CHAPTER XI

THE FRUIT OF THE VINE

1888-1892

See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed: Therefore, God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth.

Genesis

WITH the advent of the year of the triple-eights which, Mr. Burroughs used to say, would not come again in a thousand years, came a real epoch in his life. He bought nine additional acres and began the vineyard work which was to absorb much of his time for the next decade and more an enterprise which led Stedman to name him 'The Vine-Dresser of Esopus.' In the work of clearing and draining the land and setting out vines he found new delight; his health improved; his sleep was sweeter, and his days lost their somber tinge. Passages in 'The Secret of Happiness' ('Literary Values') tell of the magic change wrought by yielding to the demand of his yeoman ancestry.

In underdraining the moist places in the land, he said he seemed to be underdraining his own life and carrying off the stagnant water there also. The work was arduous: posts to set out, wire to string, ploughing, planting, fertilizing, spraying, trimming, tying up, and harvesting. When he gathered his first harvest of grapes, he must have rejoiced as much as did Thoreau when he had made the land say 'beans.' Thoreau's venture had had somewhat of brag in it. He crowed over his beans to his neighbors; but Burroughs tended his vineyard, intent on making it pay; on gathering the choicest grapes that could be raised, and on supplementing the scanty income from his books, in order to support his family in greater comfort, send his son to college, and be free to write as the spirit moved. In all of this he succeeded.

Walter H. Page, in writing of this phase of the life of Burroughs, called attention to the fact that while he had given himself to the study and interpretation of Nature, he had regularly sold his grapes at the highest market-price; and that, however much he was an organic part of his garden and vineyard, he was equally a part of human society - an observa

tion which recalls a comment of Mr. Bliss Perry's on Emerson: that, though he could muse on the over-soul, he could raise the best Baldwin apples and Bartlett pears in Concord, and get the highest current prices for them. In getting the best current prices for his grapes, peaches, raspberries, and other fruit, Burroughs found his purchase of more land to be one of the best investments he ever made. For vineyard and garden contributed to, rather than detracted from, the cultivation of the 'other garden,' whose harvests cannot be reckoned in dollars and cents. The fruit of the vine, gathered in Concords, Campbell's Earlies, Niagaras, Delawares, and Gaertners, was tallied by the observations and meditations that simultaneously grew into essays, and in the essays that grew into volumes, during those busy, fruitful years.

How completely he planted himself in his vineyard is seen in that, long after he had ceased to take an active part in it, he still went to it for the title of one of his volumes ('Leaf and Tendril'), drawing from his long years of husbandry apt figures for the preface — one of the most felicitous among his many felicitous prefaces. For the blind, sensitive, outreaching tendrils of his thoughts on the great questions as they groped their way in the world-vineyard, he found a symbol in the tendrils of the vines growing near his Study. There, as he sat and wrote, and heard the sharp 'Click, click' of 'Hud's' (Hudson Covert, his faithful helper in the vineyard) shears, trimming and pruning, he prayed the divinities that preside over growing things both indoors and out to help him trim his own vines as heroically as 'Hud' trimmed his to get rid of as much old wood as possible, and leave only the young, vigorous shoots; and he who tastes the 'grapes,' knows that the prayer of the Vine-Dresser was answered.

At the beginning of this eventful year, the husbandman was busy also in his 'other vineyard,' pruning away at his essay on Arnold, before transplanting it to his new book ('Indoor Studies'); or, shall one say, he was trimming here, guiding there, and relentlessly lopping off superfluities, intent only upon a choice yield.

The following June letter to Hamilton Wright Mabie shows how the essay on Arnold had impressed a brother author:'

1 For the loan of this and other letters, I am indebted to Mrs. Mabie; and to her and Mr. Edwin W. Morse, and Dodd, Mead & Co., for permission to quote from letters published in Mr. Morse's Life and Letters of Hamilton W. Mabie.

I do not take too seriously your generous appreciation of my Arnold essay, though among the younger writers of the country there is no one whose good opinion I value more. I remember your own work in this field, especially that noble essay of yours in the Princeton Review on some characteristics of modern literature as distinguished from the ancient. This was a serious, penetrating, and conclusive piece of work, and I ought ere now to have sent you my congratulations.

My criticism is far less satisfying to myself, and I believe it is to the public, than my out-of-door papers. It is not my proper field, but I cannot always get my fresh salt on the tails of the birds; but one can catch an author almost any time. But I can say this for myself: I always make a serious study of the man I write about, and work away at it till my thought on the subject runs clear.

I hope you and your wife are well and in the country. The world is very beautiful now. Indeed, it has been so to me all the spring, for I have been a day-laborer in the field since the first of April. Life has a new zest. I am just beginning to know the sweetness of real labor. I believe it cures the soul as well as the body. How good the earth tastes to my hoe! Every drop of sweat I shed in the soil seems to come back to me in flowers and perfume.

Indoor interests never blinded him to those without. One morning early in January, as he sat at breakfast, he was thrilled to see a fox running over the snow, a few rods below the house. It trotted through the currant-patch and disappeared in the lane beyond. 'I love to think of that wild cunning creature,' he writes, 'passing over my lawn and amid my currant bushes, just as if... it were a remote mountain lot.'

The following letter to one of his unknown readers is characteristic of his friendly replies to correspondents. It was written to Mr. W. W. Christman in January.

That a young farmer, trapper and wood-chopper, is also an appreciative reader of my books, is an interesting fact to me. The books must at least contain some flavor of reality to appeal to a mind so constantly conversant with real things.

That the nests of wild birds are sometimes attacked by vermin is a new fact to me. . . . I have no doubt the essence of the skunk has some rare medicinal properties, if one has the courage to use it.

Stick to the Whitman; he can do you good. The book of Thoreau that will please you most is 'Walden, or Life in the Woods.' It is the best book of the kind in English literature.

Other letters to the same young man followed, exchanging natural history observations; offering to read his articles, some of which he placed for him. Some of the observations of