THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOHN BURROUGHS CHAPTER I ANCESTRY AND ENVIRONMENT The history of a man's childhood is the description of his parents and environment; this is his inarticulate but highly important history, in those first times, while of articulate history he has yet none. CARLYLE JOHN BURROUGHS was born in an unpainted, weather-worn farmhouse nestling in the lap of the hills above the village of Roxbury, Delaware County, New York, on April 3, 1837. He was the seventh child of Chauncey A. Burroughs, whose parents and grandparents moved into that locality from Connecticut about 1776, and of Amy Kelly Burroughs, whose father was a soldier of the Revolution. He came of a long line of farmers and country dwellers, mostly humble folk, so that his love of the soil and of all rural things had a background of many generations. His works are probably the most noteworthy gift to literature that ever sprang from a line of farmers in this country. Scores of American farm-boys have risen to eminence in the professions and in politics, but what other has attained equal rank in the field of literature? His parents and brothers and sisters were nowise distinguished from the ordinary run of farming people. There are almost no traditions of culture or learning, to say nothing of literary achievement, in either branch of his descent for many generations. 'I come of a race of plain, unlettered farmer-folk,' he wrote in an early letter, 'and the world that you and I know is a sealed book to them.' But while freely acknowledging his debt to the humble stock from which he sprang, he said it would have been of signal advantage had there been a few trained and intellectual men in his line of descent. However, the qualities of mind and heart which his parents and grandparents possessed - veracity, humility, religious seriousness, and an ingrained love of the country were, considering his chosen work, probably about the best ancestral inheritance he could have had. It is difficult to estimate just how much a man owes to his ancestry and youthful environment, but in John Burroughs both are unmistakably reflected in his intellectual output: his writings have a savor of the soil and a joy in rural things as vital as the red corpuscles of his blood; and they have an effortless beauty and simplicity, like the landscape of which his father's acres form a part. To him it was given to transmute the plain, homely, inarticulate industry of his yeoman ancestry into inimitable interpretations of rural life. His ancestors tilled the fields and tended the kine; while he, grazing where the kine grazed, translated the grass and herbage and all country scenes and sounds into enduring pastorals. The Burroughs Homestead farm of three hundred and twenty acres lies in the watershed of the east branch of the Delaware - the Pepacton- and at an altitude of some two thousand feet, with an eastern and southern exposure. From this elevation one looks upon the long flowing lines and into the broad cradle-like valleys of the western Catskills, 'with their farms tilted against the sides of the mountains, or lapping over the long sweeping hills.' It is like the goodly land described in Deuteronomy - 'a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills.' Mr. Burroughs used to say that the hand of Time, through incalculable ages, had so moulded and shaped the old Devonian hills as to rub all harshness and angularity from them. The heights, broad-backed and gentle, the slopes, smooth and flowing, give an impression of singular restfulness and simplicity. It is the look of youth supervening upon a region of vast geological antiquity [he once wrote me]. The slow, gentle forces of air and water, and not the sudden, violent, and disruptive forces that rule in earthquakes and volcanoes, have shaped this landscape. The farms, striped or checked with stone walls, bend over the rounded hills or lean restfully upon their vast slopes, or stretch serenely in the deep, level valley-bottoms; many-colored, with various crops and grasses, and squares of beech and maple woods; always giving the beholder a delightful sense of freedom and repose as the eye dwells upon these green pastoral vistas. It is not a picturesque country, as that |