ny feeling; one divines the invalid
as well as the mystic back of them; there is a hectic flush, perhaps a
neurotic taint. Beautiful, yes, but not the beauty of health and sanity.
It is the same indescribable feeling I get in reading that pathetically
beautiful book, "The Road-Mender," by "Michael Fairless"--the gleam of
the White Gate is seen all along the Road, though the writer strives so
bravely to keep it hidden till it must open to let him pass. One of the
purest gems of Jefferies--"Hours of Spring"--has a pathos and haunting
melody of compelling poignancy. It is like a white violet or a hepatica.

But with Mr. Burroughs we feel how preeminently sane and healthy he is.
His essays have the perennial charm of the mountain brooks that flow
down the hills and through the fertile valleys of his Catskill home.
They are redolent of the soil, of leaf mould, of the good brown earth.
His art pierces through our habitual indifference to Nature and kindles
our interest in, not her beauty alone, but in her rugged, uncouth, and
democratic qualities.

Like the true walker that he describes, he himself "is not merely a
spectator of the panorama of nature, but is a participator in it. He
experiences the country he passes through,--tastes it, feels it, absorbs
it." Let us try this writer by his own test. He says: "When one tries to
report nature he has to remember that every object has a history which
involves its surroundings, and that the depth of the interest which it
awakens in us is in the proportion that its integrity in this respect is
preserved." He must, as we know Mr. Burroughs does, bring home the river
and the sky when he brings home the sparrow that he finds singing at
dawn on the alder bough; must make us see and hear the bird _on
the bough_, and this is worth a whole museum of stuffed and labeled
specimens. To do this requires a peculiar gift, one which our essayist
has to an unusual degree--an imagination that goes straight to the
heart of whatever he writes about, combined with a verbal magic that
re-creates what he has seen. Things are felicitously seen by Mr.
Burroughs, and then felicitously said. A dainty bit in Sidney's
"Apologie for Poetrie" seems to me aptly to characterize our author's
prose: "The uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the minde,
which is the end of speech."

One can pick out at random from his books innumerable poetic conceits;
the closed gentian is the "nun among flowers"; a patch