Perhaps the best form of review for a book like Birds and Poets1 would be a series of quotations. Not that the essays composing the volume are written with a view to quotation; but Mr. Burroughs has a freshness and pithiness impossible to describe and needing to be seen in order to be felt. In rambling through his pages the critic is apt to seize upon particular passages, exactly as in taking a walk in early spring one is inclined to pick the choicest sprays of new greenery and the first flowers, to show to those who have not been fortunate enough to see them. If readers have heeded our recommendations in the past, they are now acquainted with some of the merits of this delightful out-of-door essayist. In the present volume they will see something of him in another phase; they will find him with various books in his hands, seated against a background of wide landscape, and disposed to lecture on literature. The first essay, that on Birds and Poets, presents some of the good points and some of the defects in poetical interpretations of bird life; the essay on Spring Poems has a similar cast; April and A Bird Medley are concerned more exclusively with the themes to which Mr. Burroughs has happily established a peculiar right. There is one delectable chapter on the cow, an animal which the writer honors with the title of Our Rural Divinity.
But the drift of the book is preponderatingly in the direction of literature.
That Mr. Burroughs has the native gift of discernment lying at the base of keen
and wholesome conclusions as to books might be pointed out in many passages.
By way of brief and casual example take this: "Thoreau
is the Lamb of New England fields and woods, and Lamb is the Thoreau of London
streets and clubs." We find, however, a tendency on Mr. Burroughs's
part to discourse a little too much off-hand, and to judge literature as if
it were a mere fringe of flowers by the side of the road along which he is striding
for the benefit of his legs and lungs. He gives us pedestrian criticism, fresh
and lively, but incomplete. He patronizes the creators, a trifle,—recognizing
their successes pleasantly and liberally, but giving a little compensatory cut
at almost everyone, and managing to intimate that after all there are few things
quite so worthy of approval as the critic's own love of nature, his acquaintance
with the habits of animals, and his hearty sensuous enjoyment of bodily existence.
Nevertheless, Mr. Burroughs's individuality yields many excellent suggestions.
It becomes monotonous, yet it is useful, to have him always insisting on the
"stomachic" quality in literature. His paper on Emerson is, we think,
the best; in this group, excepting the closing one—an eloquent, defense
of Walt Whitman, whom Mr. Burroughs places above all other American poets. He
honors him as the only thorough-going exponent of a dignified, poetic, prophetic
democracy whom our literature can yet show; and, while praising his peculiar
powers and practice, reveals a proper reverence for the traditional forms. He
underrates these, somewhat; but it ought to go It good way with those who still
regard Whitman only with impatience to find an author enamored of him who is
himself so variously appreciative, and so full of qualities that all lovers
of original, half-poetic, half-humorous essay-writing must agree in commending.
1 Birds and Poets. With other Papers. By JOHN BURROUGHS. Author of Wake-Robin and Winter Sunshine. New York: Published by Hurd and Houghton. Cambridge: The Riverside Press. 1877.