thoreau's, too,--if you are partial to
+squash-bugs. There are chapters in John Burroughs, such as "Is it
+going to Rain?" "A River View," "A Snow-Storm," which seem to me as
+perfect, in their way, as anything that has ever been done--single,
+simple, beautiful in form, and deeply significant; the storm being
+a piece of fine description, of whirling snow across a geologic
+landscape, distant, and as dark as eternity; the whole wintry picture
+lighted and warmed at the end by a glowing touch of human life:
+
+"We love the sight of the brown and ruddy earth; it is the color of
+life, while a snow-covered plain is the face of death; yet snow is
+but the mark of life-giving rain; it, too, is the friend of man--the
+tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow."
+
+There are many texts in these volumes, many themes; and in them all
+there is one real message: that this is a good world to live in; that
+these are good men and women to live with; that life is good, here
+and now, and altogether worth living.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+It was in October that I last saw him--at Woodchuck Lodge. November
+22 he wrote:
+
+   I neglected to make any apologies for the long letter I wrote
+   you the other day. I promise not to do so again. I am enclosing
+   an old notebook of mine, filled with all sorts of jottings as
+   you will see. I send it for a keepsake.
+
+   We are off for California to-morrow. Hope to be there in early
+   December. We leave Chicago on the 29th. My address there will
+   be _La Jolla_, San Diego. Good luck to you and yours.
+
+    Always your friend
+
+    JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+   He kept his promise too too well. This was the last letter I ever had
+from him.
+
+He dreaded that California journey. San Diego is a long, long way
+from Woodchuck Lodge when one is nearing eighty-four. Dr. Barrus
+and two of her nieces made the trip with him, Henry Ford, out of
+his friendship, meeting the expenses of the winter sojourn. But
+California had no cure for the winter that had at last fallen upon
+the old naturalist. Sickness, and longing for home, and other ills
+befell him. He was in a hospital for many days. But visitors came to
+see him as usual; he went among the schools speaking; nor was his
+pen idle--not yet; one of the last things, if not the very last he
+wrote for publication, being a vigorous protest against free verse,
+called "The Reds of Literature." But all the while he was thinking of
+home, and planning for his birthday party at the Lodge back on the
+ancestral farm.
+
+We celebrated it. He was there. But he did not know. On the third
+day of April, his eighty-fourth birthday, followed by a few of his
+friends, mourned by all the nation, he was laid to rest in the hill
+pasture, beside the boulder on which he had played as a child, and
+where only a few months before he had taken me to see the glory of
+hill and sky that had been his lifelong theme, and that were to be
+his sleep forever.
+
+He died on the train that was bringing him back from California, his
+last desire not quite fulfilled. He was a wholly human man; and an
+utterly simple man; and so true to himself, that his last words,
+uttered on the speeding train, expressed and completed his whole life
+with singular beauty: "How far are we from home," he asked,--and the
+light failed; and the train sped on as if there were need of hurry
+now!
+
+    "Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
+    Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea,
+    I rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate
+    For lo! my own shall come to me."
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+    The Riverside Press
+
+    CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
+    U . S . A
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Seer of Slabsides, by Dallas Lore Sharp
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 43846 ***