John Burroughs 123 



enjoy myself, not to report them." And again: "For my part, 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 con- 

 sciously gather through my intellect. Hence the act of composition with me 

 is a kind of self-exploration to see what hidden stores my mind holds. . . . 

 I come gradually to have a feeling that I want to write upon a given 

 theme. . . ." How the expression "I want to write" explains the potent charm 

 of Burroughs' writings. No editor ever prevailed upon him to write unless he 

 had something he wanted to say. The written word with him was merely the 

 visible results of the reaction of an exquisitely sensitive, svTnpathetic nature to 

 the spirit of the forest, the peace of the sunset hour, or the heaven-born melody 

 of the Hermit Thrush. 



'T have loved nature no more than thousands upon thousands of others 

 have" he said, but how many among these thousands have understood the 

 manifold voices of woods and fields until Burroughs acted as their interpreter? 



I clearly recall the delighted surprise, when as a boy, I first read Burroughs 

 and found expressed on page after page some vague, half-formed thought of 

 the possession of which I had been barely conscious. His books helped to 

 acquaint me not only with nature, but with myself. This discovery I attempted 

 to describe to him in a letter sent ten years or more before we met. Promptly 

 came the reply expressing his pleasure that anything he had written should 

 possess this potency. How many such letters he must have written as the suc- 

 ceeding third of a century rapidly widened his audience I How immeasurable 

 was the influence they exerted upon the lives of those who received them! 

 And if we are saddened by the thought that Burroughs' last letter is written, 

 we must remember that his published works have that direct, intimate, per- 

 sonal quality which make them letters to the nature-lovers of all time. They 

 are his legacy to the world. 



If from this wealth of human documents I were asked to select one passage 

 which more than any other revealed John Burroughs' attitude toward Nature 

 at the end, as well as at the age of twenty-eight, when he wrote it, I should 

 take these lines from Tn the Hemlocks,' published in 'Wake Robin.' 



"Moimting toward the upland again, I pause reverently as the hush and 

 stillness of twilight come upon the woods. It is the sweetest, ripest hour of 

 day. And as the hermit's evening hymn goes up from the deep solitude below 

 me, I experience that serene exaltation of sentiment of which music, literature, 

 and religion are but the faint types and s\Tnbols." 



This is John Burroughs' 'Angelus. '—Frank M. Chapman. 



