i 4 4 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS 



time, its beginninglessness, its endinglessness, as 

 none of his earlier chapters have done. 



Many men have written more than Mr. Bur- 

 roughs. His eighteen or twenty books, as books 

 may be turned out, are nothing remarkable for 

 fifty years of work. It is not their numbers, but 

 the books, that are remarkable, that among them 

 should be found " Wake-Robin," " Winter Sun- 

 shine," " Birds and Poets," " Locusts and Wild 

 Honey," " Pepacton," " Fresh Fields," " Signs and 

 Seasons," " Riverby," " Far and Near," " Ways 

 of Nature," and " Leaf and Tendril " ; for these 

 eleven nature-books, as a group, stand alone and 

 at the head of the long list of books written 

 about the out-of-doors since the days of the His- 

 toria Animalium, and the mediaeval "Fables" and 

 " Beasteries." 



These eleven volumes are Mr. Burroughs's 

 characteristic, his important work. His other 

 books are eminently worth while : there is rever- 

 ent, honest thinking in his religious essays, a 

 creedless but an absolute and joyous faith; there 

 is simple and exquisite feeling in his poems ; close 

 analysis and an unmitigatedness, wholly Whit- 

 manesque, in his interpretation of Whitman ; and 



