964 Rural School Leaflet 



soil, a reader, critic, thinker, poet, whose chief business these fifty years 

 has been the interpretation of the out-of-doors. 



" For my part, when I take up an outdoor book I am glad if there is 

 quiet in it, fragrance, and something of the sameness and sweetness of 

 the sky. * * * There is a clear sky to most of Mr. Burroughs's pages, 

 a rural landscape, wide, gently rolling, with cattle standing beneath the 

 trees. 



" 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, perhaps, as one would find in an eighteen-acre vineyard, yet 

 Mr. Burroughs's eighteen acres have certainly proved no check — rather, 

 indeed, a stimulus — to his writing. He seems to have gathered a volume 

 out of every acre; and he has 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 that have been trimmed, 

 trained, sprayed, and kept free from rot. Such books may not be alto- 

 gether 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, of chicken-licken literature, because the writers do not 

 know a spade when they see one, would not call it that if they knew, and 

 need to do less writing and more farming, more real work with their hands 

 in partnership with the elemental forces of nature, or in comradeship with 

 average elemental man — the only species extant of the quality to make 

 writing worth while. 



" Mr. Burroughs has had this labor, this comradeship. His writing is 

 seasoned and sane. It is ripe, and yet as fresh as green com with the dew 

 in the silk. You have eaten com on the cob just from the stalk and 

 steamed in its own husk? Green corn that is com, that has all its milk 

 and sugar and flavor, is cob and kernel and husk, not a stripped ear that 

 is cooked with the kitchen air. 



" Literature is 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 



