JOHN BURROUGHS 159 



bird is probably a primitive bird ; and also that 

 this is a true idyl, and that he could not write a 

 true idyl if he tried. No one could write like that 

 by trying. And what has any happy combination 

 of circumstances to do with it ? No, a book es- 

 sentially 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 ! 



Mr. Burroughs is not an idyl, but an essayist, 

 with a love for books only second to his love for 

 nature ; a watcher in the woods, a tiller of the soil, 

 a reader, critic, thinker, poet, whose chief busi- 

 ness these fifty years has been the interpretation 

 of the out-of-doors. 



Upon him as interpreter and observer, his re- 

 cent books, " Ways of Nature " and " Leaf and 

 Tendril," are an interesting comment. 



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 liter- 

 ary ends. Have I sacrificed truth to literature ? 

 asks Mr. Burroughs of his books. Have I seen 

 in nature the things that are there, or the strange 



