quarter of a mile away, it is something of a feat to send a bullet through its heart, but what sportsmanship is this?

It was the only deer he ever shot, or attempted to shoot. In middle life, having outgrown his earlier practice of studying the birds with a gun, he admitted, as though it were a weakness, 'I can't kill things any more.' As the years multiplied, he grew still more averse to taking life — always excepting woodchucks, and other 'varmints,' which continued to rouse in him the primitive instinct to kill.

Another unpublished passage throws light upon Benton and their comradeship:

In the twilight 'Richard' and I made our bed on a gentle slope, nearly overshadowed by a huge pine, where the moss was peculiarly thick and soft, and fell into one of our discursive, easy-going talksthe sport and play of the mind rather than the deliberate application of its powers. Rich and rare old 'Richard!' what depths there are in thee, and what heights! what quaintness, what subtlety, what clearness of vision, and what Norseman sturdiness and vigor! How we have tugged at the old problems, seeking again the unknown quantity whose symbol is not x, but the visible universe! Loafing and inviting our souls in forest and field, by lake and river and mountain, what converse we have had! what questionings, what glorious metaphysical wrestlings, what uplifting and liberation of spirit!

This night, in a kind of shadow-talk the hours went by. The slope was a little too rapid, and gravity, by inches and half inches and quarter inches, pulled us down toward the level, till finally we found our equilibrium around the camp-fire. 'Robin,' rolled up in his blanket, woke to find a gray log beside him which, he declared, was not there when he went to sleep. The gray log, being manipulated, disclosed 'Richard's' head at one end of it, and his boots at another, his butternut blanket, and his liberal length making the deception quite perfect.

The light from their camp-fire, extinguished so long ago, still shines in this passage:

The sparks go up in their serpentine courses till the sparks seem stars, and the stars sparks. How true is Thoreau's remark that we do not know what our stoves and chimneys have concealed from us till we have built a fire in the woods at night! The sparks, the smoke, the deep shadows, the silent listening trees, and the great ocean of night kept at bay there by a little blaze! How cavernous the woods look, how spectral and pokerish! There in the deep flickering shadows is the region of superstition and dread. Here one looks for the glaring eyes and the crouching forms of evil... while getting wood and water he is inclined to whistle... is unusually vigilant,

and half expects to hear a stealthy tread behind him. [This calls up the Roxbury farm-boy with his fears of the dark.]

The ease with which Burroughs established intimacy and harmony with Nature is seen in subsequent passages in the essay. The mountain must come to me, not I to it. Beauty unsought is truest found.' And then, lured by a hummingbird, he strayed from the others, and, penetrating deep into the woods, reclined upon a moss-covered log, while a troop of chickadees, coming near,, chattered and disputed; the little green flycatcher' came, too, to see what it was all about; then the blue-backed warbler, and the black and yellow; then a nuthatch and in the goodly company,' he says, simply and truly, 'the woods satisfied me.'

In late September the embryo ornithologist writes Benton:

...

I am seriously contemplating going into the army. I am getting dissatisfied and crave action. I do want to get nearer to this bugbear, War! I want to decide the matter this week, if possible. I have proposed to the Trustees to raise my wages, and if they refuse to do it, I shall stop the school at once and shoulder the musket. If I had some one like yourself to go with me, I should go at any

rate.

Our campaign in the Adirondacks seems almost like a dream; it has idealized itself already, and my life will always be the sweeter and richer for it. How it enhances the value of living, does it not? to have something sweet to remember!

I am as absorbed in birds as ever, and 'fly-catchers' are my constant companions. I have succeeded in mounting them better than I had hoped, and now, as I write, a jay looks down at me from the top of my desk, 'as natural as life,' as they say. But few of the birds that I got in the mountains are fit for use, I find, owing to the imperfect state of plumage. The bird you spoke of is called the little green fly-catcher.

The month's Atlantic I find remarkably rich. Thoreau's article 2 is actually one of the best things I ever read. You see he discusses the point we talked about that Sunday on Lake Henderson. You remember my views were very nearly his. I stated, I believe, that I lived for my pleasure, or development, and had no other purpose before me.3

A mistake in identification. Perhaps the yellow-bellied flycatcher.

'I think it was "Life without Principle."' J. B. This article appeared in the Atlantic for October, 1863.

This rather bald admission of his hedonistic intentions must be taken cum grano salis. However, it expresses, in the main, an attitude he consistently held through life.

Wasson's article' I liked much. I would, however, that the style of it did not remind me of Carlyle himself. But doesn't he sock it to him? Whew! Did Trowbridge write the 'Pewee'? It is good. The fourth verse, I think, is very fine.

I liked your article on the Bishop in the Leader. In some parts of it you did yourself justice. I wish you would always sink your bucket down thus....

Benton's protest comes forthwith:

... This matter of your going into the Army troubles me not a little. God forbid that I should throw a straw in the way of patriotism now. Our country needs sacrifices which should be offered willingly. But I do not see that the cause requires very much now in the mere matter of numbers, after the means which have been taken. One born with the genius to direct and control the great mass of raw material could do something for his country now; but I cannot see that the demand is such that you are called upon to enlist at this time. I beg of you, do not plunge into this thing out of rash uneasiness, and craving for excitement. Such feelings ought to be smothered before they lead you to bury all your opportunities of intellectual improvement, as you know you would. . . .

Being tired, I would not have answered tonight except to send my opinion on this subject; for I fear you are going to be very precipitate. Think of all you would forego to satisfy the 'craving' for the excitement of the 'big War.' One week would satisfy all that, and then the long drudgery. If you think it is your duty to your country, I will not open my mouth, though it would be a sacrifice on my part to lose you. What you would sacrifice would be immense. I need not tell you that your after life will depend very much upon the way in which the next three or four years are spent towards your 'development.'

Ten days later Burroughs replied that his plans had been 'knocked prematurely in the head' by the severe illness of his wife.

She has been very bad for nearly two weeks, and of course I could not leave her.... She undergoes the most excruciating pain. I can get no girl, and have to take the sole care of her myself and keep my school going.... If you happen to know a good girl in your neighborhood, I wish you would send her to me.

The draft has just come off here, and I believe I have not the honor to be a conscript...

The housemaid did not materialize, but the wife soon con

'A letter to Carlyle in answer to Carlyle's "Shooting Niagara," in which Wasson dealt Carlyle some good resounding blows. Carlyle had taken sides with the South.' J. B.

valesced. However, the undercurrent of unrest was waxing stronger and stronger. His meager salary was inadequate to meet the increased cost of living; domestic dissonances were occurring frequently. One night after reaching home, although he had, as usual, given out the lessons for the next day, he suddenly decided to abandon teaching and get nearer to the seat of war.

Teaching had been but a means to an end, as had his brief study of medicine; while his business ventures had been foreign to all his tastes and aims. But the flowers and the birds continued absorbing, while the desire to write grew more insistent. And there was the War beckoning. So in the golden days of October, migrating South with the birds, he alighted in Washington in quest of work and adventure.

A friend of his wrote me that awkwardness on his (J. B.'s) part, in overturning a 'spider' of hot grease on the floor, and the resulting recriminations, was the 'last straw' that prompted this sudden move.

CHAPTER IV

IN GOVERNMENT EMPLOY

1863-1872

The essential part of the life of a great writer, a great poet, is just this: to seize, grasp, and analyze the whole man at the moment when, by a concurrence more or less slow and easy, his genius, his education, his circumstances, accord in such a way that he has given birth to his first masterpiece. If you comprehend the poet at this critical moment, if you unravel the knot to which all within him will henceforth be bound, if you find, so to speak, the key to that mysterious ring, half iron, half diamond, which links his second existence-obscure, repressed, and solitary the very memory of which he would oftentimes fain destroy, then it may be said of you that you possess and know your poet to the depths: you have entered with him the darksome regions of Dante and Virgil; you are worthy to accompany him side by side without fatigue, through his other marvels.

SAINTE-BEUVE

THE Nation's Capital was the scene of the growth and activities of John Burroughs for the greater part of the next decade. Emerging from the obscurity of rural surroundings, casting off the drudgery of teaching, freed from domestic cares, he found his new environment teeming with novelty and interest. The Washington of those closing years of the Civil War, then, as now, a city of magnificent distances, with its population of but sixty thousand, was like a country village with its dusty, unpaved streets, and its broad commons whereon the cattle grazed; where goats cropped the rose-bushes through the fences, and pigs dreamed dreams beneath them. Nature came up to the city's threshold. One could get to the primitive woods in ten minutes. Burroughs used to hunt snipe where now are solid blocks of buildings and rolling cars. Great apartments now loom in many of his former woodland haunts.

Reaching Washington in the fall of the year, when the Southern days, he said, had Northern blood in their veins, he drank deep of 'that vintage that intoxicates all lovers of the open air,' and basked in the soft brooding days and the enchanting nights. Never, he declared in 'Winter Sunshine,' had he seen anything but second-grade sunlight and moonlight until he reached Washington. There, dilating and expanding under the azure skies, he breathed deeper and stepped more proudly, as though inhaling the pure ether of mountain-tops.

Although he reacted with keen delight to his surroundings, a dismal period was yet to be passed before his 'Own' was to