had. It made quite a hit. Experts in banking circles wrote me about it. One man said he took it as his chart and compass.' At the time it was published (March, 1882), directors of many of the national banks wrote urging him to write a manual for bank directors. The paper attests to the thoroughness of his work as bank-examiner. There was nothing slipshod in his searching methods. An expertness not looked for in one with so much ideality is here revealed. One sees quite another Burroughs than the one of the books. In truth, in one sentence only can we detect the writer of the nature essays:

Bees carry off honey from the hive and leave the comb all intact; and cashiers have been known to exhibit as clean and straight a set of books as need be, when their accounts were little more than empty combs.

Evidently, if he had not let the banks interfere with the birds, he had also not let the birds interfere with the banks. One finds, despite his avowal to the contrary, that he could spy on something besides a chipmunk; for, airing the devious ways of dishonest cashiers, he gave explicit instructions to unwary stockholders and directors, lest 'the golden apple of bank-shares and expected dividends turn to ashes' on their lips. All these seemingly foreign activities in one we associate with such different interests and aims, all the reams on reams of paper he covered with wearying columns of figures (and had preserved for old association's sake), make one marvel that the untrammeled man one knew, who came and went freely in nature, could so steadily have held himself, and for so many years, to work so alien to his tastes and temperament.

CHAPTER VIII

IN PASTURES NEW

1882

The scenery of the Clyde is unequaled by any other approach to Europe.... The landscape closes around us. We can almost hear the cattle ripping off the lush grass in the fields. One feels as if he could eat grass himself. It is pastoral paradise. From Fresh Fields

EARLY in the ensuing year-a year that was to yield so much of varied interest- Burroughs settled in new quarters, his cosy, one-room bark study, a few rods from his dwelling. Its huge fireplace,' its book-lined walls, and its wide windows looking out upon vineyard and river, and its detachment from domestic affairs, afforded the place and atmosphere needed for work. He himself fashioned the book-shelves, table, and settle from native oak.

Much joy went into the making of this snug little refuge where, in succeeding years, besides many magazine articles, he was to write 'Fresh Fields,' 'Signs and Seasons,' 'Indoor Studies,' and 'Riverby.' He records in the Journal, January 5th:

The first day in my new Study. Moved in yesterday. My books in their new places last night. I contemplated them with a strange, sad feeling, my faithful, silent companions.

'Signs and Seasons' was the first essay he wrote there; the Carlyle essay, next.

In January, urging Benton to come over and visit them, he says:

We are well, have a good girl, a full larder, a bursting coal-bin, and hospitable hearts. . . . We have had little or no company this winter and have had to crack the social hickory, and eat the juicy Nelli's, and toothsome Spies, alone. . . . Come over, and like two mice, we will nibble away on such cheese-rinds as my poor board, literary and other, affords.

I have builded me a new house, and there is a big chair in it for you. I am alone with my books and my thoughts now, down on the brink of the hill, beyond the orbit of household matters, and hardly

1 Its brick chimney which did not draw well, was supplanted by a wood-stove, and later by a picturesque cobble-stone chimney.

ever perturbed by them. I have the solitude of Bruin in his den, and I suck my paws pretty industriously.

I am writing a little and reading a little-reading mainly African travels.

If you have got copies of the old Radical, see if you can find the one with a poem by John Weiss called 'Dark,' or something like that (it was a very dark poem, at any rate), and send it to me, or bring it with you. I want to contrast it with Emerson's 'Brahma' in a little essay for the Critic.

Benton came, as the Journal shows:

Feb. 13. Myron left for home today.... Much talk down in my little house, trying our teeth as usual upon the old uncrackable nuts. The logico-metaphysical lines in Myron's mind much stronger and deeper than in my own. The inward eye of his mind is very clear.

Feb. 27.... A suggestion of spring this morning, clear and soft and hazy. The bluebird (here all winter) has the amorous warble of spring. The purple finches sitting in all the apple trees, indulged in a fine, half-suppressed chorus; it was very pleasing. My little woodpecker has not begun to drum yet. A hard snow covers the ground. Ice men began to put in poor six-inch ice on Saturday in front of me. A sun-dog yesterday afternoon; and a soft rosy glow diffused over the clouds at sunrise this morning, reaching nearly to the zenith. Do these signs indicate fair weather? First chipmunk today, back on Manning's ridge.

March 1.... Finished my 'Signs and Seasons' today,' begun two weeks ago. Writing is like fishing: you do not know that there are fish in that hole till you have caught them. I did not know there was an article in me on this subject till I fished it out. I tried many times before I had a bite, and I did much better some days than others. Stormy days (either snow or rain, though snow is best) were my best days.

The stimulus of Benton's comradeship is further acknowledged in this letter:

I have been pretty busy since you left. Your visit put about two inches of fat on my ribs, and I have been working it off. It was most timely and satisfactory. I needed a pause, a breathing spell, and to have my thoughts crossed with some vigorous species. You know Darwin has shown (I have got nearly all his works since you were here) that cross-fertilization is best in the vegetable kingdom, and I know it is in the intellectual. One must have pollen from other

This essay was published in the Century Magazine in 1883. Its title was changed to 'A Sharp Lookout' on becoming the initial chapter in the volume Signs and Seasons.

minds if he would keep up a race of vigorous seedlings of his own. The next two weeks after you were here I wrote quite a long article, and one of my best, I think, on Observation of Nature - nothing that we discussed, yet I doubt if it would have been written if you had not come. I have also written another short essay.

I send you the Critic with my little Emerson essay, which you may return sometime.

I will send you advance sheets of my Thoreau article soon.1

I like your poem on the Mowers much. It is one of your best, and is no doubt destined to a permanent place amid our rural poetry. If you dug into your mind as persistently as I do in mine, you might write many such, and many prose sketches of permanent value. The muse is not going to seize one's hand and make him write; he has got to wait upon her, and court her assiduously. I bore her unmercifully sometimes. . . .

Well, spring has come, the tender, yearning, wistful spring, and the heroic winter is gone. I confess I am sorry. One can nestle so close to himself, and to his friend, in winter, but spring drives one forth. I experience all the pain and sadness of the annual migration of my Aryan ancestors in the spring. . . .

[Journal] April 3. My 45th birthday. Clear, crisp, and delightful. All day in the old sap-bush at home, boiling sap, Father, Julian, and Hiram there much of the time. How delighted I am again amid the old scenes and at the old occupations!

Now, on my 45th birthday, my hair is about half gray, beard ditto, mustache unchanged, except on close inspection, when three or four gray hairs appear. Health good, and much of a boy yet at heart, but the boy is growing more and more sad with longer and more frequent retrospections.

Indeed, the Past begins to grow at my back like a great pack, and it seems as if it would overwhelm me quite before I get to be really an old man. As time passes, the world becomes more and more a Gethsemane [Golgotha?] a place of graves, even if one does not actually lose by death his friends and kindred. The days do not merely pass, we bury them; they are of us, like us, and in them we bury our own images, a real part of our selves. With what longing and regret we look back athwart this cemetery of the years where our days, many of them so beautiful and happy and bright, lie hushed and still. They cannot rise, they cannot come back to us; they were the offspring of our loins. Many of them we have entirely forgotten the look and aspect of; we cannot recall what they were like, and this makes us sad. Occasionally a word, a forgotten tune, or a perfume, brings back for a moment the buried Past, and a mournful thrill goes through the soul.

It was of such passages that he spoke when, on giving me his Journals, he said, 'I seem to have put all my gloom in them, 'First published in the Century Magazine; later in Indoor Studies.

and all my sunshine in my books.' One does find in the Journals much too much of the pensive mood; hears too often the 'sad whisper of autumn leaves.' Nevertheless, retrospections are often relieved by sunnier reflections. For example, on the same day that he made the pathetic birthday record, he sent a note to Myron Benton which shows him looking forward:

We have made up our minds to go to England in May and spend part of the summer there. We have also made up our minds that you and Mrs. B. are just the couple to go with us. I have been in N.Y. to see about passage. Write that you will go with us.... We are younger this year than we will ever be again.

Meanwhile his pen was not idle, as an amusing Journal entry attests:

April 26. Am writing on Carlyle, and hitting the mark now and then. Just at this moment my wife calls me to drop my Carlyle and come and shake the carpet a Carlylean task that makes me wrathful. I will whip the seams open!

Mrs. Burroughs had a dinner-bell of no uncertain sound, with which she used to summon him from his Study to the house. 'Many an essay has that hateful bell ruined for me,' he said in later years. 'Sometimes I would pretend not to hear it — no use — if I didn't respond, Mrs. B. herself would soon appear I might better have gone at the first clang. For when I would get angry, my Muse would desert me, and it sometimes took days to woo her back.' The exasperating part was that the bell exacted tasks of a kind which his hired man could have done far better than he.

The departing April days brought sad tidings:

[Journal] April 28. Emerson died last night at 8.30 o'clock. At that hour I was sitting with Benton in his house, talking of him [Emerson] and his probable death.'

With Emerson dead, it seems folly to be alive. No man of just his type and quality has ever before appeared upon the earth. He looked like a god. That wise, serene, inscrutable look was without a parallel in any human face I ever saw. Such an unimpeachable look! The subtle, half-defined smile was the reflection of the smile of his soul. It was not a propitiatory smile, or a smirk of acquiescence, but the reassuring smile of the doctor when he takes out his lancet. It was the sheath of that trenchant blade of his. Behind it lurked some

• Strange coincidence! Together in young manhood, Benton and Burroughs had first met Emerson, and together they sat talking of him when he breathed his last.