our own youth alive and real? It is paradise regained--the paradise of
one's lost youth. Let this author describe his boyhood pastures, going
'cross lots to school, or to his favorite spring, whatsoever it is--is
it the path that he took to the little red schoolhouse in the Catskills?
Is it the spring near his father's sugar bush that we see? No. One is a
child again, and in a different part of the State, with tamer scenery,
but scenery endeared by early associations. The meadow you see is the
one that lies before the house where you were born; you read of the
boy John Burroughs jumping trout streams on his way to school, but see
yourself and your playmates scrambling up a canal bank, running along
the towpath, careful to keep on the land side of the towline that
stretches from mules to boat, lest you be swept into the green,
uninviting waters of the Erie. On you run with slate and books; you
smell the fresh wood as you go through the lumber yard. Or, read another
of his boyish excursions, and you find yourself on that first spring
outing to a distant, low-lying meadow after "cowslips"; another, and you
are trudging along with your brother after the cows, stopping to
nibble spearmint, or pick buttercups by the way. Prosaic recollections,
compared to spring paths and trout brooks in the Catskill valleys, yet
this is what our author's writings do--re-create for each of us our own
youth, with our own childhood scenes and experiences, invested with a
glamour for us, however prosy they seem to others; and why? Because,
though nature's aspects vary, the human heart is much the same the world
over, and the writer who faithfully adds to his descriptions of nature
his own emotional experiences arouses answering responses in the soul of
his reader.

Perhaps the poet in Mr. Burroughs is nowhere more plainly seen than in
his descriptions of bird life, yet how accurately he gives their salient
points; he represents the bird as an object in natural history, but
ah! how much more he gives! Imagine our bird-lover describing a bird as
Ellery Channing described one, as something with "a few feathers, a hole
at one end and a point at the other, and a pair of wings"! We see the
bird Mr. Burroughs sees; we hear the one he hears. Long before I had the
memorable experience of standing with him on the banks of the Willowemoc
and listening at twilight to the slow, divine chant of the hermit
thrush, I had heard it in my dreams, because of tha