his new vineyard for the
first time: "How I soaked up the sunshine to-day! At night I glowed all
over; my whole being had had an earth bath; such a feeling of freshly
ploughed land in every cell of my brain. The furrow had struck in; the
sunshine had photographed it upon my soul." Later he built him a little
study somewhat apart from his dwelling, to which he could retire and
muse and write whenever the mood impelled him. This little one-room
study, covered with chestnut bark, is on the brow of a hill which slopes
toward the river; it commands an extended view of the Hudson. But
even this did not meet his requirements. The formality and routine of
conventional life palled upon him; the expanse of the Hudson, the noise
of railway and steamboat wearied him; he craved something more
retired, more primitive, more homely. "You cannot have the same kind of
attachment and sympathy for a great river; it does not flow through your
affections like a lesser stream," he says, thinking, no doubt, of the
trout-brooks that thread his father's farm, of Montgomery Hollow Stream,
of the Red Kill, and of others that his boyhood knew. Accordingly
he cast about for some sequestered spot in which to make himself a
hermitage.

(Illustration of The Study, Riverby. From a photograph by Charles S.
Olcott)

During his excursions in the vicinity of West Park, Mr. Burroughs had
lingered oftenest in the hills back of, and parallel with, the Hudson,
and here he finally chose the site for his rustic cabin. He had fished
and rowed in Black Pond, sat by its falls in the primitive forest,
sometimes with a book, sometimes with his son, or with some other hunter
or fisher of congenial tastes; and on one memorable day in April, years
agone, he had tarried there with Walt Whitman. There, seated on a
fallen tree, Whitman wrote this description of the place which was later
printed in "Specimen Days":--

I jot this memorandum in a wild scene of woods and hills where we have
come to visit a waterfall. I never saw finer or more copious hemlocks,
many of them large, some old and hoary. Such a sentiment to them,
secretive, shaggy, what I call weather-beaten, and let-alone--a rich
underlay of ferns, yew sprouts and mosses, beginning to be spotted with
the early summer wild flowers. Enveloping all, the monotone and liquid
gurgle from the hoarse, impetuous, copious fall--the greenish-tawny,
darkly transparent waters plunging with velocity down the rocks, with
p