Rambles With John Burroughs Part 5

"What matter if I stand alone?

I wait with joy the coming years; My heart shall reap where it hath sown, And garner up its fruits of tears.

"The waters know their own, and draw The brook that springs in yonder heights; So flows the good with equal law Unto the soul of pure delights.

"The stars come nightly to the sky; The tidal wave unto the sea; Nor time, nor s.p.a.ce, nor deep, nor high, Can keep my own away from me."

It is this willingness to wait the results of his efforts without fretting or worrying, to which Mr. Burroughs owes his success. This I think, is what has toned and sweetened his prose and poetry, and makes him so readable. He looks for truth and finds it, and lets it ripen into expression in his mind, and we get the good after the smelting process has completed its work, and the dross all worked off. The above poem has been a true prophesy of his life. His own has come to him, and he is now experiencing the richest reward for his long years of waiting and patience. If too much success comes to us in the beginning of any career, the career is most likely to suffer, or possibly better, we are likely to develop a little vain glory and never return to the proper att.i.tude to truth and service. Mr. Burroughs in his plain simple way has been 'still achieving, still pursuing,' and has long since learned 'to labor and to wait.' His att.i.tude toward his work is almost as pleasant as the work itself. Never in a hurry--though he always manages to get much done. The melancholy days have been 'few and far between' with him, though we do see some few sad but wholesome lines in his poetry. These almost sound like some homesick visitor in a foreign land. The following from the poem, "In Blooming Orchards," is a good ill.u.s.tration of this:

"My thoughts go homeward with the bees; I dream of youth and happier days-- Of orchards where amid the trees I loitered free from time's decrees, And loved the birds and learned their ways.

"Oh, orchard thoughts and orchard sighs, Ye, too, are born of life's regrets!

The apple bloom I see with eyes That have grown sad in growing wise, Through Mays that manhood ne'er forgets."

"The Return" is another of his poems in which this longing for the days of his youth crops out:

"O sad, sad hills! O cold, cold hearth!

In sorrow he learned this truth-- One may go back to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth."

Again in "Snow Birds" he says:

"Thy voice brings back dear boyhood days When we were gay together."

His contact with out-door life and his habits of observation are unmistakably those of a poet. "In the rugged trail through the woods or along the beach we shall now and then get a whiff of natural air, or a glimpse of something to

"Make the wild blood start In its mystic springs."

Burroughs says himself, 'the very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. How many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song! Indeed, is not the bird the original type and teacher of the poet, and do we not demand of the human thrush or lark that he shake out his carols in the same free manner as his winged prototype?... The best lyric pieces, how like they are to certain bird-songs!--clear, ringing, ecstatic, and suggesting that challenge and triumph which the outpouring of the male bird contains.' Again he says 'Keats and Sh.e.l.ly have pre-eminently the sharp semi-tones of the sparrows and larks.'

But what shall we say of Burroughs? His poetry is somewhat matter-of-fact, like the songs of the Indigo bunting and the Thrushes, and we cannot help but feel that the songs of these birds had the effect on him that Burns speaks of in one of his letters: "I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild, mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of the soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry." Verily he has achieved his purpose. 'He has brought home the bough with the bird he heard singing upon it. His verse is full of the spirit of the woods and fields; the winds of heaven blow through it; there is the rustle of leaves, the glint of sunlight; the voices of the feathered folk are present. One finds himself in touch with out-doors in every line.' O, what a blessing when one can drink from the great fountain of Nature! When one can be so inured with the larger and more wholesome truths of the universe that he forgets to fret and to make records of the negative forces of the world! This we claim is pre-eminently true of Burroughs. He tells truths about Nature in his simple, musical verse, and almost vindicates Wordsworth's definition of poetry: "The breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," or "The impa.s.sioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." I would almost say of him what Dryden said of Chaucer: "He is a perpetual fountain of good sense." Perhaps Mr. Dowden, in speaking of Coleridge's poetry, comes nearer than any one else to the truth about Burroughs'

poetry. "These poems contemplate and describe Nature in a resting and meditative temper. There is no pa.s.sionate feeling in their delight. The joy he has in the beauty of the world is the joy of dreaming, often only a recollected joy in what he has seen. He found in poetry, paths of his imagination. The pensiveness, the dying fall, the self-loving melancholy, are harmonized by him with Nature." Th.o.r.eau says in one of his books: "Very few men can speak of Nature with any truth. They overstep her modesty somehow or other, and confer no favor." The richest flavor in the poetry of John Burroughs is the flavor of truth, and 'beauty is truth, truth beauty.' Unlike Th.o.r.eau, he never forgets his fellowmen, nor has he ever failed to find beauty in man as well as in Nature.

"He sees the mower where he rides Above the level gra.s.sy tides That flood the meadow plain,"

and writes a poem. He dislikes the conventional in man no less than he dislikes the conventional in poetry, but man unaffected is as beautiful as the Nature that surrounds him.

A few years ago when Mr. E. H. Harriman took a number of friends to Alaska on what was known as The Harriman Alaska Expedition, John Burroughs was selected as a purely literary man to write a narrative of the Expedition. In addition to the story of the trip, Mr. Burroughs was so inspired with the new scenery of those Borean Hills that the muse seized him and the result was three of his best poems: _To the Oregon Robin_, _To the Golden Crown Sparrow of Alaska_, and _To the Lapland Longspur_. Since that trip in 1899, he has written no verse, I believe, except _The Return_. Before then he was an irregular contributor of poetry to the current magazines since the appearance of _Waiting_, in 1862. He says now that he does not seem to be in a mood for poetry, but that he may find his muse again some day. The total number of his poems in print amounts to only thirty-five and none of them are lengthy. The longest of all is his very life which is to me one continuous poem. His verses are only sparks from the life in which they grew, and never rise to the height of the fountain head.

Perhaps one way to test a poet is to measure him by the number of single line poems that can be found in his poetry; lines that make the real poem of a number of verses. Pope thought that a long poem was a contradiction of terms, and we certainly know many references in the poets to suggestive lines that are almost poems in themselves.

Wordsworth's _Solitary Reaper_ contains one or two pa.s.sages of this kind.

"Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago."

or the following from the _Ode_:

"Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence."

Another of his most exquisite lines is,

"And the stars move along the edges of the hills."

Walter Pater finds in Wordsworth's poetry an extraordinary number of these short pa.s.sage poems, which he called 'delicious morsels.'

Coleridge says of Wordsworth: "Since Milton, I know of no poet with so many felicitous and unforgetable lines." Many critics have found these suggestive lines in the poets, and I find Wordsworth full of them.

The lines of this kind that I find in the poetry of John Burroughs are rather numerous for the amount of poetry he gave to the world, and some of them are as fine as the language has.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LOOKING ACROSS THE PASTURE WALL IN THE DIRECTION OF THE NATHAN CHASE FARM]

"Like mellow thunder leagues away,"

"I hear the wild bee's mellow chord, In airs that swim above,"

"Once more the tranquil days brood o'er the hills, And sooth earth's toiling breast,"

"The dome of day o'erbrims with sound From humming wings on errands bound,"

"Pausing in the twilight dim, Hear him lift his evening hymn,"

"Again from out the garden hives The exodus of frenzied bees; The humming cyclone onward drives, Or finds repose amid the trees."

"Then waiting long hath recompense, And all the world is glad with May."

"Oh, skater in the fields of air," he says of the swallow. How well this expresses the flight of the swallow!

"The robin perched on treetop tall Heavenward lifts his evening call."

"Forth from the hive go voyaging bees, Cruising far each sunny hour."

There are many pa.s.sages of this kind in his poems and they express the moods of Nature, perhaps as well as it is possible for them to be put in words. In _Arbutus Days_, he uses the following figure to paint a spring day:

"Like mother bird upon her nest The day broods o'er the earth."

To him the common things are all beautiful and if we only have the eyes to see with, they are made beautiful for us by him. Recognizing the fate of every insincere book, he declares: "Only an honest book can live; only absolute sincerity can stand the test of time. Any selfish or secondary motive vitiates a work of art, as it vitiates a religious life. Indeed, I doubt if we fully appreciate the literary value of staple, fundamental human virtues and qualities--probity, directness, simplicity, sincerity, love." He is probably not an inspired poet, but I shall claim for him that he is an honest singer, a sincere interpreter of Nature, and every virtue referred to in the above quotation he has woven into _Bird and Bough_. What he says of another we can appropriately say of him: "This poet sees the earth as one of the orbs, and has sought to adjust his imagination to the modern problems and conditions, always taking care, however, to preserve an outlook into the highest regions."

JOHN BURROUGHS AND WALT WHITMAN

A certain publisher, who honored very much Walt Whitman, could have paid him no higher tribute than to have closed the preface to Whitman's Poems as follows: "To have met Whitman was a privilege, to have been his friend was an honor. The latter was mine; and among the many reminiscences of my life, none are to me more pleasing than those which gather about the name of 'The Good Grey Poet'."

John Burroughs was for thirty years the intimate friend and constant a.s.sociate of Walt Whitman, and I have heard him say that those were among the most pleasant years of his life. All who ever knew Whitman, and became in any way intimate with him, have practically the same to say of him. No writer ever unfolded himself and his greatness more completely than Whitman, and yet we have a great many excellent critics who are pretty harsh on him. This we believe is so, because the critics have not read the poet aright. They have failed to get out of the poems what was put in them. Whitman is not a poet according to cla.s.sical standards, but as a "Creator" he is.

Emerson says of his poetry: "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." Julian Hawthorne says of it: "Original and forceful, Whitman cannot be judged by ordinary literary standards. His scornful trampling upon all metrical rules, and his freedom in treating of matters, usually pa.s.sed in silence, have so far been a decided barrier to the approval of his work."

Professor Underwood of the California University has the following good word for the poet: "Pupils who are accustomed to a.s.sociate the idea of poetry with regular cla.s.sic measure in rhyme, or in ten-syllabled blank verse or elastic hexameter, will commence these short and simple prose sentences with surprise, and will wonder how any number of them can form a poem. But let them read aloud with a mind in sympathy with the picture as it is displayed, and they will find by Nature's unmistakable response, that the author is a poet, and possesses the poets'

incommunicable power to touch the heart."

Professor Pattee of the Pennsylvania State College, on the other hand says: "It is certainly true that to the majority of readers, 'Leaves of Gra.s.s', contains a few good things amid a disgusting ma.s.s of rubbish.