Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/106

 JOHN BUEEOUGHS 87 earth-mother is in the truest sense love of the Divine. One who speaks thus of the things of such import to every human soul is bound to win responses ; he deals with things that come home to us all ; we want to know him. ' * Continuing, the same writer says, **We are coming more and more to like the savor of the wild and the unconventional ; perhaps it is just this savor or suggestion of free fields and woods both in his life and in his books that causes so many persons to seek out John Burroughs in his retreat among the trees and rocks on the hills that skirt the western bank of the Hudson. To Mr. Burroughs, more perhaps than to any other Uving American, might be appUed these words in Genesis : Lord hath blessed' — so redolent of the soil and of the hardi- ness and plenitude of rural things is the influence that em- anates from him. His works are as the raiment of the man, and to them adheres something as racy and wholesome as is yielded by the fertile soil. ' ' Mr. Burroughs 's residence since 1874 has been at Eiverby, V West Park, Ulster County, New York. Here he combines farming, or rather horticulture, with his achievements as a literary naturalist. However, most of his observations, his thinking and writing are done at his cabin home farther up on the slope of the mountains, which home he has designated as Of his life here, his most noted biographer says, ''Business life, he had long known, could never be congenial to him. Lit- erary pursuits alone were insuflScient ; the long line of yeoman ancestry back of him cried out for recognition ; he felt the need of closer contact with the soil ; of having land to till and culti- vate; this need, an ancestral one, was as imperative as his need of literary expression, an individual one.'* To him it seems that the town is better than the city, the im- proved farm better than the town, and the primitive forest better than the improved farm. Litense love of home and home scenes are characteristic of Mr. Burroughs. In his auto- biographical sketches he evinces these characteristics:
 * See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the
 * Slabsides.''
 * When I think of the storied lands across the Atlantic — Eng-