originally by the cows. So they were.

If Mr. Burroughs were to start from my door for a tramp over these Hingham hills he would cross the trout-brook by my neighbor's stone bridge, and nibbling a spear of peppermint on the way, would follow the lane and the cow-paths across the pasture. Thoreau would pick out the deepest hole in the brook and try to swim across; he would leap the stone walls of the lane, cut a bee-line through the pasture, and drop, for his first look at the landscape, to the bottom of the pit in the seam-face granite quarry. Here he would pull out his note-book and a gnarly wild apple from his pocket, and intensely, critically, chemically, devouring said apple, make note in the book that the apples of Eden were flat, the apples of Sodom bitter, but this wild, tough, wretched, impossible apple of the Hingham hills united all ambrosial essences in its striking flavor of squash-bugs. Mr. Burroughs takes us along with him. Thoreau comes upon us-jumps out at us from behind some bush, with a 'Scat!' Burroughs brings us home in time for tea; Thoreau leaves us tangled up in the briars. It won't hurt us to be jumped at now and then and told to scat!' To be digged by the briars is good for us, else we might forget that we are beneath our clothes; good for us and highly diverting, but highly irritating too.

For my part, when I take up an outdoor book I am glad if there is quiet in it, fragrance, and something of the sameness and sweetness of the sky. Not that I always want sweet skies. It is 98 degrees in the shade, and three weeks since there fell a drop of rain. I could sing like a robin for a sizzling, crackling thunder-shower-less for the sizzling and crackling than for the shower. Thoreau is a succession of showers 'tempests'; his pages are sheet-lightning, electrifying, purifying,

illuminating, but not altogether conducive to peace. There is a clear sky to most of Mr. Burroughs's pages, a rural landscape, wide, gently rolling, with cattle standing beneath the trees.

His natural history is entirely natural, his philosophy entirely reasonable, his religion and ethics very much of the kind we wish our minister and neighbor might possess; and his manner of writing is so unaffected that we feel we could write in that manner ourselves. Only we cannot.

Since the time he can be said to have 'led' a life, Mr. Burroughs has led a literary life; that is, nothing has been allowed to interfere with his writing; yet the writing has not interfered with a quiet successful business - with his raising of grapes. He has a study and a vineyard.

Not many men ought to live by the pen alone. A steady diet of inspiration and words is hard on the literary health. The writing should be varied with some good wholesome work, actual hard work for the hands; not so much, perhaps, as one would find in an eighteenacre vineyard, yet Mr. Burroughs's eighteen acres have certainly proved no check-rather, indeed, a stimulus - to his writing. He seems to have gathered a volume out of every acre; and he has put a good acre into every volume. Fresh Fields is the name of one of the volumes, Leaf and Tendril of another; but the freshness of his fields, the leaves and the tendrils of his vineyard, enter into them all. The grapes of the vineyard are in them also.

Here is a growth of books out of the soil that have been trimmed, trained, sprayed, and kept free from rot. Such books may not be altogether according to the public taste; they will keep, however, until the public acquires a better taste. Sound, ripe, fresh, early and late, a full crop! Has the vineyard anything to do with it?

It is not every farmer who should go to writing, nor every writer who should go to farming; but there is a mighty waste of academic literature, of premature, precocious, lily-handed literature, of chicken-licken literature, because the writers do not know a spade when they see one, would not call it that if they knew, and need to do less writing and more farming, more real work with their hands in partnership with the elemental forces of nature, or in comradeship with average elemental men- the only species extant of the quality to make writing worth while.

Mr. Burroughs has had this labor, this comradeship. His writing is seasoned and sane. It is ripe, and yet as fresh as green corn with the dew in the silk. You have eaten corn on the cob just from the stalk and steamed in its own husk? Green corn that is corn, that has all its milk and sugar and flavor, is cob and kernel and husk, not a stripped ear that is cooked with the kitchen air.

Literature is too often stripped of its human husk, and cut from its human cob: the man gone, the writer left; the substance gone, the style left corn that tastes as much like corn as it tastes like puffed rice, which tastes like nothing at all. There is the sweetness of the husk, the flavor of the cob, the substance of the corn to Mr. Burroughs.

There is no lack of cob and husk to Thoreau, of shell and hull, one should say, for he is more like a green walnut than an ear of green corn. Thoreau is very human, a whole man; but he is almost as much a tree, and a mountain, and a pond, and a spell of weather, and a state of morals. He is the author of Walden, and nobody else in the world is that; he is a lover of nature, as ardent a lover as ever eloped with her; he is a lover of mankind, loving them with

an intensity that hates them bag and baggage; he is poetical, prophetic, paradoxical, and utterly impossible.

But he knew it. Born in Concord, under the transcendental stars, at a time when Delphic sayings and philosophy, romance, and poetry ran wild in the gardens, where Bouncing-Bet with Wayward Charlie now run wild, Thoreau knew that he was touched, and that all his neighbors were, and sought asylum at Walden. But Walden was not far enough. If Mr. Burroughs, in New York State, found it necessary to take to the woods in order to escape Emerson, then Thoreau should have gone to Chicago, or to Xamiltapec.

Thoreau overworked, even in his bean-patch. But perhaps he had to, in order to produce beans with minds and souls. Such beans! Yet, for baking, plain beans are better than these transcendental beans, because your transcendental beans are always baked without pork.

It is the strain, in Thoreau, that wearies us; his sweating among the stumps and wood-chucks, a bean-crop netting him eight dollars, seventy-one and one-half cents. A family man cannot contemplate that fiddling patch with any patience, even though he have a taste for literature as real as his taste for beans. It is better to watch Mr. Burroughs pruning his grape-vine for a crop to net him one thousand, three hundred and twenty-five dollars, and no cents, and no half-cents. Here are eighteen acres to be cultivated, whose fruit is picked, shipped, and sold in the New York markets at a profit.

good style? Such style as is had by a pair of pruning-shears, or is embodied in the exquisite lines of a flying swallow - the style that is perfect, purposeful adaptability?

But there is more than efficiency to Mr. Burroughs's style; there are strengths and graces existing in and for themselves. Here is a naturalist who has studied the art of writing. 'What little merit my style has,' he declares, 'is the result of much study and discipline.' And whose style, if it be style at all, is not the result of much study and discipline? Flourish, fine-writing, wordiness, obscurity, and cant are exorcised in no other way; and as for the 'limpidness, sweetness, freshness,' which Mr. Burroughs says should characterize out-door writing, and which do characterize his writing, how else shall they be obtained?

Out-door literature, no less than other types, is both form and matter; the two are mutually dependent, inseparably one; but the writer is most faithful to the form when he is most careful of the matter. It makes a vast difference whether his interest is absorbed by what he has to say, or by the possible ways he may say it. If Mr. Burroughs writes in his shirt-sleeves, as a recent critic says he does, it is because he goes about his writing as about his vineyarding-for grapes, for thoughts, and not to see how pretty he can make a paragraph look, or into what fantastic form he can train a vine. The vine is lovely in itself, if it bear fruit.

And so is language. Take Mr. Burroughs's manner in any of its moods: its store of single, sufficient words, for instance, especially the homely, rugged words and idioms, and the flavor they give, is second to the work they do; or take his use of figuresDe Quincey's discursive, roundabout style, herding his thoughts as a collie

dog herds sheep,' and unexpected, vivid, apt as they are, they are even more effective. One is often caught up by the poetry in the prose of these essays and borne aloft, but never on a gale of words; the life and sweep are genuine emotion and thought.

As an essayist, as a nature-writer I ought to say, Mr. Burroughs's literary care is perhaps nowhere so plainly seen as in the simple architecture of his essay-plans, in their balance and finish, a quality that distinguishes him from others of the craft, and that neither gift nor chance could so invariably supply. The common fault of out-door books is the catalogue- raw data, notes. There are paragraphs of them in Mr. Burroughs, volumes of them in Thoreau. The average naturewriter sees not too much of nature, but knows all too little of literary values; he sees everything, gets a meaning out of nothing; writes it all down; and gives us what he sees, which is precisely what everybody may see; whereas we want what he thinks and feels. Some of our present writers do nothing but feel and divine and fathom - the animal psychologists, whatever they are. The bulk of nature-writing, however, is journalistic, done on the spot, into a note-book, as were the journals of Thoreau-fragmentary, yet often exquisite, like bits of old stained glass, unleaded, and lacking unity and design.

No such fault can be found with Mr. Burroughs. He goes pencilless into the woods, and waits before writing until his return home, until time has elapsed for the multitudinous details of the trip to blur and blend, leaving only the dominant facts and impressions for his pen. Every part of his work is of selected stock, as free from knots and seams, and sap-wood, as a piece of oldgrowth pine. There is plan, proportion, integrity to his essays the naturalist

Mr. Burroughs is a good, but not a great naturalist, as Audubon and Gray were great naturalists. His claim (and Audubon's in part) upon us is literary. He has been a watcher in the woods; has made a few pleasant excursions into the primeval wilderness, leaving his gun at home, and his camera, too, thank Heaven! He has broken out no new trail, discovered no new animal, no new thing. But he has seen all the old, uncommon things, and seen them oftener, has watched them longer, through more seasons, than any other writer of our out-of-doors; and though he has discovered no new thing, yet he has made discoveries, volumes of them, - contributions largely to our stock of literature, and to our store of love for the earth, and to our joy in living upon it. He has turned a little of the universe into literature; has translated a portion of the earth into human language; has restored to us our garden here eastward in Eden-apple-tree and all.

For a real taste of fruity literature,

apple.' Try Thoreau's too, if you are partial to squash-bugs. There are chapters in Mr. Burroughs, such as 'The Flight of the Eagle,' 'A River View,' 'A Snow-Storm,' which seem to me as perfect, in their way, as anything that has ever been done — single, simple, beautiful in form, and deeply significant; the storm being a piece of fine description, of whirling snow across a geologic landscape, distant and as dark as eternity; the whole wintry picture lighted and warmed at the end by a glowing touch of human life:

'We love the sight of the brown and ruddy earth; it is the color of life, while a snow-covered plain is the face of death; yet snow is but the mark of lifegiving rain; it, too, is the friend of man - the tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow.'

There are many texts in these ten volumes, many themes, which unite, however, in one real message: that this is a good world to live in; these are good men and women to live with; that life, here and now, is altogether worth living.

clusion, and, in the case of the affluent, red curtains drawn at sermon-time.

The child wearied by the spectacle of a plump divine, in black gown and Geneva bands, thumping the pulpitcushions in the madness of incomprehensible oratory, surrendered his ears to the noise of intonations which, in his own treble, would have earned the reprimand, 'Naughty temper.' His eyes, however, were, through some oversight of the gods of his universe, still his own. They found their own pasture: not, to be sure, the argent and sable of gown and bands, still less the gules of flushed denunciatory gills.

There is fair pasture in an old church which, when Norman work was broken down, men loved and built again as from the heart, with pillars and arches, that, to their rude time, symbolized all that the heart desires to materialize, in symbolic stone. The fretted tombs where the effigies of warrior and priest lay life-like in dead marble, the fretted canopies that brooded above their rest. Tall pillars like the trunks of the pine woods that smelt so sweet, the marvel of the timbered roof, - turned upside down it would be like a ship. And what could be easier than to turn it upside down? Imagination shrank bashfully from the pulpit already tightly tenanted, but the triforium was plainly and beautifully empty; there one could walk, squeezing happily through the deep thin arches and treading carefully by the unguarded narrow ledge. Only if one played too long in the roof aunts nudged, and urgent whispers insisted that one must not look about like that in church. When this moment came it came always as a crisis foreseen, half-dreaded, half longed-for. After that the child kept his eyes lowered, and looked only at the faded red hassocks that the straw bulged from, and in brief, guarded, intimate moments, at the other child.

The other child was kneeling, always, whether the congregation knelt or stood or sat. Its hands were clasped. Its face was raised, but its back bowed under a weight a weight the weight of the font, for the other child was of marble and knelt always in the church, Sundays and weekdays. There had been once three marble figures holding up the shallow basin, but two had crumbled or been broken away, and now it seemed that the whole weight of the superimposed marble rested on those slender shoulders.

The child who was not marble was sorry for the other. He must be very tired.

The child who was not marble, - his name was Ernest,—that child of weary eyes and bored brain, pitied the marble boy while he envied him.

'I suppose he does n't really feel, if he's stone,' he said. "That's what they mean by the stony-hearted tyrant. But if he does feel-How jolly it would be if he could come out and sit in my pew, or if I could creep under the font beside him. If he would move a little there would be just room for me.'

The first time that Ernest ever saw the marble child move was on the hottest Sunday in the year. The walk across the fields had been a breathless penance, the ground burned the soles of Ernest's feet as red-hot ploughshares the feet of the saints. The corn was cut, and stood in stiff yellow stooks, and the shadows were very black. The sky was light, except in the west beyond the pine trees, where blue-black clouds were piled.

'Like witches' feather-beds,' said Aunt Harriet, shaking out the folds of her lace shawl.

'Not before the child, dear,' whispered Aunt Emmeline.

Ernest heard her, of course. It was always like that: as soon as any one spoke about anything interesting, Aunt