You flowret, nodding in the wind,Is ready plighted to the bee;And, maiden, why that look unkind?For, lo! thy lover seeketh thee.
This stanza is a detraction from the poem as we know it, and assuredly its author has a right to drop it. Concerning the fifth stanza, Mr. Burroughs says he has never liked it, and has often substituted one which he wrote a few years ago. The stanza he would reject is—
The waters know their own and drawThe brook that springs in yonder heights;So flows the good with equal lawUnto the soul of pure delights.
The one he would offer instead—
The law of love binds every heart,And knits it to its utmost kin,Nor can our lives flow long apartFrom souls our secret souls would win.
And yet he is not satisfied with this; he says it is too subtle and lacks the large, simple imagery of the original lines.
The legion who cherish this poem in their hearts are justly incensed whenever they come across a copy of it to which some one, a few years ago, had the effrontery to add this inane stanza:—
Serene I fold my hands and wait,Whate'er the storms of life may be,Faith guides me up to heaven's gate,And love will bring my own to me.
One of Mr. Burroughs's friends (Joel Benton), himself a poet, in an article tracing the vicissitudes of this poem, shows pardonable indignation at the "impudence and hardihood of the unmannered meddler" who tacked on the "heaven's gate" stanza, and adds:—
The lyric as Burroughs wrote it embodies a motive, or concept, that has scarcely been surpassed for amenability to poetic treatment, and for touching and impressive point. Its partly elusive outlines add to its charm. Its balance between hint and affirmation; its faith in universal forces, and its tender yet virile expression, are all shining qualities, apparent to the critical, and hypnotic to the general, reader. There is nothing in it that need even stop at "heaven's gate." It permits the deserving reader by happy instinct to go through that portal—without waiting outside to parade his sect mark. But the force of the poem and catholicity of its sanctions are either utterly destroyed or ridiculously enfeebled, by capping it with a sectarian and narrowly interpreted climax.
Although the poem is so well known, I shall quote it here in the form preferred by its author;—
WAITINGSerene, 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.I stay my haste, I make delays,For what avails this eager pace?I stand amid th' eternal ways,And what is mine shall know my face.Asleep, awake, by night or day,The friends I seek are seeking me;No wind can drive my bark astray,Nor change the tide of destiny.What matter if I stand alone?I wait with joy the coming years;My heart shall reap where it hath sown,And garner up its fruit of tears.The waters know their own and drawThe brook that springs in yonder heights;So flows the good with equal lawUnto the soul of pure delights.The stars come nightly to the sky,The tidal wave comes to the sea;Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,Can keep my own away from me.
"Come and go to Slabsides for over Sunday—I think we can keep warm. We will have an old-fashioned time; I will roast a duck in the pot; it will be great fun."
This invitation came from Mr. Burroughs in 1911 to friends who proposed to call on him early in December. Riverby was closed for the season, its occupants tarrying in Poughkeepsie, but, ever ready for an adventure, the Sage of Slabsides proposed a winter picnic at his cabin in the hills.
A ride of some two hours from New York brings us to West Park, where our host awaits us. A stranger, glancing at his white hair and beard, might credit his seventy-five years, but not when looking at his ruddy face with the keen, bright eyes, or at his alert, vigorous movements.
Together with blankets and a market-basket of provisions we are stowed away in a wagon and driven up the steep, winding way; at first along a country road, then into a wood's road with huge Silurian rocks cropping out everywhere, showing here and there seams of quartz and patches of moss and ferns.
"In there," said Mr. Burroughs, pointing to an obscure path, "I had a partridge for a neighbor. She had a nest there. I went to see her every day till she became uneasy about it, and let me know I was no longer welcome."
"Yonder," he continued, indicating a range of wooded hills against the wintry sky, "is the classic region of 'Popple Town Hill,' and over there is 'Pang Yang.'"
Some friendly spirit has preceded us to the cabin; a fire is burning in the great stone fireplace, and mattresses and bedding are exposed to the heat. Moving these away, the host makes room for us near the hearth. He piles on the wood, and we are soon permeated by the warmth of the fire and of the unostentatious hospitality of Slabsides.
How good it is to be here! The city, with its rush and roar and complexities, seems far away. How satisfying it is to strip off the husks and get at the kernel of things! There is more chance for high thinking when one is big enough to have plain living. How we surround ourselves with non-essentials, how we are dominated with the "mania of owning things"—one feels all this afresh in looking around at this simple, well-built cabin with its few needful things close at hand, and with life reduced to the simplest terms. One sees here exemplified the creed Mr. Burroughs outlined several years ago in his essay "An Outlook upon Life":—
I am bound to praise the simple life, because I have lived it and found it good.... I love a small house, plain clothes, simple living. Many persons know the luxury of a skin bath—a plunge in the pool or the wave unhampered by clothing. That is the simple life—direct and immediate contact with things, life with the false wrappings torn away—the fine house, the fine equipage, the expensive habits, all cut off. How free one feels, how good the elements taste, how close one gets to them, how they fit one's body and one's soul! To see the fire that warms you, or better yet, to cut the wood that feeds the fire that warms you; to see the spring where the water bubbles up that slakes your thirst, and to dip your pail into it; to see the beams that are the stay of your four walls, and the timbers that uphold the roof that shelters you; to be in direct and personal contact with the sources of your material life; to want no extras, no shields; to find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to find a quest of wild berries more satisfying than a gift of tropic fruit; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest, or over a wild flower in spring—these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
(Illustration of The Living-Room. From a photograph by M. H. Fanning)
The two men were soon talking companionably. When persons of wide reading and reflection, and of philosophic bent, who have lived long and been mellowed by life, come together, the interchange of thought is bound to be valuable; things are so well said, so inevitably said, that the listener thinks he cannot forget the manner of saying; but thoughts crowd thick and fast, comments on men and measures, on books and events, are numerous and varied, but hard to recapture. The logs ignite, sending out their cheering heat, the coals glow, the sparks fly upward, warmth and radiance envelop us; but an attempt to warm the reader by the glow of that fireside talk is almost as futile as an effort to dispel to-day's cold by the fire of yesterday.
A few deserted cottages perched on the rocks near by show us where the summer neighbors of our host live, but at all seasons his wild neighbors are the ones he hobnobs with the most; while his indoor companions are Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, Carlyle, Arnold, Wordsworth, Darwin, Huxley, Emerson, Whitman, Bergson, and many others, ancient and modern.
"I've been rereading Emerson's essay on 'Immortality' lately, evenings in my study down there by the river," said Mr. Burroughs. "I had forgotten it was so noble and fine—he makes much of the idea of permanence."
In this connection he spoke of John Fiske and his contributions to literature, telling of the surprise he felt on first meeting Fiske at Harvard, to see the look of thebon vivantin one in whom the intellectual and the spiritual were so prominent. Laughing, he recalled the amusement of the college boys at Fiske's comical efforts to discover a piece of chalk dropped during his lecture on "Immortality." Standing on the hearth, a merry twinkle in his eyes, he recited some humorous lines which he had written concerning the episode.
Reverting to the question of immortality in a serious vein, he summed up the debated question much as he has done in one of his essays,—that it has been good to be here, and will be good to go hence; that we know not whence we come, nor whither we go; were not consulted as to our coming, and shall not be as to our going; but that it is all good; all for "the glory of God;" though we must use this phrase in a larger sense than the cramped interpretation of the theologian. All the teeming life of the globe, the millions on millions in the microscopic world, and the millions on millions of creatures that can be seen by the naked eye—those who have been swept away, those here now, those who will come after—all appearing in their appointed time and place, playing their parts and vanishing, and to the old question "Why?" we may as well answer, "For the glory of God"; if we will only conceive a big enough glory, and a big enough God. His utter trust in things as they are seemed a living embodiment of that sublime line in "Waiting"—
"I stand amid the Eternal ways";
and, thus standing, he is content to let the powers that be have their way with him.
"To all these mysteries I fall back upon the last words I heard Whitman say, shortly before the end—commonplace words, but they sum it up: 'It's all right, John, it's all right'; but Whitman had the active, sustaining faith in immortality—
'I laugh at what you call dissolution,And I know the amplitude of time.'"
As the afternoon wanes, Mr. Burroughs hangs the kettle on the crane, broils the chops, and with a little help from one of the guests, soon has supper on the table, a discussion of Bergson's philosophy suffering only occasional interruptions; such as, "Wherehavethose women (summer occupants of Slabsides) put my holder?" or, "See if there isn't some salt in the cupboard."
"There! I forgot to bring up eggs for breakfast, but here are other things," he mutters as he rummages in his market-basket. "That memory of mine is pretty tricky; sometimes I can't remember things any better than I can find them when they are right under my nose. I've just found a line from Emerson that I've been hunting for two days—'The worm striving to be man.' I looked my Emerson through and through, and no worm; then I found in Joel Benton's Concordance of Emerson that the line was in 'May-Day'; he even cited the page, but my Emerson had no printing on that page. I searched all through 'May-Day,' and still no worm; I looked again with no better success, and was on the point of giving up when I spied the worm—it almost escaped me—"
"It must have turned, didn't it?"
"Yes, the worm surely turned, or I never should have seen it," he confessed.
The feminine member of the trio wields the dish-mop while the host dries the dishes, and the Dreamer before the fire luxuriates in the thought that his help is not needed.
The talk on philosophy and religion does not make the host forget to warm sheets and blankets and put hot bricks in the beds to insure against the fast-gathering cold.
The firelight flickers on the bark-covered rafters, lighting up the yellow-birch partition between living-room and bedroom downstairs, and plays upon the rustic stairway that leads to the two rooms overhead, as we sit before the hearth in quiet talk. Outside the moonlight floods the great open space around the cabin, revealing outlines of the rocky inclosure. No sounds in all that stillness without, and within only the low voices of the friends, and the singing logs.
Mr. Burroughs tells of his visit, in October, to the graves of his maternal grandparents:—
"They died in 1854, my first season away from home, and there they have lain for fifty-seven years, and I had never been to their graves! I'm glad I went; it made them live again for me. How plainly I could see the little man in his blue coat with brass buttons, with his decidedly Irish features! And Grandmother, a stout woman, with quaint, homely ways. The moss is on their gravestones now, and two evergreen trees wax strong above them. I found an indigo-bird had built her nest above their graves. I broke off the branch and brought it home."
"There! get up and use that water before it freezes over," the host calls out the next morning, as, mounting the stairs, he places a pitcher of hot water by the door. It is bitter cold, one's fingers ache, and one wonders if, after all, it is so much fun to live in a cabin in the woods in the dead of winter. But a crackling fire below and savory smells of bacon and coffee reconcile one, and the day begins right merrily.
And what a dinner the author sets before us! what fun to see him prepare it, discussing meanwhile the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, recounting anecdotes of boyhood, touching on politics and religion, on current events, on conflicting views of the vitalists and the chemico-physicists, on this and on that, but never to the detriment of his duck. It is true he did serenely fold his hands and wait, between times. Then what an event to see him lift the smoking cover and try the bird with a fork—" to see if the duck is relenting," he explains. At a certain time he arises from a grave psychological discussion to rake out hollow places in the coals where he buries potatoes and onions.
"The baking of an onion," he declares, "takes all the conceit out of him. He is sweet and humble after his baptism of fire." Then the talk soars above ducks and onions, until he gives one of the idlers permission to prepare the salad and lay the table.
For a dinner to remember all one's days, commend me to a thoroughly relented duck; a mealy, ash-baked potato; an onion (yea, several of them) devoid of conceit, and well buttered and salted; and a salad of Slabsides celery and lettuce; with Riverby apples and pears, and beechnuts to complete the feast—beechnuts gathered in October up in the Catskills, gathered one by one as the chipmunk gathers them, by the "Laird of Woodchuck Lodge," as he is called on his native heath, though he is one and the same with the master of Slabsides.
We hear no sounds all the day outside the cabin but the merry calls of chickadees, until in mid-afternoon an unwelcome "Halloa!" tells us the wagon is come to take us down to Riverby. Reluctantly the fire is extinguished, and the wide, hospitable door of Slabsides closes behind us.
Riverby, "the house that Jack built," as the builder boasted, is a house interesting and individual, though conforming somewhat to the conventions of the time when it was built (1874). It is as immaculate within as its presiding genius can make it, presenting a sharp contrast to the easy-going housekeeping of the mountain cabin.
We tarry a few minutes in the little bark-covered study, detached from the house and overlooking the Hudson, where Mr. Burroughs does his writing when at home; we see the rustic summer-house near by, and the Riverby vineyards, formerly husbanded by "the Vine-Dresser of Esopus," as his friends used to call him; now by his son Julian, who combines, like his father before him, grape-growing with essay-writing.
A pleasant hour is spent in the artistic little cottage, planned and built by the author and his son, where live Mr. Julian Burroughs and his family. Here the grandfather has many a frolic with his three grandchildren, who know him as "Baba." John Burroughs the younger is his special pride. Who knows but the naturalist stands somewhat in awe of his grandson?—for as the youngster reaches for his "Teddy," and says sententiously, "Bear!" the elder never ventures a word about the dangers of "sham natural history."
Boarding the West Shore train, laden with fruit and beechnuts and pleasant memories, we return to the city's roar and whirl, dreaming still of the calls of chickadees in the bare woods and of quiet hours before the fire at Slabsides.
There has always been a haunting suggestiveness to me about the expressionRue du Temps Perdu—the Street of Lost Time. Down this shadowy vista we all come to peer with tear-dimmed eyes sooner or later. Usually this pensive retrospection is the premonitory sign that one is nearing the last milestone before the downhill side of life begins. But to some this yearning backward glance comes early; they feel its compelling power while still in the vigor of middle life. Why this is so it is not easy to say, but imaginative, brooding natures who live much in their emotions are prone to this chronic homesickness for the Past, this ever-recurring, mournful retrospect, this tender, wistful gaze into the years that are no more.
It is this tendency in us all as we grow older that makes us drift back to the scenes of our youth; it satisfies a deep-seated want to look again upon the once familiar places. We seek them out with an eagerness wholly wanting in ordinary pursuits. The face of the fields, the hills, the streams, the house where one was born—how they are invested with something that exists nowhere else, wander where we will! In their midst memories come crowding thick and fast; things of moment, critical episodes, are mingled with the most trivial happenings; smiles and tears and sighs are curiously blended as we stroll down the Street of Lost Time.
While we are all more or less under this spell of the Past, some natures are more particularly enthralled by it, even in the very zenith of life, showing it to be of temperamental origin rather than the outcome of the passing years. Of such a temperament is John Burroughs. Now, when the snows of five-and-seventy winters have whitened his head, we do not wonder when we hear him say, "Ah! the Past! the Past has such a hold on me!" But even before middle life he experienced this yearning, even then confessed that he had for many years viewed everything in the light of the afternoon's sun—"a little faded and diluted, and with a pensive tinge." "It almost amounts to a disease," he reflects, "this homesickness which home cannot cure—a strange complaint. Sometimes when away from the old scenes it seems as if I must go back to them, as if I should find the old contentment and satisfaction there in the circle of the hills. But I know I should not—the soul's thirst can never be slaked. My hunger is the hunger of the imagination. Bring all my dead back again, and place me amid them in the old home, and a vague longing and regret would still possess me."
As early as his forty-fifth birthday he wrote in his Journal: "Indeed, the Past begins to grow at my back like a great pack, and it seems as if it would overwhelm me quite before I get to be really an old man. As time passes, the world becomes more and more a Golgotha,—a place of graves,—even if one does not actually lose by death his friends and kindred. The days do not merely pass, we bury them; they are of us, like us, and in them we bury our own image, a real part of ourselves." Perhaps, among the poems of Mr. Burroughs, next to "Waiting" the verses that have the most universal appeal are those of—
THE RETURNHe sought the old scenes with eager feet—The scenes he had known as a boy;"Oh, for a draught of those fountains sweet,And a taste of that vanished joy!"He roamed the fields, he wooed the streams,His school-boy paths essayed to trace;The orchard ways recalled his dreams,The hills were like his mother's face.Oh, sad, sad hills! Oh, cold, cold hearth!In sorrow he learned this truth—One may return to the place of his birth,He cannot go back to his youth.
But a half-loaf is better than no bread, and Mr. Burroughs has now yielded to this deep-seated longing for his boyhood scenes, and has gone back to the place of his birth amid the Catskills; and one who sees him there during the midsummer days—alert, energetic, curious concerning the life about him—is almost inclined to think he has literally gone back to his youth as well, for the boy in him is always coming to the surface.
It was on the watershed of the Pepacton (the East Branch of the Delaware), in the town of Roxbury, Delaware County, New York, that John Burroughs was born, and there that he gathered much of the harvest of his earlier books; it was there also that most of his more recent books were written. Although he left the old scenes in his youth, his heart has always been there. He went back many years ago and named one of his books ("Pepacton") from the old stream, and he has now gone back and arranged for himself a simple summer home on the farm where he first saw the light.
Most of his readers have heard much of Slabsides, the cabin in the wooded hills back of the Hudson, and of his conventional home, Riverby, at West Park, New York; but as yet the public has heard little of his more remote retreat on his native heath.
(Illustration of Woodchuck Lodge and Barn. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott)
For several years it has been his custom to slip away to the old home in Delaware County on one pretext or another—to boil sap in the old sugar bush and rejoice in the April frolic of the robins; to meander up Montgomery Hollow for trout; to gather wild strawberries in the June meadows and hobnob with the bobolinks; to saunter in the hemlocks in quest of old friends in the tree-tops; and—yes, truth compels me to confess—to sit in the fields with rifle in hand and wage war against the burrowing woodchuck which is such a menace to the clover and vegetables of the farmer.
In the summer of 1908, Mr. Burroughs rescued an old dwelling fast going to decay which stood on the farm a half-mile from the Burroughs homestead, and there, with friends, camped out for a few weeks, calling the place, because of the neighbors who most frequented it, "Camp Monax," or, in homelier language, "Woodchuck Lodge." In the succeeding summers he has spent most of his time there. Though repairing and adding many improvements, he has preserved the simple, primitive character of the old house, has built a roomy veranda across its front, made tables, bookcases, and other furniture of simple rustic character, and there in summer he dwells with a few friends, as contented and serene a man as can be found in this complicated world of to-day. There his old friends seek him out, and new ones come to greet him. Artists and sculptors paint and model him, and photographers carry away souvenirs of their pilgrimages.
In order to withdraw himself completely during his working hours from the domestic life, Mr. Burroughs instituted a study in the hay-barn, a few rods up the hill from the house. A rough box, the top of which is covered with manilla paper, an old hickory chair, and a hammock constitute his furnishings. The hay carpet and overflowing haymows yield a fragrance most acceptable to him, and through the great doorway he looks out upon the unfrequented road and up to Old Clump, the mountain in the lap of which his father's farm is cradled, the mountain which he used to climb to salt the sheep, the mountain which is the haunt of the hermit thrush. (His nieces and nephews at the old home always speak of this songster as "Uncle John's bird.")
(Illustration of Mr. Burroughs in the Hay-Barn Study, Woodchuck Lodge. From a photograph by R. J. H. DeLoach)
As I watched Mr. Burroughs start out morning after morning with his market-basket of manuscripts on his arm, and briskly walk to his rude study, I asked myself, "Is there another literary man anywhere, now that Tolstoy has gone, who is so absolutely simple and unostentatious in tastes and practice as is John Burroughs?" How he has learned to strip away the husks and get at the kernels! How superbly he ignores non-essentials! how free he is from the tyranny of things! There in the comfort of the hills among which his life began, with his friends around him, he rejoices in the ever-changing face of Nature, enjoys the fruits of his garden, his forenoons of work, and the afternoons when friends from near and far walk across the fields, or drive, or motor up to Woodchuck Lodge; and best of all, he enjoys the peace that evening brings—those late afternoon hours when the shadow of Old Clump is thrown on the broad mountain-slope across the valley, and when the long, silvery notes of the vesper sparrow chant "Peace, goodwill, and then good-night." As the shadows deepen, he is wont to carry his Victor out to the stone wall and let the music from Brahms's "Cradle Song" or Schubert's "Serenade" float to us as we sit on the veranda, hushed into humble gratitude for our share in this quiet life.
To see Mr. Burroughs daily amid these scenes; to realize how they are a part of him, and how inimitably he has transferred them to his books; to roam over the pastures, follow the spring paths, linger by the stone walls he helped to build, sit with him on the big rock in the meadow where as a boy he sat and dreamed; to see him in the everyday life—hoeing in the garden, tiptoeing about the house preparing breakfast while his guests are lazily dozing on the veranda; to eat his corn-cakes, or the rice-flour pudding with its wild strawberry accompaniment; to see him rocking his grandson in the old blue cradle in which he himself was rocked; to picnic in the beech woods with him, climb toward Old Clump at sunset and catch the far-away notes of the hermit; to loll in the hammocks under the apple trees, or to sit in the glow of the Franklin stove of a cool September evening while he and other philosophic or scientific friends discuss weighty themes; to hear his sane, wise, and often humorous comments on the daily papers, and his absolutely independent criticism of books and magazines—to witness and experience all this, and more, is to enjoy a privilege so rare that I feel selfish unless I try to share it, in a measure, with less fortunate friends of Our Friend.
(Illustration of Cradle in which John Burroughs was rocked. From a photograph by Dr. John D. Johnson)
It has been my good fortune to spend many delightful summers with Mr. Burroughs at his old home, and also at Woodchuck Lodge. On my first visit he led me to a hilltop and pointed off toward a deep gorge where the Pepacton, although it is a placid stream near Roxbury, rises amid scenery wild and rugged. It drains this high pastoral country, where the farms hang upon the mountainsides or lie across the long, sloping hills. The look of those farms impressed me as the fields of England impressed Mr. Burroughs—"as though upon them had settled an atmosphere of ripe and loving husbandry." I was often reminded in looking upon them of that line of Emerson's: "The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the wide, warm fields." There is a fresh, blue, cleansed appearance to the hills, "like a newly-washed lamp chimney," as Mr. Burroughs sometimes said.
Our writer's overmastering attachment to his birthplace seems due largely to the fact that the springs, the hills, and the wooded mountains are inextricably blended with his parents and his youth. As he has somewhere said, "One's own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of him; he has sown himself broadcast upon it... planted himself in the fields, builded himself in the stone walls, and evoked the sympathy of the hills in his struggle."
From a hilltop he pointed off to the west and said, "Yonder is the direction that my grandparents came, in the 1790's, from Stamford, cutting a road through the woods, and there, over Batavia Hill, Father rode when he went courting Mother."
Then we went up the tansy-bordered road, past the little graveyard, and over to the site where his grandfather's first house stood. As we wandered about the old stone foundations, his reminiscences were interrupted by the discovery of a junco's nest. On the way back he pointed across the wide valley to the West Settlement schoolhouse where he and his brothers used to go, although his first school was in a little stone building which is still standing on the outskirts of Roxbury, and known thereabouts as "the old stone jug." Mr. Burroughs remembers his first day in this school, and the little suit he wore, of bluish striped cotton, with epaulets on the shoulders which flopped when he ran. He fell asleep one day and tumbled off the seat, cutting his head; he was carried to a neighboring farmhouse, and he still vividly recalls the smell of camphor which pervaded the room when he regained consciousness. He was about four years of age. He remembers learning his "A-b ab's," as they were called, and just how the column of letters looked in the old spelling-book; remembers sitting on the floor under the desks and being called out once in a while to say his letters: "Hen Meeker, a boy bigger than I was, stuck one. I can remember the teacher saying to him; 'And you can't tell that? Why, little Johnny Burroughs can tell you what it is. Come, Johnny.' And I crawled out and went up and said it was e, like a little man."
Up the hill a short distance from the old homestead he indicated the "turn 'n the road," as it passes by the "Deacon Woods"; this, he said, was his first journey into the world. He was about four years old when, running away, he got as far as this turn; then, looking back and seeing how far he was from the house, he became frightened and ran back crying. "I have seen a young robin," he added, "do the very same thing on its first journey from the nest."
"One of my earliest recollections," he said, "is that of lying on the hearth one evening to catch crickets that Mother said ate holes in our stockings—big, light-colored, long-legged house crickets, with long horns; one would jump a long way.
"Another early recollection comes to me: one summer day, when I was three or four years old, on looking skyward, I saw a great hawk sailing round in big circles. I was suddenly seized with a panic of fear and hid behind the stone wall.
"The very earliest recollection of my life is that of the 'hired girl' throwing my cap down the steps, and as I stood there crying, I looked up on the sidehill and saw Father with a bag slung across his shoulders, striding across the furrows sowing grain. It was a warm spring day, and as I looked hillward wistfully, I wished Father would come down and punish the girl for throwing my cap down the stairs—little insignificant things, but how they stick in the memory!"
"I see myself as a little boy rocking this cradle," said Mr. Burroughs, as he indicated the quaint blue wooden cradle (which I had found in rummaging through the attic at the old home, and had installed in Woodchuck Lodge), "or minding the baby while Mother bakes or mends or spins. I hear her singing; I see Father pushing on the work of the farm."
Most of the soil in Delaware County is decomposed old red sandstone. Speaking of this soil Mr. Burroughs said, "In the spring when the plough has turned the turf, I have seen the breasts of these broad hills glow like the breasts of robins." He is fond of studying the geology of the region now. I have seen him dig away the earth the better to expose the old glacier tracings, and then explain to his grandchildren how the glaciers ages ago made the marks on the rocks. To me one of the finest passages in his recent book "Time and Change" is one wherein he describes the look of repose and serenity of his native hills, "as if the fret and fever of life were long since passed with them." It is a passage in which he looks at his home hills through the eye of the geologist, but with the vision of the poet—the inner eye which assuredly yields him "the bliss of solitude."
One evening as we sat in the kitchen at the old home, he described the corn-shelling of the olden days: "I see the great splint basket with the long frying-pan handle thrust through its ears across the top, held down by two chairs on either end, and two of my brothers sitting in the chairs and scraping the ears of corn against the iron. I hear the kernels rattle, a shower of them falling in the basket, with now and then one flying out in the room. With the cobs that lie in a pile beside the basket I build houses, carrying them up till they topple, or till one of the shelters knocks them over. Mother is sitting by, sewing, her tallow dip hung on the back of a chair. Winter reigns without. How it all comes up before me!"
He remembers when four or five years old crying over a thing which had caused him deep chagrin: A larger boy—"the meanest boy I ever knew, and he became the meanest man," he said with spirit—"found me sulking under a tree in the corner of the school-yard; he bribed me with a slate pencil into confessing what I was crying about, but as soon as I had told him, he ran away with the pencil, shouting my secret to the other boys."
One day we went 'cross lots after spearmint for jelly for the table at Woodchuck Lodge, and an abandoned house near the mint-patches recalled to Mr. Burroughs the first time he had heard the word "taste" used, except in reference to food. The woman who had lived in this house, while calling at his home and seeing his attempt at drawing something, had said, "What taste that boy has!" "It made me open my eyes—'taste'!—then there was another kind of taste than the one I knew about—the taste of things I ate!"
At a place in the road near the old stone schoolhouse, he showed me where, as a lad of thirteen, perhaps, he had stopped to watch some men working the road, and had first heard the word "antiquities" used. "They had uncovered and removed a large flat stone, and under it were other stones, probably arranged by the hands of earlier roadmakers. David Corbin, a man who had had some schooling, said, as they exposed the earlier layers, 'Ah! here are antiquities!' The word made a lasting impression on me."
(Illustration of View of the Catskills from Woodchuck Lodge. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott)
One of our favorite walks at sunset was up the hill beyond the old home where the road winds around a neglected graveyard. From this high vantage-ground one can see two of the Catskill giants—Double Top and Mount Graham. It was not a favorite walk of the boy John Burroughs. He told how, even in his early teens, at dusk, he would tiptoe around the corner past the graveyard, afraid to run for fear a gang of ghosts would be at his heels. "When I got down the road a ways, though, how I would run!" He was always "scairy" if he had to come along the edge of the woods alone at nightfall, and was even afraid of the big black hole under the barn in the daytime: "I was tortured with the thought of what might lurk there in that great black abyss, and would hustle through my work of cleaning the stable, working like Hercules, and often sending in 'Cuff,' the dog, to scare 'em out."
Fed on stories of ghosts and hobgoblins in childhood, his active, sensitive imagination became an easy prey to these fears. But we do outgrow some things. In the summer of 1911 this grown-up boy waxed so bold that he sat in the barn with its black hole underneath and wrote of "The Phantoms Behind Us." There was still something Herculean in his task; he looked boldly down into the black abysms of Time, not without some shrinking, it is true, saw the "huge first Nothing," faced the spectres as they rose before him, wrestled with them, and triumphantly conquered by acknowledging each phantom as a friendly power—a creature on whose shoulders he had raised himself to higher and higher levels; he saw that though the blackness was peopled with uncouth and gigantic forms, out of all these there at last arose the being Man, who could put all creatures under his feet.
Along the road between the old home and Woodchuck Lodge are some rocks which were the "giant stairs" of his childhood. On these he played, and he is fond now of pausing and resting there as he recalls events of those days.
"Are these rocks very old?" some one asked him one day.
"Oh, yes; they've been here since Adam was a kitten."
Whichever way he turns, memories of early days awaken; as he himself has somewhere said in print, "there is a deposit of him all over the landscape where he has lived."
As we have learned, Mr. Burroughs seems to have been more alive than his brothers and playmates, to have had wider interests and activities. When, a lad, he saw his first warbler in the "Deacon Woods," the black-throated blue-back, he was excited and curious as to what the strange bird could be (so like a visitant from another clime it seemed); the other boys met his queries with indifference, but for him it was the event of the day; it was far more, it was the keynote to all his days; it opened his eyes to the life about him—here, right in the "Deacon Woods," were such exquisite creatures! It fired him with a desire to find out about them. That tiny flitting warbler! How far its little wings have carried it! What an influence it has had on American literature, and on the lives of readers for the past fifty years, sending them to nature, opening their eyes to the beauty that is common and near at hand! One feels like thanking the Giver of all good that a little barefoot boy noted the warbler that spring day as it flitted about in the beeches wood. Life has been sweeter and richer because of it.
Down the road a piece is the place where this boy made a miniature sawmill, sawing cucumbers for logs. On this very rock where we sit he used to catch the flying grasshoppers early of an August morning—"the big brown fellows that fly like birds"; they would congregate here during the night to avail themselves of the warmth of the rocks, and here he would stop on his way from driving the cows to pasture, and catch them napping.
Yonder in the field by a stone wall, under a maple which is no longer standing, in his early twenties he read Schlemiel's "Philosophy of History," one of the volumes which, when a youth, he had found in an old bookstall in New York, on the occasion of his first trip there.
"Off there through what we used to call the 'Long Woods' lies the road along which Father used to travel in the autumn when he took his butter to Catskill, fifty miles away. Each boy went in turn. When it came my turn to go, I was in a great state of excitement for a week beforehand, for fear my clothes would not be ready, or else it would be too cold, or that the world would come to an end before the time of starting. Perched high on a spring-seat, I made the journey and saw more sights and wonders than I have ever seen on a journey since."
On the drive up from the village he showed me the place, a mile or more from their haunts on the breezy mountain lands, where the sheep were driven annually to be washed. It was a deep pool then, and a gristmill stood near by. He said he could see now the huddled sheep, and the overhanging rocks with the phoebes' nests in the crevices.
"Down in the Hollow," as they call the village of Robbery, he drew my attention to the building which was once the old academy, and where he had his dream of going to school. He remembers as a lad of thirteen going down to the village one evening to hear a man, McLaurie, talk up the academy before there was one in Roxbury. "I remember it as if it were yesterday; a few of the leading men of the village were there. I was the only boy. I've wondered since what possessed me to go. In his talk the man spoke of what a blessing it would be to boys of that vicinity, pointing me out and saying, 'Now, like that boy, there.' I recall how I dropped my head and blushed. He was a small man, very much in earnest. When I heard of his death a few years ago, it gave me long, long thoughts. He finally got the academy going, taught it, and had a successful school there for several years, but I never got there. The school in the West Settlement, Father thought, was good enough for me. But my desire to go, and dreaming of it, impressed it and him upon me more, perhaps, than the boys who really went were impressed. How outside of it all I felt when I used to go down there to the school exhibitions! It was after that that I had my dream of going to Harpersfield Seminary—the very name had a romantic sound. Though Father had promised me I might go, when the time came he couldn't afford it; he didn't mean to go back on his word, but there was very little money—I wonder how they got along so well as they did with so little."
"As a boy it had been instilled into my mind that God would strike one dead for mocking him. One day Ras Jenkins and I were crossing this field when it began to thunder. Ras turned up his lips to the clouds contemptuously. 'Oh, don't, you'll be struck,' I cried, cringing in expectation of the avenging thunderbolt. What a revelation it was when he was not struck! I immediately began to think, 'Now, maybe God isn't so easily offended as I thought'; but it seemed to me any God with dignity ought to have been offended by such an act."
Mr. Burroughs showed me the old rosebush in the pasture, all that was left to mark the site where a house had once stood; even before his boyhood days this house had become a thing of the past. The roses, though, had always been a joy to him, and had played such a part in his early days that he had transplanted some of the old bush to a spot near his doorsteps at Slabsides. Once when he sent me some of the roses he wrote of them thus: "The roses of my boyhood! Take the first barefooted country lad you see with homemade linen trousers and shirt, and ragged straw hat, and put some of these roses in his hand, and you see me as I was fifty-five years ago. They are the identical roses, mind you. Sometime I will show you the bush in the old pasture where they grew."
One day we followed the course he and his brothers and sisters used to take on their way to school. Leaving the highway near the old graveyard, we went down across a meadow, then through a beech wood, and on through the pastures in the valley along which a trout brook used to flow, on across more meadows and past where a neglected orchard was, till we came to where the little old schoolhouse itself stood.
How these trout streams used to lure him to play hookey! All the summer noonings, too, were spent there. He spoke feelingly of the one that coursed through the hemlocks—"loitering, log-impeded, losing itself in the dusky, fragrant depths of the hemlocks." They used to play hookey down at Stratton Falls, too, and get the green streaks in the old red sandstone rocks to make slate pencils of, trying them on their teeth to make sure they were soft enough not to scratch their slates. The woods have been greatly mutilated in which they used to loiter on the way to school and gather crinkle-root to eat with their lunches,—though they usually ate it all up before lunch-time came, he said. In one of his books Mr. Burroughs speaks of a schoolmate who, when dying, said, "I must hurry, I have a long way to go over a hill and through a wood, and it is getting dark." This was his brother Wilson, and he doubtless had in mind this very course they used to take in going to school.
This school (where Jay Gould was his playmate) he attended only until he was twelve years of age. A rather curious reciprocal help these two lads gave each other—especially curious in the light of their subsequent careers as writer and financier. The boy John Burroughs was one day feeling very uncomfortable because he could not furnish a composition required of him. Eight lines only were sufficient if the task was completed on time, but the time was up and no line was written. This meant being kept after school to write twelve lines. In this extremity. Jay Gould came to his rescue with the following doggerel:—