JOHN BURROUGHSJOHN BURROUGHSAT ESOPUS ON THE HUDSON
JOHN BURROUGHS
When the author of “Winter Sunshine” comes to town, it is over the most perfectly graded track and through the finest scenery about New York. Returning he is carried past Weehawken and the Palisades, through the Jersey Meadows, in and out among the West Shore Highlands, under West Point, and past Newburg factories and Marlborough berry farms. He leaves the train at West Park, mounts a hill through a peach-orchard, crosses a grassy field, and the high-road when he reaches the top, opens a rustic gate, and is at home. From the road, you look down upon the roofs and dormers and chimneys of the house, about half covered with the red and purple foliage of the Virginia creeper. The ground slopes quite steeply, so that the house is two stories high on the side next the road and three on the side toward the river, which winds away between high, wooded banks to the Catskills, twenty miles to the north, and to the Highlands, thirty miles to the south. The slope, in the rear of the house, to the river, is laid out in a grapery and an orchard ofapple and peach trees. Between the house and the road the steep hillside is tufted with evergreens and other ornamental trees. At the foot of the hill, the gray roofs of a big ice-house are seen. Squirrels, that have their nests in the sawdust packing, clamber around the walls. Near the house, to the left, there is a substantial store-house, and a carriage-shed and stable. There are two other dwellings on the farm. The country immediately about is all very much alike, nearly half of it in ornamental plantations surrounding neat country houses; the other half, where it is not occupied by rocks, being covered with fruit, or corn, or grass. The opposite shore of the Hudson is of the same character, varied with clumps of timber, villas and farm-houses of the style that was in vogue before the introduction of the so-called Queen Anne mode of building; a few cultivated fields and many wild meadows and out-cropping ridges of slate rock intervening. But the interior country, on the hither-side, back of the railroad which cuts through the slate hills like a hay-knife, is a perfect wilderness—rugged, barren, and uninhabited. A number of little lakes lie behind the first range of hills, the highest of which has been named byMr.Burroughs Mount Hymettus, because it is a famous place for wild bees and sumac honey. From one of these ponds, an exemplary mountain stream—modelof all that a mountain stream should be—makes its way by a series of cascades into the valley, where it forms deep pools, peopled by silvery chub and black bass, brawls over ledges, sparkles in the sun, and sleeps in the shadow, and performs all the recognized and traditional brook “business” to perfection. Its specialty is its bed of black stones and dark green moss, which has gained it its name of Black Creek. At one spot, where it passes under a high bank overhung by hemlocks, it has communicated its dark color to the very frogs that jump into it, and to the dragonflies that rid it of mosquitoes.
The road between West Park and Esopus crosses this brook near a ruined mill, whose charred rafters lie in the cellar, and whose wheel-buckets are filled with corn-shucks. The ruby berries of the nightshade hang in over its window-sills. This is the most varied two miles of road that I can bring to mind. Starting with a fine view up and down the river, it soon dips into the valley, between walls of slate and rows of tall locusts. The locusts are succeeded by the firs and pines of a carefully kept estate. Then comes the stream, spanned by a rustic bridge; the ruined mill, and the new rise of ground which, beyond the railroad, reaches up into summits covered with red oaks and flaming orange maples. A tree by the roadside, now torn in two by a storm, ispointed out byMr.Burroughs as the former home of an old friend of his—a brown owl who, in the course of a ten years’ acquaintanceship, as if dreading the contempt that familiarity breeds, never showed an entire and unhesitating confidence in him. The bird would slink out of sight as he approached—slowly and by imperceptible degrees; wisely effacing himself rather than that it should be said he was too intimate with a mere human. Esopus contains a tavern, a post-office, a bank, a blacksmith-shop, and one or two houses; and yet—like an awkward contingency—one never suspects its existence until he has got fairly into it. From the railroad station it is invisible; it cannot be seen from the river; and the road, which runs through it, knows nothing of it before or after.
Mr.Burroughs’s portrait must be drawn out of doors. He is of a medium height, but being well-built and having a fine head, he gives the impression of being by no means a middling sort of a man, physically. His skin is well tanned by exposure to all sorts of weather. He has grisly hair and beard. The eyes and mouth have a somewhat feminine character; the eyes are humid, rather large, and they are half closed when he is pleased; the lips are full, the line between them never hard, and the corners of the mouth are blunt. The nose would be Roman, if it were atrifle longer. I make no apology for giving so short a description of a man whom it would be well worth while to paint. It is unnecessary to sketch his mental features, for he has unconsciously placed them on record, himself, in the delightful series of essays which he has added to the treasures of the English language.
His walks, his naturalistic rambles, his longer boating or shooting excursions, are the subjects of some of his most entertaining chapters; but a not impertinent curiosity may be gratified by some account of his everyday life when at home and at work. His literary labors are at a standstill throughout the summer. He does not take notes. Even when he has returned from camping out, or canoeing, or from his summer vacation of whatever form, he does not rush at once to pen and paper. He waits till the spirit moves him, which it usually begins to do a little after the first frosts. He rises early—between five and six o’clock; breakfasts, reads the newspapers or employs himself about the house and farm until nine or ten; then writes for three or four hours, seldom more. He has always refused to do literary work to order, although he has had some tempting offers. He will write only what he pleases, and when he pleases, and so much as he pleases. And he observes no method in preparing, any more than in doing, his work. He exactsfrom himself no account of his time. He does not feel himself bound in conscience to improve every incident that has occurred, every observation he has made during the year. He simply lets the material which he has absorbed distill over into essays long or short, few or many, as providence directs. He does not belong to the class of methodical laborers who make a business of writing, and who would feel conscience-stricken if, at the close of their working-day, they had not blackened a certain number of sheets of white paper. But he acknowledges that good work is done in that way, and he thinks it is all a matter of habit.
His neighbors see to it that his leisure does not degenerate into idleness. They have made a bank examiner of him, and a superintendent of roads, and, latterly, a postmaster. The first-mentioned position is the only one that has any emoluments attached to it; but, as he likes to drive, he thinks it for his interest to see after the roads, and he hopes, now that his post-office at West Farms is in working order, to get his mails in good time.
Most of his books—“Wake Robin,” “Birds and Poets,” “Winter Sunshine,” etc.—were written in the library of his house, a small room, fitted with book-shelves both glazed and open, and enjoying a splendid view of the Hudson to and beyondPoughkeepsie. But he has lately built himself a study, several hundred yards from the house and more directly overlooking the river. Here he has pretty complete immunity from noise and from interruptions of all sorts. It is a little, square building, the walls rough-cast within and faced with long strips of bark without. Papers, magazines, books, photographs, lithographs lie scattered over the table, the window-sills and the floor, and fill some shelves let into a little recess in the wall. A student’s lamp on the table shows that the owner sometimes reads here at night. His room-mates at present are some wasps hatched out of a nest taken last winter and suspended to the chimney. This primitive erection is further ornamented with a lot of pictures of men and birds, the men mostly poets—Carlyle being the only exception—and the birds all songsters. Two steps from the study is a summer-house of hemlock branches, with gnarled vine-stocks twisted in among them, where one may sit of an afternoon and read the New York morning papers, or watch the boats or the trains on the opposite bank, or the antics of a squirrel among the branches of the apple-tree overhead, or the struggles of a honey-bee backing out of a flower of yellow-rattle.
Mr.Burroughs has been his own architect; and I know many people who might wish that he had been theirs too. He planned and superintendedthe erection of his house, which is a four-gabled structure, with a porch in front and a broad balcony in the rear. Most of the timber for the upper story is oak from his old Delaware County farm. The stone of which the two lower stories are built was obtained on the spot, and is a dark slate plentifully veined with quartz. Great pains were taken in the building to turn the handsomest samples of quartz to the fore, and to put them where they would do the most good, artistically. Over the lintel of the door, for example, is a row of three fine specimens; and a big chunk, with mosses lying between its crystals, protrudes from the wall near the porch. The variety of color so obtained, with the drab woodwork of the upper story and the red Virginia vine, keeps the house, at all seasons, in harmony with its surroundings. It is no less so within; for doors, wainscots, window-frames, joists, sills, skirting-boards, floor and rafters are all of native woods, left of their natural colors, and skillfully contrasted with one another; one door being of Georgia pine with oak panels, another of chestnut and curled maple, a third of butternut and cherry, and so on. Grayish, or brownish, or russet wall-papers, and carpets to match, give the house very much of the appearance of a nest, into the composition of which nothing enters that is not of soft textures and low and harmonious color.
Roger Riordan.