An appreciative letter from Dowden to Burroughs concerning the latter's 'Notes' on Whitman, called forth the response which follows, which, apart from the value of its critical comments, gives a glimpse into the innermost nature of Burroughs. In this letter he speaks of his companionship with Nature: Your letter sent a warm glow through me, under the influence of which I took out my little book and read parts of it over for the first time in a long while. In the light of your approval it seemed better than it had ever seemed before. Mr. Whitman himself likes the book, and thinks it will stand, so does Mr. O'Connor; and I am indebted largely to both of them for aid in getting the matter into shape. [Italics mine.] But the book has had no audience in this country. I sent it to most of the critics and literary men, but they said not a word. The N.Y. Tribune gave me a good notice, but the other journals steered clear of it. Less than a hundred copies have been sold. I have myself never been satisfied with the passage on Wordsworth, and it never would have been allowed to stand, had not Whitman and O'Connor both commended it highly, neither of whom, I have since made up my mind, do Wordsworth justice. I read Wordsworth a good deal, and find my own in his pages, and shall soon attempt an essay upon him. The right word about him I have not yet seen spoken, nor has it come to me to speak it. I think he is the first and the highest of the modern solitary poets, and that he speaks, or sings, warmly and genuinely, even grandly, out of that solitude which lurks by mountain lakes, and broods over lonely moors. He is to me the greatest of the interpreters of this phase of nature, but I do not recognize the creative touch in him. Wordsworth expresses to me that delicious companionship which I have with the silent forms and shows of rural nature, and which I am half ashamed I do not have with men, and with towns and cities. I think it is something of the 'homesickness' that Schiller speaks of; while Whitman expresses to me the life and power of the globe itself, and lets me into the secret of creation. His poems rival the elemental laws and the great dynamic forces. They are deeds and not thoughts, and have the same intimate direct personal relation to himself that a man's proper act has to himself. I am not satisfied with my allusion to Tennyson, either, though it is doubtless true in that connection. But I think Tennyson a noble poet that he has the real 'fluid and attaching character,' and will live. He does not belong to the morning of the world, like Whitman, but rather to its sunset; but this phase has its place also. Whitman has been absent in New York over a month, bringing out another edition of his books. Do you know of John Addington Symonds? He writes Whitman some very appreciative letters, and has sent him quite a long poem in print, inspired, he says, by Whit man's 'Calamus.' It is lofty and symphonous, and reminds of Shelley.... I am not going to allow you to disparage your article in the Westminster. At that distance from Whitman it is a marvel to me how you could grasp him so completely. I am sure I could never have written my book, had I not known Whitman intimately and long. There is no distinction between the man and the poet, and to know one is to know the other. The article is very lofty and effective, and the first half of it is positively a new contribution to the science of criticism. It makes a new and for us immensely important classification.... I think his treatment of the sexual part of man perfectly consistent with his scheme, and no more bold and unconventional or inartistic than his treatment of any other part. Poetry must be as pure as science, and the subject, if handled at all, must be handled without reservation or insinuation, and solely with reference to offspring. If people are shocked-and they are shocked-I was shocked - it is because we are not used to cold water upon this subject, but expect something much more sweet and spicy. ... The year of 1872 was comparatively uneventful for Burroughs. Besides the work in the Currency Bureau, he wrote on his European trip, tramped the woods, and fled to his native hills when vacation came. In November, he wrote Benton of having just finished a paper on 'The Birds of the Poets,' adding: Of course I voted for Grant. I was never a believer in Greeley. To me he was neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. We know well enough what would undoubtedly have happened, had he been in Lincoln's place, and that settled him for me, as I guess it did for the people.... By this time, weary of Washington, -'tired of eating Government dirt,' - Burroughs was casting about for something whereby he could ‘earn his victuals and have plenty of time to scribble.' On the last day of the year, resigning his position in the Treasury Department, Burroughs left Washington almost as abruptly as he had quit school-teaching some nine years before. By this time it will have been gathered that, however deliberate he was in thought, he was often impulsive, even precipitate, in action. Under trying conditions he could be patient and long-suffering; could submit to irksome tasks, and to a surprising amount of routine and drudgery; but suddenly something within him would take the bit in its teeth, when, with unreasoning impetuosity, he would kick over the traces, leap over, or break through, the bars, and escape to pastures new. In leaving Washington, however, he was by no means freed from the coat-tails of Uncle Sam; for, being appointed receiver of a broken bank in the city of Middletown, New York, he immediately went there and engaged in the unaccustomed work. One of the last pieces of writing he did in Washington was 'The Exhilarations of the Road' ('Winter Sunshine')-an essay which takes the reader forth on a gleesome saunter, the foot striking fire at every step; the air tasting like a new and finer mixture; the walkers accumulating force and gladness as they go. On such jaunts about Washington, he had, among others, as companions, W. L. Shoemaker, E. J. Loomis, one Parnell, and Mr. Henry Litchfield West. Shoemaker and Loomis came to him, attracted by his writings. Loomis had once boarded with the mother of Thoreau; had eaten at the table with her gifted son, walked with him in the Concord woods and along the Musketaquid, and bathed with him in Walden Pond. One likes to think of the talks the happy saunterers had in the environs of Washington, with reminiscences of Concord by the way. Once, within the last few years, when, along a country road, we encountered some young pedestrians with their camping equipment swung across their shoulders, Mr. Burroughs said: 'Whenever I see young men walking through the country like that, I sometimes flatter myself that maybe my books have had a share in sending them forth.' To read the before-mentioned essay, in which he preaches so alluringly the gospel of walking, is to agree that it undoubtedly had such a share. What a walker he himself was! and how he loved the old paths where he walked! - about Roxbury, Washington, Middletown, and his Hudson River home, and in countless other haunts in woods and fields, — alone, or with friends! There was something peculiarly characteristic in the way he walked the way he put down and lifted his feet; a direct, firm implantation of the feet upon the ground; no fumbling, but an involuntary precision and surefootedness, as though spirit and body were in perfect unison, the spirit informing the feet a quiet tread in the woods, a directness and eager ness upon the hills- something in the press of his foot to the earth that seemed peculiarly his; a something difficult to describe, but which those who have followed him up a hill, or along a woodland path, must have noticed. I used to search in my mind for words to describe it when following his footsteps, but could not find them. Nor can I now; but the paths he frequented with his friends, the trees under which they tarried, the springs at which they have quenched their thirst, the mountain-tops from which they have looked off a something intangible will ever linger in those places, and in them, together, in silence, the friends will walk forever. CHAPTER V BACK TO THE SOIL 1873-1876 Smile, O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! Earth of departed sunset-earth of the mountains misty-topt! Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake! WHITMAN WHEN, at the age of thirty-six, Burroughs resigned his position in the Treasury Department, and went back to his native State, he began truly to come into his own. Nature, during the preceding ten years in the city, had called him unceasingly; now he was to heed her call; he would 'hear the bravuras of birds,' and 'the bustle of growing wheat,' and give himself freely to that which satisfies 'more than the metaphysics of books.' Before leaving Washington, his yeoman ancestry becoming rampant, he had written Benton that he felt like a fowl with no gravel in its gizzard — was hungry for the earth - could almost eat it like a horse if he could get at it. He was now by way of becoming the essayist whose page savors of the soil and of the hardiness and plenitude of rural things. In Washington he had published two books; the other twenty-five were to follow gradually. Although in resigning his clerkship he had taken the first step toward realizing his dream of a home in the country, he was to remain for several succeeding years in the service of the government. Beginning his work as receiver of an insolvent bank in Middletown, New York, on January 1, 1873, he was occupied with the disentangling of the bank's affairs and long-drawn-out litigations for four or five years. He also acted as special National Bank Examiner for districts along the Hudson, in other sections of the Empire State, and in certain sections of Virginia — work consuming four or five months of each year, which, with his receivership, yielded him between fourteen and fifteen hundred dollars. The bank-examining lasted till 1885, or a little later, when he was ousted by the |