Do we not turn to writers of the first class with eagerness, slaking our
thirst, refreshing our minds at perennial springs? How are we glad that
they lead us into green pastures and beside still waters, away from
the crowded haunts of the conventional, and the respectably commonplace
society garb of speech! What matter if occasionally one even gives a
wholesome shock by daring to come into the drawing-room of our minds
in his shirt-sleeves, his hands showing the grime of the soil, and his
frame the strength that comes from battling with wind and weather? It is
the same craving which makes us say with Richard Hovey:--

"I am sick of four walls and a ceiling;
I have need of the sky,
I have business with the grass."

But it will not do to carry this analogy too far in writing of Mr.
Burroughs lest it be inferred that I regard the author's work as having
in it something of the uncouth, or the ill-timed, or the uncultured.
His writing is of the earth, but not of the earth earthy. He sees divine
things underfoot as well as overhead. His page has the fertility of a
well-cultivated pastoral region, the limpidness of a mountain brook, the
music of our unstudied songsters, the elusive charm of the blue beyond
the summer clouds; it has, at times, the ruggedness of a shelving rock,
combined with the grace of its nodding columbines.

Mr. Burroughs has told us, in that June idyl of his, "Strawberries,"
that he was a famous berry-picker when a boy. It was with a peculiar
pleasure that I wandered with him one midsummer day over the same
meadows where he used to gather strawberries. My first introduction to
him as a writer, many years before, had been in hearing this essay read.
And since then never a year passes that I do not read it at least three
times--once in winter just to bring June and summer near; once in spring
when all outdoors gives promise of the fullness yet to be; and once in
the radiant summer weather when daisies and clover and bobolinks and
strawberries riot in one's blood, making one fairly mad to bury one's
self in the June meadows and breathe the clover-scented air. And it
always stands the test--the test of being read out in the daisy-flecked
meadows with rollicking bobolinks overhead.

What quality is it, though, that so moves and stirs us when Mr.
Burroughs recounts some of the simple happenings of his youth? What is
it in his recitals that quickens our senses and perceptions and makes