it. The good, the beautiful, and the true my soul worships; and the more your spirit assimilates to mine in this respect, Ursula, the more I can love you. Open your heart to the good and the beautiful in Nature and in life, and my soul will go out to yours as naturally as the magnet turns to the Pole. But I must talk about something else.

Then you was afraid to have me go to that Cave, was you? Bless your heart! I am glad you are so anxious for my safety, but I would not have you have any unnecessary trouble. I did not go to the cave because it rained, and I guess I should not have gone had it been a fair day, simply because you pleaded so earnestly for me not to. I will try and do as you want me to, and will come up in two or three weeks if not before. You may expect me next Friday night if nothing happens.... So here is a kiss until I come. Your

Later, from High Falls, October 7th:

MY DEAR URSULA,

JOHN

I intend to invert the golden rule this time and do unto others as they do unto me. Your letter to me was short and business-like, so mine to you shall be short and business-like. Here is all I have to say at present: I think I shall probably be up to Olive Friday or Saturday. You did not ask me to come in your letter, but I want to come very much, and I hope you will be glad to see me. If I don't come then I shall be oblige[d] to wait four weeks, and it would be very painful to me to be absent from you that long. Oh, how glad I shall be when you can be with me all the time!

Adieu. Yours while life lasts,

JOHN BURROUGHS

Toward spring his wife came and boarded with him in the home of the trustee, returning to her father before the term ended. At close of school the teacher was chagrined that the trustee did not offer to hire him again. Commenting on this, he said:

I suppose I was thinking too much, and not attending to business. I believe they complained that I read in school. But there were other reasons - things over which I had no control - squabbles among the women-folks some silly quarrel about apple-sauce started it. I shall never forget the shock I got on coming home and hearing my wife's voice raised in altercation and violent denunciation of the woman where we boarded. . . . This probably had something to do with my not getting the school again.

Attempts to get a business position in New York, to which his wife was urging him, were unsuccessful, and the summer

of 1858 found him teaching at Rosendale on the Rondout, whence he writes in a cheery vein, wishing she were there keeping house and sailing with him on the river in the balmy evenings:

... I think they will raise my wages after the first quarter, so that we could live nice and comfortable, and at the same time I could be pursuing my studies and preparing myself for something else. You must not expect too much of me at first, Ursula; I am very young yet and must study and grow, work and wait, before I can take the position in the world that I am capable of taking. My Ursula must have patience and all will be right one of these days. I think I will come up and see you next week. If you could come and meet me with one of your father's horses, write so that I can get it by Thursday, and I will not try to get a horse here. . . . Be a good girl and make up your mind that we had better go to keeping house....

That fall he became interested in a new kind of harnessbuckle invented by the village harness-maker — a buckle with a direct draft on the tongue, instead of the movable tongue of the kind then in use. The inventor had inveigled him into making a drawing of the buckle for the Patent Office, while doing which he had waxed enthusiastic. He dreamed of buckles, and talked of buckles to everybody. The village doctor caught the enthusiasm, and together they bought the inventor out. Buoyant with hope, and basking in the sunshine of his wife's approval, he resigned his school and went to Newark, New Jersey, to superintend the making of the buckles. Months of disillusionment followed.' He realized only loss and humiliation; and, after futile attempts to obtain other employment, resumed teaching. Having engaged himself to teach near Newark, he wrote his wife that on his wages of one hundred dollars for sixty days, they could live together as cheaply as she was living at Olive:

You may ask what we will go to housekeeping with. Well, you know you have some things; our folks will send us some things; I will hire some money, so we can get along till 'our ship comes home from sea.' There is no use to mourn and repine over misfortune, but the way is to 'up and at it again' with a cheerful countenance, and a bold, resolute heart. 'There's a good time coming, boys, wait a little longer.' ...

For a detailed story of his adventures with the buckle, see John Burroughs, Boy and Man.

Write without delay.... Newark is only seven miles from New York, so we can occasionally go to hear Chapin and Beecher.'

In a January letter he confessed to his wife: 'It grinds to take up the old occupation after indulging for three months in visions of wealth and independence.' A month later, still urging her to come and keep house, he writes of hearing Edward Everett lecture, but, lonely and depressed, and grievously disappointed at her decision to defer housekeeping, he adds:

The news from B― about our affairs has distressed me much; the bad news from you, and my own depressed feelings occasioned by the labors of school-teaching and almost incessant study, have quite broken me down, and I feel sad, sad indeed. I never felt the need of your society, or of some congenial companion who can sympathize with me, and come in close communion with my heart and feelings, as I do at present. In a city of strangers, with poverty and misfortune and hard toil; with a mind full of tender recollections of the past, and darkened with uncertainties as to the future; with a heart yearning for old friends and companions, and a spirit racked with thoughts and inward struggles; I more than ever need the assurance of your love, and the presence of your kind, cheerful heart.

Oh, why is it that trouble and disappointment are the inevitable result of our earthly condition. I look at the stars, I look at the setting sun, I look toward the blue horizon, I ramble through the busy city, I delve into the sea of books, I struggle with the mysteries of eternity, and nothing satisfactory can I find. All is a sliding sandbank beneath me. Peace, Beauty, Satisfaction, Rest where, oh, where can ye be found? Ah! my dearest girl, this poor life cannot be all! this inward longing and struggling point to something beyond the stars!

I received a letter from Father the other day; they were all well, but very much grieved that I had got so far from home. Home! Home! would that my future days might be as happy as those spent within thy sacred precincts!...

The mood then changes; sentiment is abandoned; taking a more masterful tone, he sweeps aside the trivial excuses for delaying housekeeping; tells what he expects of her; gives practical directions for coming for shipping their belongings; discusses all details, then adds vigorously:

Get your things to the river, put your clothes in your trunk, put my clothes in my trunk, together with my manuscripts, Shake

Years later he said that in those days he was so eager to hear Beecher, then in the heyday of his fame and power, that he used to run to get there. He couldn't bear to miss a word, and it was lively hustling after getting off the ferry.

speare's works, and my two big dictionaries; get aboard the stage; go to Rondout; stay overnight with your cousin; and the next day take the cars for New York, and I will meet you at the depot.

... I shall certainly expect you to come, and if you have my happiness and your own at heart, you will let nothing detain you. We can live nicely and happily here....

Our folks are going to send me some apples and butter soon.

In the course of this long letter he declares that if she will not come, he will give up the school, and travel with the buckle and a book-agency in the West; but, pushing aside this alternative, he outlines the more desirable plan so irresistibly as to produce the desired effect. The feminine heart loves a wooer, but above all else loves a master.

They set up housekeeping in East Orange (February, 1859) in a modest way. For the first time since marriage the strong domestic nature of the young husband was satisfied in the possession of a home; reverses counted for little; he was at last under his own roof-tree.

2. THE APPRENTICESHIP

The only way to learn to write is to write, Mr. Burroughs used to say, just as one learns to swim by plunging in and striking out till he masters the new element. "The formal rules,' he declared, 'are so much dead wood unless you have the root of the matter within yourself.' In 1859 and 1860, while teaching in East Orange, he plunged in and floundered about a good deal, and, indeed, it was several years before he became a bold swimmer. He began writing for the 'Saturday Press,' under the general caption 'Fragments from the Table of an Intellectual Epicure,' by 'All Souls.' ('Ugh! the title sets my teeth on edge now,' he said in later years.) He offered his wares for a dollar an article, and when they could not pay even that sum, he still wrote for them. Howells said of the 'Saturday Press,' which had been started in 1858, that it was nearly as well for one to be accepted by it as by the 'Atlantic Monthly,' since there was no other literary comparison at the time.

A few crumbs from the 'intellectual epicure's' table are gathered here:

Every book and every sermon ought to be a pair of magnetic slippers that shall make us dance to a new tune, and feel as if we

were walking on thunderbolts. . . . There is nothing so healthy as a freshet in the soul. A man needs to be elated and depressed; to be lifted up until he feels he could grasp the big dipper and... sunk down till one foot breaks through Hades.

Some of the essays which young Burroughs subsequently sent to the 'Press' were named 'Deep,' 'A Thought on Culture,' and 'Poetry.' Between 1860 and 1862, among those he sent to the New York 'Leader' were 'World Growth,' 'New Ideas,' 'Theory and Practice,' 'On Indirections,' and 'Some of the Ways of Power.' All were experimental. He was struggling to attain clearness of expression. Of his early efforts he said:

The two feet upon which they go is analogy. It looks as if, in each case, I had my physical fact in mind first, and then hunted around till I found its mate in some moral or intellectual principle.

In the latter part of April (1860), he wrote to his wife, in Roxbury:

The prospects for a situation of any kind are very poor. The supply of help so much exceeds the demand. They advertised yesterday for twenty men to canvas for the Brooklyn Register. I went precisely at the hour, but the room was so full that I could hardly get in. I suppose there were two hundred applied, and, as many of them had worked at it before, of course my chance was poor. I shall advertize in the Tribune to-morrow.

I am very anxious to get a place, more on your account than my own. It would suit me best to go home, and I believe would be better in the long run. I know you have an idea that it is a very easy matter to get a place, but your ideas would change if you were to try it awhile here in New York. It is the most disheartening business I ever undertook....

Well, be a good girl and don't find fault with me when I do the best I can. You little know my troubles and anxieties.

Horace and I made seventy-five cents apiece on our lecture.1 ... I wish I could be with you up there among the grassy fields. I never hungered and thirsted after rest, and the country, as I do now. You may ask what I have done so wonderful to make me feel thus. Well, I don't know myself, except what you call 'no work' thinking and teaching. I have nursed forty boys for over a year, and they have sucked a great deal of marrow and pith out of me. I feel

He and a friend, Horace Fish, had engaged Bayard Taylor to lecture. On that occasion, he spoke to Taylor about some verses of Walt Whitman's, then appearing in the Saturday Press. Taylor replied, patronizingly, ‘Oh, yes, there is something in him, but he is a man of colossal egotism.'