in the circle
of the hills. But I know I should not--the soul's thirst can never be
slaked. My hunger is the hunger of the imagination. Bring all my dead
back again, and place me amid them in the old home, and a vague longing
and regret would still possess me."

As early as his forty-fifth birthday he wrote in his Journal: "Indeed,
the Past begins to grow at my back like a great pack, and it seems as
if it would overwhelm me quite before I get to be really an old man.
As time passes, the world becomes more and more a Golgotha,--a place
of graves,--even if one does not actually lose by death his friends and
kindred. The days do not merely pass, we bury them; they are of us,
like us, and in them we bury our own image, a real part of ourselves."
Perhaps, among the poems of Mr. Burroughs, next to "Waiting" the verses
that have the most universal appeal are those of--

THE RETURN

He sought the old scenes with eager feet--
The scenes he had known as a boy;
"Oh, for a draught of those fountains sweet,
And a taste of that vanished joy!"

He roamed the fields, he wooed the streams,
His school-boy paths essayed to trace;
The orchard ways recalled his dreams,
The hills were like his mother's face.

Oh, sad, sad hills! Oh, cold, cold hearth!
In sorrow he learned this truth--
One may return to the place of his birth,
He cannot go back to his youth.

But a half-loaf is better than no bread, and Mr. Burroughs has now
yielded to this deep-seated longing for his boyhood scenes, and has gone
back to the place of his birth amid the Catskills; and one who sees him
there during the midsummer days--alert, energetic, curious concerning
the life about him--is almost inclined to think he has literally gone
back to his youth as well, for the boy in him is always coming to the
surface.

It was on the watershed of the Pepacton (the East Branch of the
Delaware), in the town of Roxbury, Delaware County, New York, that John
Burroughs was born, and there that he gathered much of the harvest of
his earlier books; it was there also that most of his more recent books
were written. Although he left the old scenes in his youth, his heart
has always been there. He went back many years ago and named one of his
books ("Pepacton") from the old stream, and he has now gone back and
arranged for himself a simple summer home on the farm where he first saw
the li