Dallas Lore Sharp

“ 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 42 to the ancient Hebrews, but which the readers of modern nature-writing do greedily devour—are these the things I have seen? ”

“ All outdoor existence, all outdoor 21 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 52 eighteen acres certainly proved to be no check—rather, indeed, a stimulus—to his writing. ”

“ The individual, the particular thing, is always of particular interest to 22 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Take John Burroughs's manner in any of its moods: its 62 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.
55 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 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 ”

“ 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 29 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 63 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ And with me at dinner 8 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 41 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 24 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. ”

“ 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 48 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 23 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. ”

“ 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, 43 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 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 7 and his constant joy in living, his utter naturalness and naïveté amounted to genius. ”

“ 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 46 other people. ”

“ 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 15 must be the result of the laws of matter and force that prevail in celestial mechanics ”

“ 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 44 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. ”

“ 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 33 time in John Burroughs. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Our pleasure in Burroughs as an 47 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. ”