146 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS 



" lonely as a cloud " in search of poems, nor skulk- 

 ing in the sedges along the banks of the Guaso 

 Nyero looking for lions. We want him at Slab- 

 sides, near his celery fields. And whatever the 

 literary quality of our other nature-writers, no 

 one of them has come any nearer than Mr. Bur- 

 roughs to that difficult ideal, — a union of thought 

 and form, no more to be separated than the heart 

 and the bark of a live tree. 



Take Mr. Burroughs's work as a whole, and it 

 is beyond dispute the most complete, the most re- 

 vealing, of all our outdoor literature. His pages 

 lie open like the surface of a pond, sensitive to 

 every wind, or calm as the sky, holding the 

 clouds and the distant blue, and the dragon-fly, 

 stiff-winged and pinned to the golden knob of a 

 spatter-dock. 



All outdoor existence, all outdoor phenomena, 

 are deeply interesting to him. There is scarcely a 

 form of outdoor life, scarcely a piece of land- 

 scape, or natural occurrence characteristic of the 

 Eastern States, which has not been dealt with 

 suggestively in his pages : the rabbit under his 

 porch, the paleozoic pebble along his path, the 

 salt breeze borne inland by the Hudson, the 



