BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. v 



Winter Sunshine, and in the papers gathered into the 

 volume Fresh Fields. 



He resigned his place in the Treasury in 1873, and was 

 appointed receiver of a broken national bank. Later, unti 1 

 1885, his business occupation was that of a National Bank 

 Examiner. An article contributed by him to The Century 

 Magazine for March, 1881, on Broken Banks and Lax 

 Director's, is perhaps the only literary outcome of this occu- 

 pation, but the keen powers of observation, trained in the 

 Held of nature, could not fail to disclose themselves in 

 analyzing columns of figures. After leaving Washington 

 Mr. Burroughs bought a fruit farm at West Park, near 

 Esopus, on the Hudson, and there building his house from 

 the stones found in his fields, has given himself the best- 

 conditions for that humanizing of nature which constitutes 

 the charm of his books. He was married in 1857 to a lady 

 living in the New York village where he was at the time 

 teaching. He keeps his country home the year round, only 

 occasionally visiting New York. The cultivation of grapes 

 absorbs the greater part of his time ; but he has by no means 

 given over letters. His work, which has long found ready 

 acceptance both at home and abroad, is now passing into that 

 security of fame which comes from its entrance into the 

 school-life of American children. 



Besides his outdoor sketches and the other papers already 

 mentioned, Mr. Burroughs has written a number of critical 

 essays on life and literature, published in Indoor Studies, 

 and other volumes. He has also taken his readers into his 

 confidence in An Egotistical Chapter, the final one of his 

 Indoor Studies ; and in the Introduction to the Riverside 

 Edition of his writings he has given us further glimpses of 

 his private intellectual life. 



Probably no other American writer has a greater sym- 

 pathy with, and a keener enjoyment of, country life in all 

 its phases — farming, camping, fishing, walking — than has 

 John Burroughs. His books are redolent of the soil, and 

 have such "freshness and primal sweetness," that we need 



