CHAPTER VIII

RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS

One phase of the new discovery of America following the Civil War--return to reality, insistence upon things as they are--expressed itself in nature study. While the new local color school was ransacking the odd corners of the land for curious types of humanity, these writers were calling attention to the hitherto unnoticed phenomena of fields and meadows and woodlands. Handbooks of birds and trees, nature guides and charts of all varieties were multiplied. Nature study became an art, and it ranged all the way from a fad for dilettantes to a solemn exercise in the public school curriculum.

I

The creator and inspirer and greatest figure of this school of nature writers was Henry David Thoreau. In point of time he was of the mid-century school that gathered about Emerson. He was born in 1817, two years earlier than Lowell, and he died in 1862, the first to break the earlier group, yet in spirit and influence and indeed in everything that makes for the final fixing of an author's place in the literary history of his land, he belongs to the period after 1870.

His own generation rejected Thoreau. They could see in him only an imitator of Emerson and an exploiter of newnesses in an age grown weary of newnesses. They did not condemn him: they ignored him. Of his first book, _A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers_, 1849, printed at Thoreau's expense, only two hundred and nineteen copies had been sold in 1853 when the remainder of the edition was returned to the author. _Walden; or, Life in the Woods_ fared somewhat better because of the unique social experiment which it recorded, but not enough better to encourage its author ever to publish another book. After the death of Thoreau, Emerson undertook to give him permanence by editing four or five posthumous volumes made up of his scattered magazine articles and papers, but even this powerful influence could not arouse enthusiasm. The _North American Review_, which in 1854 had devoted seven patronizing lines to _Walden_, took no note of Emerson's editings until the _Letters to Various Persons_ appeared in 1865. Then it awoke in anger. To publish the letters of an author is to proclaim that author's importance, and what had Thoreau done save to live as a hermit for two years in the woods? He was a mere eccentric, a "Diogenes in his barrel, reducing his wants to a little sunlight"; one of "the pistillate plants kindled to fruitage by the Emersonian pollen." "It is something eminently fitting that his posthumous works should be offered us by Emerson, for they are strawberries from his own garden." He was an egotist, a poser for effect, a condemner of what he could not himself attain to. "He condemns a world, the hollowness of whose satisfactions he had never had the means of testing." "He had no humor"; "he had little active imagination"; "he was not by nature an observer." "He turns commonplaces end for end, and fancies it makes something new of them." His nature study was only "one more symptom of the general liver complaint." "I look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease."

The review was from no less a pen than Lowell's and it carried conviction. Its author spread it widely by republishing it in _My Study Windows_, 1871, and including it in his collected works. It was the voice of Thoreau's generation, and to England at least it seems to have been the final word. Stevenson after reading the essay was emboldened to sum up the man in one word, a "skulker." The effect was almost equally strong in America. During the period from 1868 to 1881, not one of the author's volumes was republished in a new edition. When in 1870 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, his foremost champion in the dark period, had attempted to secure the manuscript journal for possible publication, he was met by Judge Hoar, the latter-day guardian of Concord, with the question: "Why should any one wish to have Thoreau's journal printed?"

That was the attitude of the seventies. Then had come the slow revival of the eighties. At the beginning of the decade H. G. O. Blake, into whose hands Thoreau's papers had fallen, began to publish extracts from the journals grouped according to days and seasons: _Early Spring in Massachusetts_, 1881. _Summer_, 1884, and _Winter_, 1888. The break came in the nineties. Between 1893 and 1906 were published, in addition to many individual reprints of Thoreau's books, the Riverside edition in ten volumes, the complete journal in fourteen volumes, and the definitive Walden edition in twenty volumes. A Thoreau cult had arisen that hailed him as leader and master. After all the years he had arrived at his own. In the case of no other American has there been so complete and overwhelming a reversal of the verdict of an author's own generation.

Lowell devoted his whole essay to a criticism of Thoreau as a Transcendental theorist and social reformer. To-day it is recognized that fundamentally he was neither of these. His rehabilitation has come solely because of that element condemned by Lowell as a certain "modern sentimentalism about Nature." It is not alone because he was a naturalist that he has lived, or because he loved and lived with Nature: it was because he brought to the study of Nature a new manner, because he created a new nature sentiment, and so added a new field to literature. Instead of having been an imitator of Emerson, he is now seen to have been a positive original force, the most original, perhaps, save Whitman, that has contributed to American literature.

The first fact of importance about Thoreau is the fact that he wrote day after day, seldom a day omitted for years, the 6,811 closely printed pages of his journal, every part done with thoroughness and finish, with no dream that it ever was to be published. It is a fact enormously significant; it reveals to us the naked man; it furnishes a basis for all constructive criticism. "My journal," he wrote November 16, 1850, "should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for an aspect of the world, what I love to think of." And again, "Who keeps a journal is purveyor to the gods." And still again, February 8, 1841, "My journal is that of me which would else spill over and run to waste, gleanings from the field which in action I reap. I must not live for it, but, in it, for the gods. They are my correspondents, to whom daily I send off this sheet, post-paid. I am clerk in their counting house, and at evening transfer the account from day-book to ledger." He was not a poser for effect, for it is impossible for one to pose throughout 6,811 printed pages wrought for no eyes save his own and the gods. His power came rather from the fact that he did not pose; that he wrote spontaneously for the sheer love of the writing. "I think," he declares in one place, "that the one word that will explain the Shakespeare miracle is unconsciousness." The word explains also Thoreau. Again he adds, "There probably has been no more conscious age than the present." The sentence is a key: in a conscious age, a classical age building on books, watchful of conventions and precedents, Thoreau stood true only to himself and Nature. Between him and the school of Taylor and Stoddard there was the whole diameter. He was affected only by the real, by experience, by the testimony of his own soul. "The forcible writer," he wrote February 3, 1852, "stands boldly behind his words with his experience. He does not make books out of books, but he has been _there_ in person."

In his nature observations Thoreau was not a scientist. It was not his object to collect endless data for the purpose of arriving at laws and generalizations. He approached Nature rather as a poet. There was in him an innate love for the wild and elemental. He had, moreover, a passion for transcending, or peering beyond, those bounds of ordinary experience and capturing the half-divined secrets that Nature so jealously guards. His attitude was one of perpetual wonder, that wonder of the child which has produced the mythology of the race. Always was he seeking to catch Nature for an instant off her guard. His eyes were on the strain for the unseen, his ears for the unheard.

I was always conscious of sounds in Nature which my ears could not hear, that I caught but a prelude to a strain. She always retreats as I advance. Away behind and behind is she and her meaning. Will not this faith and expectation make itself ears at length? I never saw to the end, nor heard to the end, but the best part was unseen and unheard.--February 21, 1842.

Nature so absorbed him that he lived constantly in an eager, expectant atmosphere. "I am excited by this wonderful air," he writes, "and go, listening for the note of the bluebird or other comer." It was not what he saw in Nature that was important; it was what he felt. "A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it." He took stock of his sensations like a miser. "As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented." It was by this watchfulness for the elemental, this constant scrutiny of instincts and savage outcroppings, that he sought to master the secret that baffled him. He would keep himself constantly in key, constantly sensitive to every fleeting glimpse of harmony that Nature might vouchsafe him.

Nature stirred him always on the side of the imagination. He loved Indian arrow-heads, for they were fragments of a mysterious past; he loved twilight effects and midnight walks, for the mystery of night challenged him and brought him nearer to the cosmic and the infinite:

I have returned to the woods and ... spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me--anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore ... communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there.... It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk which came ... to link you to Nature again.

Burroughs, like most scientists, slept at night. His observations were made by day: there is hardly a night scene in all his works; but Thoreau abounds in night scenes as much even as Novalis or Longfellow. He was at heart a mystic and he viewed Nature always from mystic standpoints. In "Night and Moonlight" he writes:

Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not tempted to explore it--to penetrate to the shores of its lake Tchad, and discover the sources of the Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are there to be found? In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads.

It was to discover these Mountains of the Moon, these mysterious sources of the Nile, forever so far away and yet forever so near, that Thoreau went to Nature. He went not to gather and to classify facts; he went to satisfy his soul. Burroughs is inclined to wonder and even laugh because of the many times he speaks of hearing the voice of unknown birds. To Burroughs the forest contained no unknown birds; to Thoreau the forest was valuable only because it _did_ contain unknown birds. His straining for hidden melodies, his striving for deeper meanings, his dreaming of Mountains of the Moon that might become visible at any moment just beyond the horizon--it is in these things that he differs from all other nature writers. He was not a reporter; he was a prophet. "My profession is always to be on the alert, to find God in nature, to know His lurking places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas in nature. Shall I not have words as fresh as my thought? Shall I use any other man's word?"

To him Nature was of value only as it furnished message for humanity. "A fact," he declared, "must be the vehicle of some humanity in order to interest us." He went to Nature for tonic, not for fact; he sought only truth and freedom and spontaneousness of soul. He had no desire to write a botany, or an ornithology; rather would he learn of Nature the fundamentals of human living. "I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Burroughs went into the woods to know and to make others to know, Thoreau went in to think and to feel; Burroughs was a naturalist, Thoreau a _super_naturalist.

Thoreau belongs completely to the later period: he is as thoroughly of American soil as even Mark Twain or Lincoln or Whitman. While Longfellow and Lowell, Taylor and Aldrich, and the rest of their school were looking eagerly to Europe, Thoreau was completely engrossed with his own land. "No truer American ever existed than Thoreau," wrote Emerson in his essay. "His preference of his country and condition was genuine, and his aversion from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt.... He wished to go to Oregon, not to London." It was this new-worldness, this freshness, this originality that made him the man of the new era. He went always to the sources; his work is redolent at every point of American soil. His images, his illustrations, his subject matter, all are American. His style, after he had outgrown an early fondness for Carlyle, is peculiarly his own, wonderfully simple and limpid and individual. Often it flows like poetry:

The sun is near setting away beyond Fair Haven. A bewitching stillness reigns through all the woodland, and over all the snowclad landscape. Indeed, the winter day in the woods or fields has commonly the stillness of twilight. The pond is perfectly smooth and full of light. I hear only the strokes of a lingering woodchopper at a distance and the melodious hooting of an owl.--December 9, 1856.

And what is this but poetry?

On the morning when the wild geese go over, I, too, feel the migratory instinct strong within me, and anticipate the breaking up of winter. If I yielded to this impulse, it would surely guide me to summer haunts. This indefinite restlessness and fluttering on the perch no doubt prophesy the final migration of souls out of nature to a serener summer, in long harrows and waving lines, in the spring weather, over that fair uplands and fertile Elysian meadows, winging their way at evening, and seeking a resting place with loud cackling and uproar.--January 29, 1859.

Thoreau was one of the most tonic forces of the later period. His inspiration and his spirit filled all the later school of Nature writers. One cannot read him long, especially in his later and more unconscious work, and find oneself unmoved. He inspires to action, to restlessness of soul. Take an entry like that of January 7, 1857, made during one of the most tumultuous of New England winter storms: "It is bitter cold, with a cutting N.W. wind.... All animate things are reduced to their lowest terms. This is the fifth day of cold, blowing weather," and so on and on till one fairly hears the roaring of the storm. Yet, despite the blast and the piercing cold, Thoreau goes out for his walk as usual and battles with the elements through miles of snow-smothered wilderness. "There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. Nothing so inspires me, and excites such serene and profitable thought." His battle with the wind and the cold and the wilderness grips us as we read. We too would rush into the storm and breast it and exult in it; we too would walk with Nature under the open skies, in the broad, wholesome places, and view the problems of life with serene soul. It is this dynamic element of Thoreau that has given him his following. He is sincere, he is working from the impulses of his soul, he is genuine. He is not a scientist: he is a poet and a seer. When we walk with Burroughs, we see as with new eyes; when with Thoreau, we feel. With Burroughs we learn of signs and seasons and traits; with Thoreau we find ourselves straining ears to catch the deeper harmonies, the mysterious soul of Nature, that somehow we feel to be intertwined eternally with the soul of man.

II

The transition from Thoreau to John Burroughs was through Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Wilson Flagg (1805-1884) had contributed to the early volumes of the _Atlantic_ a series of bird studies Irving-like in atmosphere and sentiment, but he had made little impression. He was too literary, too much the child of the mid century. In his study of the owl, for instance, he could write: "I will not enter into a speculation concerning the nature and origin of those agreeable emotions which are so generally produced by the sight of objects that suggest the ideas of decay and desolation. It is happy for us, that, by the alchemy of poetry, we are able to turn some of our misfortunes into sources of melancholy pleasure, after the poignancy of grief has been assuaged by time," and so on and on till he got to midnight and the owl. It is a literary effort. There is lack of sincerity in it: the author is thinking too exclusively of his reader. The difference between it and a passage from Thoreau is the difference between a reverie in the study and a battle in the woods. Higginson, who followed in the _Atlantic_ with "April Days," "The Life of Birds," and the other studies which he issued as _Out-Door Papers_ in 1863, avoided the over-literary element on one hand and the over-scientific on the other and so became the first of what may be called the modern school of nature writers.

As we read Higginson's book to-day we find style and method curiously familiar. For the first time in American literature we have that chatty, anecdotal, half-scientific, half-sentimental treatment of out-door things that soon was to become so common. It is difficult to persuade oneself that a paper like "The Life of Birds," for instance, was not written by the Burroughs of the earlier period. _Out-Door Papers_ and _Wake-Robin_ are pitched in the same key. Who could be positive of the authorship of a fragment like this, were not Higginson's name appended:

To a great extent, birds follow the opening foliage northward, and flee from its fading, south; they must keep near the food on which they live, and secure due shelter for their eggs. Our earliest visitors shrink from trusting the bare trees with their nests; the song-sparrow seeks the ground; the blue-bird finds a box or hole somewhere; the red-wing haunts the marshy thickets, safer in the spring than at any other season; and even the sociable robin prefers a pine-tree to an apple-tree, if resolved to begin housekeeping prematurely. The movements of birds are chiefly timed by the advance of vegetation; and the thing most thoroughly surprising about them is not the general fact of the change of latitude, but their accuracy in hitting the precise locality. That the same cat-bird should find its way back, every spring, to almost the same branch of yonder larch-tree--that is the thing astonishing to me.

The most notable thing, however, about Higginson's out-door papers was their ringing call for a return to reality. It was he who more than any one else created interest in Thoreau; and it was he who first gained attention with the cry, "Back to nature." "The American temperament," he declared, "needs at this moment nothing so much as that wholesome training of semi-rural life which reared Hampden and Cromwell to assume at one grasp the sovereignty of England.... The little I have gained from colleges and libraries has certainly not worn so well as the little I learned in childhood of the habits of plant, bird, and insect.... Our American life still needs, beyond all things else, the more habitual cultivation of out-door habits.... The more bent any man is on action, the more profoundly he needs the calm lessons of Nature to preserve his equilibrium." To the new generation of writers he flung a challenge: "Thoreau camps down by Walden Pond and shows us that absolutely nothing in Nature has ever yet been described--not a bird or a berry of the woods, not a drop of water, not a spicula of ice, nor winter, nor summer, nor sun, nor star." And again, "What do we know, for instance, of the local distribution of our birds? I remember that in my latest conversation with Thoreau last December, he mentioned most remarkable facts in this department, which had fallen under his unerring eyes."

This was published in the _Atlantic_, September, 1862. In May, 1865, as if in answer to the challenge, there appeared in the same magazine John Burroughs's "With the Birds," a paper which he had written two years before. The army life of Higginson and later his humanitarian work in many fields put an end to his out-door writings, but not to his influence.

III

John Burroughs was born on a farm in Roxbury, New York, just below the Otsego County made famous by Cooper and the Leather-stocking Tales. His boyhood until he was seventeen "was mainly occupied," to quote his own words, "with farm work in the summer, and with a little study, offset by much hunting and trapping of wild animals in winter." One must study this boyhood if one is to understand the man's work:

From childhood I was familiar with the homely facts of the barn, and of cattle and horses; the sugar-making in the maple woods in early spring; the work of the corn-field, hay-field, potato-field; the delicious fall months with their pigeon and squirrel shootings; threshing of buckwheat, gathering of apples, and burning of fallows; in short, everything that smacked of, and led to, the open air and its exhilarations. I belonged, as I may say, to them; and my substance and taste, as they grew, assimilated them as truly as my body did its food. I loved a few books much; but I loved Nature, in all those material examples and subtle expressions, with a love passing all the books of the world.[81]

Of schooling he had little. "I was born," he once wrote, "of and among people who neither read books nor cared for them, and my closest associations since have been alien to literature and art." The usual winter term in his native district, a year or two in academy courses after he was seventeen--that was the extent of his formal education. At twenty he was married, at twenty-seven, after having drifted about as a school teacher, he settled at Washington in a position in the Treasury Department that held him closely for nine years.

It was a period of self-discipline. His intellectual life had been awakened by Emerson, and he had followed him into wide fields. He read enormously, he studied languages, he trained himself with models of English style. His love of the country, legacy of the boyhood which he never outgrew, impelled him to a systematic study of ornithology. Birds were his avocation, his enthusiasm; by and by they were to become his vocation.

In 1861, when he was twenty-four, he came for the first time in contact with _Leaves of Grass_, and it aroused him like a vision.

It produced the impression upon me in my moral consciousness that actual Nature did in her material forms and shows; ... I shall never forget the strange delight I had from the following passage, as we sat there on the sunlit border of an autumn forest:

I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the reasons of things; They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen. I cannot say to any person what I hear--I cannot say it to myself--it is very wonderful; It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe, moving so exactly in its orbit forever and ever, without one jolt, or the untruth of a single second; I do not think it was made in six days, nor in ten thousand years, nor in ten billions of years; Nor planned and built one thing after another, as an architect plans and builds a house.

It was the touch that he needed. There was in him a strain of wildness even as in Thoreau, an almost feminine shrinking from the crowd, a thinking of Nature as something apart from man, a retreat and an antidote; Whitman added the human element, the sympathetic touch, the sense of the value of man.

Burroughs's first work appeared that same year in the New York _Leader_, a series of papers under the heading "From the Back Country"--crude things compared with Higginson's polished work, yet filled with a genuineness and a freshness that were notable. All of his earlier sketches were the work of a careful observer who wrote from sheer love of Nature. Moreover, they were the work of a dreamer and a poet. As the years took him farther from that marvelous boyhood, the light upon it grew softer and more golden. He dreamed of it in the spring when the bluebird called and the high-hole; he dreamed of it on his walks in the city suburbs when the swallows greeted him and the warblers. His _Atlantic_ paper "With the Birds," now the first chapter of his published works, begins with the sentence, now suppressed, "Not in the spirit of exact science, but rather with the freedom of love and old acquaintance, would I celebrate some of the minstrels of the field and forest." And years later, when he wrote the general introduction to his works, he could say:

My first book, _Wake-Robin_, was written while I was a government clerk in Washington. It enabled me to live over again the days I had passed with the birds and in the scenes of my youth. I wrote the book sitting at a desk in front of an iron wall. I was keeper of a vault in which many millions of bank notes were stored. During my long periods of leisure I took refuge in my pen. How my mind reacted from the iron wall in front of me and sought solace in memories of the birds and of summer fields and woods! Most of the chapters of _Winter Sunshine_ were written at the same desk. The sunshine there referred to is of a richer quality than is found in New York and New England.

That was the secret of the early work of John Burroughs: to him Nature was a part of his boyhood, with boyhood's light upon it. He dreamed of her when the city homesickness was upon him and when he wrote of her he wrote from a full heart. He felt every line of it; the light that plays over it is indeed of "richer quality" than is found over any actual hills. A part of his early popularity came undoubtedly from the sentiment which he freely mingled with his studies of field and woodland.

There is something almost pathetic in the fact that the birds remain forever the same. You grow old, your friends die or remove to distant lands, events sweep on and all things are changed. Yet there in your garden or orchard are the birds of your boyhood, the same notes, the same calls, and, to all intents and purposes, the identical birds endowed with perennial youth. The swallows, that built so far out of your reach beneath the eaves of your father's barn, the same ones now squeak and chatter beneath the eaves of your barn. The warblers and shy wood birds you pursued with such glee ever so many summers ago, and whose names you taught to some beloved youth who now, perchance, sleeps amid his native hills, no marks of time or change cling to them; and when you walk out to the strange woods, there they are, mocking you with their ever renewed and joyous youth. The call of the high-holes, the whistle of the quail, the strong piercing note of the meadow lark, the drumming of the grouse--how these sounds ignore the years, and strike on the ear with the melody of that springtime when the world was young, and life was all holiday and romance.[82]

The twenty years following his first _Atlantic_ paper were the years of his professional life. He left his clerkship at Washington in 1873 to become a national bank inspector, and until 1884, when he finally retired to rural life, he was busy with his duties as receiver of broken banks, examiner of accounts, and financial expert. During the two decades he published his most distinctive nature volumes: _Wake-Robin_, _Winter Sunshine_, _Birds and Poets_, _Locusts and Wild Honey_, and _Pepacton_, a small output for a man between the years of twenty-six and forty-six, yet one that is significant. Not a page of it had been written in haste, not a page that his later hand had found it necessary to revise. The primal freshness of youth is upon the books; they are as full of vitality and sweetness as a spring morning. Doubtless they are all the better for being the enthusiasms of hours stolen from a dry profession. It is tonic to read them. They are never at fault either in fact or in influence; they are the work of a trained observer, a scientist indeed, yet one who has gone to Nature like a priest to the holy of holies with the glow in his heart and the light on his face.

During the following decade, or, more exactly, the period between 1884 and 1894, he added four more books, three of them, _Fresh Fields_, _Signs and Seasons_, and _Riverby_, devoted to Nature, though with more and more of the coldly scientific spirit. These with the five earlier volumes stand alone as Burroughs's contribution to the field that he has made peculiarly his own. They contain his freshest and most spontaneous work.

To read these volumes is like going out ourselves into the forest with an expert guide who sees everything and who has at his command an unlimited store of anecdote and chatty reminiscence of birds and animals and even plants. To Burroughs, Nature was sufficient in herself. He loved her for the feelings she could arouse within him, for the recollections she could stir of the springtime of his life, for the beauty and the harmony that everywhere he found, and for the elemental laws that he saw on all sides at work and that stirred his curiosity. He had no desire to study Nature to secure evidences of a governing personality. He would draw no moral and offer no solutions of the problem of good and evil. Of the fortunes of the spirit of man he cared but little; as for himself, serene, he would fold his hands and wait. He was no mystic like Thoreau, listening for higher harmonies and peering eagerly beyond every headland to discover perchance the sources of the Nile. Upon him there was no necessity save to observe, to record, to discover new phenomena, to enlarge the store of facts, to walk flat-footed upon the material earth and observe the working of the physical mechanics about him and to teach others to observe them and to enjoy them. To appreciate the difference between Burroughs and Thoreau one has but to read them side by side. For instance, on March 21, 1853, Thoreau makes this entry:

As I was rising this crowning road, just beyond the old lime kiln, there leaked into my open ear the first peep of a hyla from some far pool ... a note or two which scarcely rends the air, does no violence to the zephyr, but yet leaks through all obstacles and far over the downs to the ear of the listening naturalist, as it were the first faint cry of the new-born year, notwithstanding the notes of birds. Where so long I have heard the prattling and moaning of the wind, what means this tenser, far-piercing sound?

Burroughs writes of the same subject in this way:

From what fact or event shall we really date the beginning of spring? The little piping frogs usually furnish a good starting point. One spring I heard the first note on the 6th of April; the next on the 27th of February; but in reality the latter season was only about two weeks earlier than the former.... The little piper will sometimes climb a bullrush to which he clings like a sailor to a mast, and send forth his shrill call. There is a Southern species, heard when you have reached the Potomac, whose note is far more harsh and crackling. To stand on the verge of a swamp vocal with these, pains and stuns the ear.

Then in a foot-note:

The Southern species is called the green hyla. I have since heard them in my neighborhood on the Hudson.

Never was there writer who kept his feet more firmly on solid earth. He takes nothing for granted; he is satisfied only with the testimony of the senses, and his own senses. Everything--example, allusion, figure of speech, subject and predicate--comes from him in the concrete. Everything is specific, localized, dated. He was in accord with his era that demanded only reality. It is the task of the writer, he declared, "to pierce through our callousness and indifference and give us fresh impressions of things as they really are."

How permanent is such work? How valuable is it? Is Nature then a thing simply to be observed and classified and reduced to formulæ? To determine the average day on which the bluebird comes, or the wild geese fly, or the hyla calls, is there virtue in that? To Burroughs, Nature was a thing to be observed accurately for new facts to add to the known. Of Thoreau he wrote: "Ten years of persistent spying and inspecting of Nature and no new thing found out." Do we ask of the poet and the seer simply for mere new material phenomena found out to add to our science? The supreme test that must come at last to all literature is the question: How much of human life is there in it? How much "Thus saith the Lord"? Who seeks for material things with eyes, however keen, and dreams of no sources of the Nile, no vision that may come perchance from supernatural power latent in bird and leaf and tendril, is a scientist, however charming he make his subject or however sympathetic be his attitude. Judged by such a standard, Burroughs falls short, far short of a place with the highest. He must decrease, while Thoreau increases. He must be placed at last among the scientists who have added facts and laws, while Thoreau is seated with the poets and the prophets.

But though he be thus without vision and without message, save as an invitation to come to material Nature and learn to observe is a message, Burroughs has a charm of manner and a picturesqueness of material that are to be found in few other writers of the period. His power lies in his simplicity and his sincerity. He is more familiar with his reader than Thoreau. He is never literary, never affected; he talks in the most natural way in the world; he tells story after story in the most artless way of homely little happenings that have passed under his own eye, and so charming is his talk that we surrender ourselves like children to listen as long as he will. When we read Thoreau we are always conscious of Thoreau. His epithets, his distinction of phrase, his sudden glimpses, his unexpected turns and climaxes, his humor, for in spite of Lowell's dictum, he is full of humor, keep us constantly in the presence of literature; but with Burroughs we are conscious of nothing save the birds and the season and the fields. We are walking with a delightful companion who knows everything and who points out new wonders at every step.

The poetry of Burroughs faded more and more from his work with every book, and the spirit of the scientist, of the trained observer impatient of everything not demonstrable by the senses, grew upon him, until at length it took full control and expressed itself as criticism, as scientific controversy, and as philosophical discussion. _Riverby_, 1894, with its prefatory note stating that the volume was "probably my last collection of out-of-door papers," marks the point of division between the two periods. If we follow the Riverside edition, at present [1914] the definitive canon, eight books preceded _Riverby_ and eight followed it. The groups are not homogeneous; it is not to be gathered that on a certain date Burroughs abandoned one form of essay and devoted himself exclusively to another, but it is true that the work of his last period is prevailingly scientific and critical. His _Indoor Studies_, 1889, _Whitman, a Study, and Literary Values_ are as distinctively works of literary criticism as Arnold's _Essays in Criticism_; his _Light of Day_ discusses religion from the standpoint of the scientist; his _Ways of Nature_ is scientific controversy; and his _Time and Change_ and _The Summit of the Years_ are philosophy.

It is in this second period that Burroughs has done his most distinctive work, though not perhaps his most spontaneous and delightful. By temperament and training he is a critic, a scientific critic, an analyzer and comparer. Only men of positive character, original forces, attract him: Emerson and Whitman, and later Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Arnold, men who molded the intellectual life of their age. His first published book had been a critical study, _Notes on Walt Whitman_, 1867, a work the most wonderful in many ways of his whole output. It came at a critical moment, in those pregnant closing years of the sixties, and it struck clear and full the note of the new period. Burroughs's later studies of Whitman are more finished and more mature than this never-republished volume, but they lack its clarion quality. It is more than a defense and an explanation of Whitman: it is a call to higher levels in literature and art, a call for a new definition of poetry, a condemnation of that softness and honey sweetness of song that had lured to weakness poets like Taylor and Stoddard. Poetry henceforth must be more than mere beauty for beauty's sake: it must have a message; it must come burning from a man's soul; it must thrill with human life.

And it is here that Burroughs stands as a dominating figure. He was the first of American critics to insist without compromise that poetry is poetry only when it is the voice of life--genuine, spontaneous, inevitable. "How rare," he complained in later years, "are real poems--poems that spring from real feeling, a real throb of emotion, and not from a mere surface itching for expression." This has been the key to all his criticism: literature is life, the voicing of a man's soul. Moreover, it is a voicing of the national life, the expression of a nation's soul:

All the great imaginative writers of our century have felt, more or less, the stir and fever of the century, and have been its priests and prophets. The lesser poets have not felt these things. Had Poe been greater or broader he would have felt them, so would Longfellow. Neither went deep enough to touch the formative currents of our social or religious or national life. In the past the great artist has always been at ease in Zion; in our own day only the lesser artists are at ease, unless we except Whitman, a man of unshaken faith, who is absolutely optimistic, and whose joy and serenity come from the breadth of his vision and the depth and universality of his sympathies.[83]

The literary criticism of Burroughs--four volumes of it in the final edition, or nearly one-fourth of his whole output--may be classed with the sanest and most illuminating critical work in American literature. Lowell's criticism, brilliant as it is at times, is overloaded with learning. He belongs to the school of the early reviewers, ponderous and discursive. He makes use of one-third of his space in his essay on Thoreau before he even alludes to Thoreau. He is self-conscious, and self-satisfied; he poses before his reader and enjoys the sensation caused by his brilliant hit after hit. Stedman, too, is often more literary than scientific. Often he uses epithet and phrase that have nothing to commend them save their prettiness, their affectation of the odd or the antique. He is an appreciator of literature rather than critic in the modern sense. Burroughs, however, is always simple and direct. He is a scientific critic who compares and classifies and seeks causes and effects. He works not on the surface but always in the deeper currents and always with the positive forces, those writers who have turned the direction of the literature and the thinking of their generation. In marked contrast with Stedman, he can place Longfellow and Landor among the minor singers: "Their sympathies were mainly outside their country and their times." He demands that the poet have a message for his age. He says of Emerson: "Emerson is a power because he partakes of a great spiritual and intellectual movement of his times; he is unequivocally of to-day and New England."

Burroughs's nature essays, charming as they are and full as they are of a delightful personality, will be superseded by others as careful and as charming; Burroughs's criticism was the voice of an era, and it will stand with the era. It was in his later years that he put forth his real message.

IV

John Burroughs is the historian of a small area; he has the home instinct, the hereditary farmer's love for his own fields and woods, and the haunts of his childhood. He is contemplative, tranquil, unassertive. John Muir was restless, fervid, Scotch by temperament as by birth, the very opposite of Burroughs. He was telescopic, not microscopic; his units were glaciers and Yosemites, Sierras and Gardens of the Gods.

The childhood of Muir was broken at eleven by the migration of his family from their native Scotland to the wilderness of Wisconsin, near the Fox River. After a boyhood in what literally was a new world to him, he started on his wanderings. By accident he found himself in the University of Wisconsin, where he studied for four years, the first author of note to be connected with the new state college movement, the democratizing of education. He pursued no regular course, but devoted himself to chemistry, botany, and other natural sciences that interested him, and then, to quote his own words, "wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma, of making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring, Godful beauty."

First he went to Florida, walking all the way, and sleeping on the ground wherever night overtook him; then he crossed to Cuba, with visions of South America and the Amazon beyond; but malarial fever, caused by sleeping on swampy ground, turned him away from the tropics toward California, where he arrived in 1868. The tremendous scenery of this west coast, those American Alps edging a continent from the Sierras to the Alaskan glaciers, so gripped his imagination and held him that he forgot everything save to look and wonder and worship. For years he explored the region, living months at a time in the forests of the Yosemite, in the wild Alpine gardens and glacial meadows of the Sierra, in passes and cañons, moving as far north as Alaska, where he was the first to see the great glacier now called by his name, sleeping where night overtook him, disdaining blanket or shelter, and returning to civilization only when driven by necessity. After years of such wandering he became as familiar with the mighty region, the tremendous western wall of a continent, as Thoreau was with Concord or Burroughs was with the banks of the Pepacton.

Unlike Burroughs, Muir sent down no roots during his earlier formative period; he was a man without a country, anchored to no past, a soul unsatisfied, restless, bursting eagerly into untrodden areas, as hungry of heart as Thoreau, but with none of Thoreau's provincialism and transcendental theories. In 1869 in the Big Tuolumne Meadows he was told of a marvelous, but dangerous, region beyond, and his account of the episode illumines him as with a flash-light:

Recognizing the unsatisfiable longings of my Scotch Highland instincts, he threw out some hints concerning Bloody Cañon, and advised me to explore it. "I have never seen it myself," he said, "for I never was so unfortunate as to pass that way. But I have heard many a strange story about it, and I warrant you will at least find it wild enough." Next day I made up a bundle of bread, tied my note-book to my belt, and strode away in the bracing air, full of eager, indefinite hope.

His first out-of-doors article, a paper on the Yosemite glaciers, was published in the New York _Tribune_ in 1871. Later he contributed to the _Overland Monthly_, to _Harper's_, and _Scribner's Monthly_ articles that have in them an atmosphere unique in literature. What sweep and freedom, what vastness of scale, what abysses and gulfs, what wildernesses of peaks. It is like sweeping over a continent in a balloon. One is ever in the vast places: one thrills with the author's own excitement:

How boundless the day seems as we revel in these storm-beaten sky-gardens amidst so vast a congregation of onlooking mountains.... From garden to garden, ridge to ridge, I drifted enchanted, now on my knees gazing into the face of a daisy, now climbing again and again among the purple and azure flowers of the hemlocks, now down among the treasuries of the snow, or gazing afar over domes and peaks, lakes and woods, and the billowy glaciated fields of the upper Tuolumne, and trying to sketch them. In the midst of such beauty, pierced with its rays, one's body is all a tingling palate. Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing.--July 26, 1869.

I chose a camping ground on the brink of one of the lakes, where a thicket of hemlock spruce sheltered me from the night wind. Then after making a tin cupful of tea, I sat by my campfire reflecting on the grandeur and significance of the glacial records I had seen. As the night advanced, the mighty rock-walls of my mountain mansion seemed to come nearer, while the starry sky in glorious brightness stretched across like a ceiling from wall to wall, and fitted closely down into all the spiky irregularities of the summits. Then, after a long fireside rest, and a glance at my note-book, I cut a few leafy branches for a bed, and fell into the clear, death-like sleep of the mountaineer.

No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future. These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God's beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be.... Perched like a fly on this Yosemite dome, I gaze and sketch and bask, oftentimes settling down into dumb admiration without definite hope of ever learning much, yet with the longing, unresisting effort that lies at the door of hope, humbly prostrate before the vast display of God's power, and eager to offer self-denial and renunciation with eternal toil to learn any lesson in the divine manuscript.--July 20, 1869.

To read Muir is to be in the presence not of a tranquil, chatty companion like Burroughs, who saunters leisurely along the spring meadows listening for the birds just arrived the night before and comparing the dates of the hyla's first cry; it is rather to be with a tempestuous soul whose units are storms and mountain ranges and mighty glacial moraines, who strides excitedly along the bare tops of ragged peaks and rejoices in their vastness and awfulness, who cries, "Come with me along the glaciers and see God making landscapes!" One gets at the heart of Muir in an episode like this, the description of a terrific storm in the Yuba region in December, 1874:

The force of the gale was such that the most steadfast monarch of them all rocked down to its roots with a motion plainly perceptible when one leaned against it. Nature was holding high festival, and every fiber of the most rigid giants thrilled with glad excitement. I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and motion across many a glen, from ridge to ridge; often falling in the lee of a rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the glad anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees--spruce, and fir, and pine, and leafless oak. ... Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the Æolian music of its topmost needles.... Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.

He had more humor than Burroughs, more even than Thoreau, a sly Scotch drollery that was never boisterous, never cynical. In the Bloody Cañon he meets the Mono Indians and finds little in them that is romantic:

The dirt on their faces was fairly stratified and seemed so ancient in some places and so undisturbed as almost to possess a geological significance. The older faces were, moreover, strangely blurred and divided into sections by furrows that looked like cleavage joints, suggesting exposure in a castaway condition on the mountains for ages. Viewed at a little distance they appeared as mere dirt specks on the landscape.

Like Thoreau, he was a mystic and a poet. He inherited mysticism with his Scotch blood as he inherited wildness and the love of freedom. He was not a mere naturalist, a mere scientist bent only on facts and laws: he was a searcher after God, even as Thoreau. As one reads him, one feels one's soul expanding, one's horizons widening, one's hands reaching out for the infinite. The message of Muir is compelling and eager:

Next to the light of the dawn on high mountain-tops, the alpenglow is the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God;... stay on this good fire mountain and spend the night among the stars. Watch their glorious bloom until dawn, and get one more baptism of light. Then, with fresh heart, go down to your work, and whatever your fate, under whatever ignorance or knowledge you may afterwards chance to suffer, you will remember these fine, wild views, and look back with joy.

And again after his joyous study of the water ouzel, a prose lyric, rapturous and infectious, he cries:

And so I might go on, writing words, words, words; but to what purpose? Go see him and love him, and through him as through a window look into Nature's warm heart.

The output of Muir, especially of books, has been small. To one who cares nothing for money and who is indifferent to fame, it is hard to offer inducements. He wrote only to please himself; he would not be commanded or bribed or begged, for why should one write words when the Sierras are in bloom and the winds are calling in the upper peaks? The public at large knows little of him, compared with what it knows of Burroughs or even of Thoreau. His influence, therefore, has been small. Though he had published many magazine articles, it was not until 1894 that he published _The Mountains of California_, his first book. _Our National Parks_ came in 1901, and _My First Summer in the Sierra_ in 1911. The last is Muir's journal, kept on the spot, full of the thrill and the freshness of the original day. If it be a sample of the journal which we have reason to believe that he kept with Thoreau-like thoroughness almost to the time of his death--he died in December, 1914--the best work of John Muir may even yet be in store.

Muir was more gentle than Thoreau or Burroughs, and more sympathetic with everything alive in the wild places which he loved. Unlike Burroughs, he has named the birds without a gun, and, unlike Thoreau, he has refused to kill even fish or rattlesnakes. He could look on even the repulsive lizards of his region, some of them veritable monsters in size and hideousness, with real affection:

Small fellow-mortals, gentle and guileless, they are easily tamed, and have beautiful eyes, expressing the clearest innocence, so that, in spite of prejudices brought from cool, lizardless countries, one must soon learn to like them. Even the horned toad of the plains and foothills, called horrid, is mild and gentle, with charming eyes, and so are the snake-like species found in the underbrush of the lower forests.... You will surely learn to like them, not only the bright ones, gorgeous as the rainbow, but the little ones, gray as lichened granite, and scarcely bigger than grasshoppers; and they will teach you that scales may cover as fine a nature as hair or feather or anything tailored.

And there is no more sympathetic, interpretative study among all the work of the nature-writers than his characterization of the Douglas squirrel of the Western mountains:

One never tires of this bright chip of Nature, this brave little voice crying in the wilderness, observing his many works and ways, and listening to his curious language. His musical, piney gossip is savory to the ear as balsam to the palate; and though he has not exactly the gift of song, some of his notes are sweet as those of a linnet--almost flute-like in softness; while others prick and tingle like thistles. He is the mocking-bird of squirrels, pouring forth mixed chatter and song like a perennial fountain, barking like a dog, screaming like a hawk, whistling like blackbirds and sparrows; while in bluff, audacious noisiness he is a jay.

Emerson visited Muir during his trip to the West Coast, climbed the precarious ladder that led to his room in the Yosemite sawmill, and passed a memorable afternoon. "He is more wonderful than Thoreau," he said, and he tried long to induce him to leave the mountains for the East, and to live in the midst of men. But to Muir the leaving of the Yosemite and the Sierra was like leaving God Himself. To him the city was the place of unnatural burdens, of money that dulls and kills the finest things of the soul, of separation from all that is really vital in the life of man.

His style is marked by vividness and fervid power. He makes a scene stand out with sharpness. He is original; there are in his work no traces of other writings save those of the Bible, with which he was saturated, and at rare intervals of Thoreau. Often there is a rhetorical ring to his page, a resonant fullness of tone that can be described only by the word eloquent. In passages describing storm or mountain majesty there is a thrill, an excitement, that are infectious. The prose of John Muir may be summed up as sincere and vigorous, without trace of self-consciousness or of straining for effect. Few writers of any period of American literature have within their work more elements of promise as they go down to the generations to come.

V

Beginning with the late sixties, out-of-door themes more and more took possession of American literature. Burroughs was only one in an increasing throng of writers; he was the best known and most stimulating, and soon, therefore, the leader and inspirer. The mid-nineteenth century had been effeminate in the bulk of its literary product; it had been a thing of indoors and of books: the new after-the-war spirit was masculine even at times to coarseness and brutality. Maurice Thompson (1844-1901), one of the earliest of the new period, perceived the bent of the age with clearness. "We are nothing better than refined and enlightened savages," he wrote in 1878. "The wild side of the prism of humanity still offers its pleasures to us.... Sport, by which is meant pleasant physical and mental exercise combined--play in the best sense--is a requirement of this wild element, this glossed over heathen side of our being, and the bow is its natural implement."[84] It was the apology of the old school for the new era of sport. Thompson would direct these heathen energies toward archery, since it was a sport that appealed to the imagination and that took its devotees into the forests and the swamps, but there was no directing of the resurging forces. Baseball and football sprang up in the seventies and grew swiftly into hitherto unheard-of proportions. Yachting, camping, mountaineering, summer tramping in the woods and the borders of civilization swiftly became popular. The Adirondacks and the Maine forests and the White Mountains sprang into new prominence. As early as 1869 Stedman had complained that _The Blameless Prince_ lay almost dead on the shelves while such books as Murray's _Adventures in the Wilderness_ sold enormously. For a time indeed W. H. H. Murray--"Adirondack Murray"--did vie even with Bonner's _Ledger_ in popularity. He threw about the wilderness an alluring, half romantic atmosphere that appealed to the popular imagination and sent forth, eager and compelling, what in later days came to be known as "the call of the wild." His books have not lasted. There is about them a declamatory, artificial element that sprang too often from the intellect rather than the heart. Charles Dudley Warner in his _In the Wilderness_, 1878, and William H. Gibson in such books as _Camp Life in the Woods_, sympathetically illustrated by their author, were far more sincere and wholesome. Everywhere for a decade or more there was appeal for a return to the natural and the free, to the open-air games of the old English days, to hunting and trapping and camping--a masculine, red-blooded resurgence of the savage, a return to the wild. The earlier phase of the period may be said to have culminated in 1882 with the founding of _Outing_, a magazine devoted wholly to activities in the open air.

The later eighties and the nineties are the period of the bird books. C. C. Abbott's _A Naturalist's Rambles About Home_, 1884; Olive Thorne Miller's _Bird Ways_, 1885; Bradford Torrey's _Birds in the Bush_, 1885; and Florence Merriam Bailey's _Birds Through an Opera Glass_, 1889, may be taken as representative. Bird life and bird ways for a period became a fad; enthusiastic observers sprang up everywhere; scientific treatises and check lists and identification guides like Chapman's _Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America_, began to appear in numbers. What the novelists of locality were doing for the unusual human types in isolated corners of the land, the nature writers were doing for the birds.

Of all the later mass of Nature writings, however, very little is possessed of literary distinction. Very largely it is journalistic in style and scientific in spirit. Only one out of the later group, Bradford Torrey, compels attention. Beyond a doubt it is already safe to place him next in order after Burroughs and Muir. He is more of an artist than Burroughs, and he is more literary and finished than Muir. In his attitude toward Nature he is like Thoreau--sensitive, sympathetic, reverent. It was he who edited the journals of Thoreau in their final form, and it was he also who after that experience wrote what is undoubtedly the most discriminating study that has yet been made of the great mystic naturalist.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

JOHN BURROUGHS. (1837----.) _Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person_, New York, 1867; _Wake-Robin_, 1871; _Winter Sunshine_, 1875; _Birds and Poets_, 1877; _Locusts and Wild Honey_, 1879; _Pepacton_, 1881; _Fresh Fields_, 1884; _Signs and Seasons_, 1886; _Indoor Studies_, 1889; _Riverby_, 1894; _Whitman, a Study_, 1896; _The Light of Day_, 1900; _Literary Values_, 1904; _Far and Near_, 1904; _Ways of Nature_, 1905; _Leaf and Tendril_, 1908; _Time and Change_, 1912; _The Summit of the Years_, 1913; _Our Friend John Burroughs_. By Clara Barrus. 1914.

JOHN MUIR. (1838-1914.) "Studies in the Sierras," a series of papers in _Scribner's Monthly_, 1878; _The Mountains of California_, 1894; _Our National Parks_, 1901; _Stickeen, the Story of a Dog_, 1909; _My First Summer in the Sierra_, 1911; _The Story of My Boyhood and Youth_, 1913; _Letters to a Friend_, 1915.

WILLIAM HAMILTON GIBSON. (1850-1896.) _Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap-Making_, 1876; _Pastoral Days, or Memories of a New England Year_, 1882; _Highways and Byways, or Saunterings in New England_, 1883; _Happy Hunting Grounds, a Tribute to the Woods and Fields_, 1886; _Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine_, 1890; _Sharp Eyes_, 1891; _Our Edible Toadstools and Mushrooms_, 1895.

CHARLES CONRAD ABBOTT. (1843----.) _The Stone Age in New Jersey_, 1876; _Primitive Industry_, 1881; _A Naturalist's Rambles About Home_, 1884; _Upland and Meadow_, 1886; _Wasteland Wanderings_, 1887; _Days out of Doors_, 1889; _Outings at Odd Times_, 1890; _Recent Rambles_, 1892; _Outings in a Tree-Top_, 1894; _The Birds About Us_, 1894; _Notes of the Night_, 1895; _Birdland Echoes_, 1896; _The Freedom of the Fields_, 1898; _Clear Skies and Cloudy_, 1899; _In Nature's Realm_, 1900.

"OLIVE THORNE MILLER"--HARRIET MANN MILLER. (1831----.) _Little Folks in Feathers and Fur_, 1879; _Queer Pets at Marcy's_, 1880; _Bird Ways_, 1885; _In Nesting Time_, 1888; _Four Handed Folk_, 1890; _Little Brothers of the Air_, 1890; _Bird-Lover in the West_, 1894; _Upon the Tree Tops_, 1896; _The First Book of Birds_, 1899; _True Bird Stories_, 1903; _With the Birds in Maine_, 1904; and others.

BRADFORD TORREY. (1843-1912.) _Birds in the Bush_, 1885; _A Rambler's Lease_, 1889; _The Foot-Path Way_, 1892; _A Florida Sketch-Book_, 1894; _Spring Notes from Tennessee_, 1896; _A World of Green Hills_, 1898; _Every-Day Birds_, 1900; _Footing It in Franconia_, 1900; _The Clerk of the Woods_, 1903; _Nature's Invitation_, 1904; _Friends on the Shelf_, 1906.

FLORENCE MERRIAM BAILEY. (1863----.) _Birds Through an Opera Glass_, 1889; _My Summer in a Mormon Village_, 1895; _A Birding on a Bronco_, 1896; _Birds of Village and Field_, 1898; _Handbook of Birds of Western United States_, 1902.

FRANK BOLLES. (1856-1894.) _Land of the Lingering Snow_, 1891; _At the North of Bearcamp Water: Chronicles of a Stroller in New England from July to December_, 1893; _From Blomidon to Smoky_, 1895.