Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/111

 92 FAMOUS LlVma AMERICANS Poets f 1877 ; Locusts and Wild Honey ^ 1879 ; Signs and Sea- sons J 1886 ; followed by Indoor Studies j 1889. Riverby appeared in 1894, and Light of Day in 1900. In 1905, Ways of Nature was added, and in 1908 came Leaf and Tendril. Burroughs has always held that Nature is the same wher- ever you find her, and in the volumes Far and Near^ 1904, and Fresh Fields^ 1884, he proves this statement. He early evinced an intense fondness for Walt Whitman. His first volume, Whitman, 1896, and the later counterpart. Whitman — A Study, are an analysis and defense of his life- long friend. In Pepactonj he expresses his filial love for his childhood scenes and parental memories. The climax of his work to date is The Summit of YearSj written with as much freshness and vigor and originality aa the works of his younger years. It contains touches of the philosophy of life, vivid descriptions of nature in tree and animal life, and an effort to draw the line clearly between the animal and the human mind. John Burroughs has found himself. An unplowed field lay stretched out before him and he possessed himself of it. It had not been occupied by White, or Thoreau, or Audubon, or Isaac Brown. They had furrowed the edges and made in- cursions into it but they had not fully possessed it. He at- tuned his ear, his eye, his feeUngs, his sympathies and senti- ments to the sweet harmonies he found therein, to bird, and bee, and blossom. Viewed from every angle, he is fitted to observe, to inter- pret, and to reveal to his fellow beings the meaning of the life about him ; gentle, serene, sympathetic ; yet of temper to re- buke impo;ition aid incoxlg.^^; dean in thought ^d habit, never passion ^s slave to sound what stop she pleases. Hence region, the limpidness of a mountain brook, the music of our unstudied songsters, the elusive charm of the blue beyond the summer clouds ; it has at times the ruggedness of a shelving rock, combined with the grace of its nodding columbines. * '
 * he sees divine things under-foot as well as over-head.*'
 * His writing has the fertility of a well-cultivated, pastoral