Our Friend John Burroughs Part 6

I remember that a notable eclipse of the sun occurred that spring on the 26th of May, when the farmers were planting their corn.

What books I read that summer I cannot recall. Yes, I recall one--"The Complete Letter-Writer," which I bought of a peddler, and upon which I modeled many of my letters to various persons, among others to a Roxbury girl for whom I had a mild fancy. My first letter to a girl I wrote to her, and a ridiculously stiff, formal, and awkward letter it was, I a.s.sure you. I am positive I addressed her as "Dear Madam," and started off with some sentence from "The Complete Letter-Writer," so impressed was I that there was a best way to do this thing, and that the book pointed it out. Mary's reply was, "To my absent, but not forgotten friend," and was simple and natural as girls' letters usually are. My Grandfather Kelly died that season, and I recall that I wrote a letter of condolence to my people, modeled upon one in the book. How absurd and stilted and unreal it must have sounded to them!

Oh, how crude and callow and obtuse I was at that time, full of vague and tremulous aspirations and awakenings, but undisciplined, uninformed, with many inherited incapacities and obstacles to weigh me down. I was extremely bashful, had no social apt.i.tude, and was likely to stutter when anxious or embarra.s.sed, yet I seem to have made a good impression.

I was much liked in school and out, and was fairly happy. I seem to see sunshine over all when I look back there. But it was a long summer to me. I had never been from home more than a day or two at a time before, and I became very homesick. Oh, to walk in the orchard back of the house, or along the road, or to see the old hills again--what a Joy it would have been! But I stuck it out till my term ended in October, and then went home, taking a young fellow from the district (a brother of some girls I fancied) with me. I took back nearly all my wages, over fifty dollars, and with this I planned to pay my way at Hedding Literary Inst.i.tute, in the adjoining county of Greene, during the coming winter term.

I left home for the school late in November, riding the thirty miles with Father, atop a load of b.u.t.ter. It was the time of year when the farmers took their b.u.t.ter to Catskill. Father usually made two trips.

This was the first one of the season, and I accompanied him as far as Ashland, where the Inst.i.tute was located.

I remained at school there three months, the length of the winter term, and studied fairly hard. I had a room by myself and enjoyed the life with the two hundred or more boys and girls of my own age. I studied algebra, geometry, chemistry, French, and logic, wrote compositions, and declaimed in the chapel, as the rules required. It was at this time that I first read Milton. We had to pa.r.s.e in "Paradise Lost," and I recall how I was shocked and astonished by that celestial warfare. I told one of my cla.s.smates that I did not believe a word of it. Among my teachers was a young, delicate, wide-eyed man who in later life became well known as Bishop Hurst, of the Methodist Church. He heard our small cla.s.s in logic at seven o'clock in the morning, in a room that was never quite warmed by the newly kindled fire. I don't know how I came to study logic (Whately's). I had never heard of such a study before; maybe that is why I chose it. I got little out of it. What an absurd study, taught, as it was, as an aid to argumentation!--like teaching a man to walk by explaining to him the mechanism of walking. The a.n.a.lysis of one sound argument, or of one weak one, in terms of common sense, is worth any amount of such stuff. But it was of a piece with grammar and rhetoric as then taught--all preposterous studies viewed as helps toward correct writing and speaking. Think of our parsing Milton as an aid to mastering the English language!

I remember I stood fairly high in composition--only one boy in the school ahead of me, and that was Herman c.o.o.ns, to whom I became much attached, and who became a Methodist minister. He went home with me during the holiday vacation. After leaving school we corresponded for several years, and then lost track of each other. I do not know that there is one of my school-mates of that time now living. I know of none that became eminent in any field. One of the boys was fatally injured that winter while coasting. I remember sitting up with him many nights and ministering to him. He died in a few weeks.

It was an event when Father and Mother came to visit me for a few hours, and Mother brought me some mince pies. What feasts two or three other boys and I had in my room over those home-made pies!

Toward spring we had a public debate in the chapel, and I was chosen as one of the disputants. We debated the question of the Crimean War, which was on then. I was on the side of England and France against Russia. Our side won. I think I spoke very well. I remember that I got much of my ammunition from a paper in "Harper's Magazine," probably by Dr. Osgood.

It seems my fellow on the affirmative had got much of his ammunition from the same source, and, as I spoke first, there was not much powder left for him, and he was greatly embarra.s.sed.

What insignificant things one remembers in a world of small events! I recall how one morning when we had all gathered in chapel for prayers, none of the professors appeared on the platform but our French teacher, and, as praying for us was not one of his duties, he hurried off to find some one to perform that function, while we all sat and giggled.

In the spring of 1855, with eight or ten dollars in my pocket which Father had advanced me, I made my first visit to New York by steamer from Catskill, on my way to New Jersey in quest of a position as school-teacher. Three of our neighborhood boys were then teaching in or near Plainfield, and I sought them out, having my first ride on the cars on that trip from Jersey City. As I sat there in my seat waiting for the train to start, I remember I actually wondered if the starting would be so sudden as to jerk my hat off!

I was too late to find a vacancy in any of the schools in the districts I visited. On one occasion I walked from Somerville twelve miles to a village where there was a vacancy, but the trustees, after looking me over, concluded I was too young and inexperienced for their large school. That night the occultation of Venus by the moon took place. I remember gazing at it long and long.

On my return in May I stopped in New York and spent a day prowling about the second-hand bookstalls, and spent so much of my money for books that I had only enough left to carry me to Griffin's Corners, twelve miles from home. I bought Locke's "Essay on the Human Understanding," Dr.

Johnson's works, Saint-Pierre's "Studies of Nature," and d.i.c.k's works and others. d.i.c.k was a Scottish philosopher whose two big fat volumes held something that caught my mind as I dipped into them. But I got little from him and soon laid him aside. On this and other trips to New York I was always drawn by the second-hand bookstalls. How I hovered about them, how good the books looked, how I wanted them all! To this day, when I am pa.s.sing them, the spirit of those days lays its hand upon me, and I have to pause a few moments and, half-dreaming, half-longing, run over the t.i.tles. Nearly all my copies of the English cla.s.sics I have picked up at these curbstone stalls. How much more they mean to me than new books of later years! Here, for instance, are two volumes of Dr.

Johnson's works in good leather binding, library style, which I have carried with me from one place to another for over fifty years, and which in my youth I read and reread, and the style of which I tried to imitate before I was twenty. When I dip into "The Rambler" and "The Idler" now how dry and stilted and artificial their balanced sentences seem! yet I treasure them for what they once were to me. In my first essay in the "Atlantic," forty-six years ago (in 1860), I said that Johnson's periods acted like a lever of the third kind, and that the power applied always exceeded the weight raised; and this comparison seems to hit the mark very well. I did not read Boswell's Life of him till much later. In his conversation Johnson got the fulcrum in the right place.

I reached home on the twentieth of May with an empty pocket and an empty stomach, but with a bagful of books. I remember the day because the gra.s.s was green, but the air was full of those great "goose-feather"

flakes of snow which sometimes fall in late May.

I stayed home that summer of '55 and worked on the farm, and pored over my books when I had a chance. I must have found Locke's "Essay" pretty tough reading, but I remember buckling to it, getting right down on "all fours," as one has to, to follow Locke.

I think it was that summer that I read my first novel, "Charlotte Temple," and was fairly intoxicated with it. It let loose a flood of emotion in me. I remember finishing it one morning and then going out to work in the hay-field, and how the homely and familiar scenes fairly revolted me. I dare say the story took away my taste for Locke and Johnson for a while.

In early September I again turned my face Jerseyward in quest of a school, but stopped on my way in Olive to visit friends in Tongore. The school there, since I had left it, had fared badly. One of the teachers the boys had turned out of doors, and the others had "failed to give satisfaction"; so I was urged to take the school again. The trustees offered to double my wages--twenty-two dollars a month. After some hesitation I gave up the Jersey scheme and accepted the trustees' offer.

It was during that second term of teaching at Tongore that I first met Ursula North, who later became my wife. Her uncle was one of the trustees of the school, and I presume it was this connection that brought her to the place and led to our meeting.

If I had gone on to Jersey in that fall of '55, my life might have been very different in many ways. I might have married some other girl, might have had a large family of children, and the whole course of my life might have been greatly changed. It frightens me now to think that I might have missed the Washington life, and Whitman,... and much else that has counted for so much with me. What I might have gained is, in the scale, like imponderable air.

I read my Johnson and Locke that winter and tried to write a little in the Johnsonese buckram style. The young man to-day, under the same conditions, would probably spend his evenings reading novels or the magazines. I spent mine poring over "The Rambler."

In April I closed the school and went home, again taking a young fellow with me. I was then practically engaged to Ursula North, and I wrote her a poem on reaching home. About the middle of April I left home for Cooperstown Seminary. I rode to Moresville with Jim Bouton, and as the road between there and Stamford was so blocked with snowdrifts that the stage could not run, I was compelled to walk the eight miles, leaving my trunk behind. From Stamford I reached Cooperstown after an all-night ride by stage.

My summer at Cooperstown was an enjoyable and a profitable one. I studied Latin, French, English literature, algebra, and geometry. If I remember correctly, I stood first in composition over the whole school.

I joined the Websterian Society and frequently debated, and was one of the three or four orators chosen by the school to "orate" in a grove on the sh.o.r.e of the lake, on the Fourth of July. I held forth in the true spread-eagle style.

I entered into the sports of the school, ball-playing and rowing on the lake, with the zest of youth.

One significant thing I remember: I was always on the lookout for books of essays. It was at this time that I took my first bite into Emerson, and it was like tasting a green apple--not that he was unripe, but I wasn't ripe for him. But a year later I tasted him again, and said, "Why, this tastes good"; and took a bigger bite; then soon devoured everything of his I could find.

I say I was early on the lockout for books of essays, and I wanted the essay to begin, not in a casual way by some remark in the first person, but by the annunciation of some general truth, as most of Dr. Johnson's did. I think I bought d.i.c.k's works on the strength of his opening sentence--"Man is a compound being."

As one's mind develops, how many changes in taste he pa.s.ses through!

About the time of which I am now writing, Pope was my favorite poet.

His wit and common sense appealed to me. Young's "Night Thoughts" also struck me as very grand. Whipple seemed to me a much greater writer than Emerson. Shakespeare I did not come to appreciate till years later, and Chaucer and Spenser I have never learned to care for.

I am sure the growth of my literary taste has been along the right lines--from the formal and the complex, to the simple and direct.

Now, the less the page seems written, that is, the more natural and instinctive it is, other things being equal, the more it pleases me. I would have the author take no thought of his style, as such; yet if his sentences are clothed like the lilies of the field, so much the better.

Unconscious beauty that flows inevitably and spontaneously out of the subject, or out of the writer's mind, how it takes us!

My own first attempts at writing were, of course, crude enough. It took me a long time to put aside all affectation and make-believe, if I have ever quite succeeded in doing it, and get down to what I really saw and felt. But I think now I can tell dead wood in my writing when I see it--tell when I fumble in my mind, or when my sentences glance off and fail to reach the quick.

(In August, 1902, Mr. Burroughs wrote me of a visit to Cooperstown, after all these years: "I found Cooperstown not much changed. The lake and the hills were, of course, the same as I had known them forty-six years ago, and the main street seemed but little altered. Of the old seminary only the foundations were standing, and the trees had so grown about it that I hardly knew the place. I again dipped my oar in the lake, again stood beside Cooper's grave, and threaded some of the streets I had known so well. I wished I could have been alone there....

I wanted to muse and dream, and invoke the spirit of other days, but the spirits would not rise in the presence of strangers. I could not quite get a glimpse of the world as it appeared to me in those callow days. It was here that I saw my first live author (spoken of in my 'Egotistical Chapter') and first dipped into Emerson."

After leaving the Seminary at Cooperstown in July of 1856, the young student worked on the home farm in the Catskills until fall, when he began teaching school at Buffalo Grove, Illinois, where he taught until the following spring, returning East to marry, as he says, "the girl I left behind me."

He then taught in various schools in New York and New Jersey, until the fall of 1863. As a rule, in the summer he worked on the home farm.

During this period he was reading much, and trying his hand at writing.

There was a short intermission in his teaching, when he invested his earnings in a patent buckle, and for a brief period he had dreams of wealth. But the buckle project failed, the dreams vanished, and he began to read medicine, and resumed his teaching.

From 1859 to 1862 he was writing much, on philosophical subjects mainly.

It was in 1863 that he first became interested in the birds.--C. B.)

Ever since the time when in my boyhood I saw the strange bird in the woods of which I have told you, the thought had frequently occurred to me, "I shall know the birds some day." But nothing came of the thought and wish till the spring of '63, when I was teaching school near West Point. In the library of the Military Academy, which I frequently visited of a Sat.u.r.day, I chanced upon the works of Audubon. I took fire at once. It was like bringing together fire and powder! I was ripe for the adventure; I had leisure, I was in a good bird country, and I had Audubon to stimulate me, as well as a collection of mounted birds belonging to the Academy for reference. How eagerly and joyously I took up the study! It fitted in so well with my country tastes and breeding; it turned my enthusiasm as a sportsman into a new channel; it gave to my walks a new delight; it made me look upon every grove and wood as a new storehouse of possible treasures. I could go fishing or camping or picknicking now with my resources for enjoyment doubled. That first hooded warbler that I discovered and identified in a near-by bushy field one Sunday morning--shall I ever forget the thrill of delight it gave me? And when in August I went with three friends into the Adirondacks, no day or place or detention came amiss to me; new birds were calling and flitting on every hand; a new world was opened to me in the midst of the old.

At once I was moved to write about the birds, and I began my first paper, "The Return of the Birds," that fall, and finished it in Washington, whither I went in October, and where I lived for ten years.

Writing about the birds and always treating them in connection with the season and their environment, was, while I was a government clerk, a kind of vacation. It enabled me to live over again my days amid the sweet rural things and influences. The paper just referred to is, as you may see, mainly written out of my memories as a farm boy. The enthusiasm which Audubon had begotten in me quickened and gave value to all my youthful experiences and observations of the birds.

(This brings us to the time when our subject is fairly launched on early manhood. He has regular employment--a clerkship in the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which, if not especially congenial in itself, affords him leisure to do the things he most wishes to do. He is even now growing in strength and efficiency as an essayist.--C. B.)

SELF-a.n.a.lYSIS