On a summer Sunday, some years ago,—how many we do not know, and have no right to guess,—a boy lying on his back in the woods saw a strange bird flying over his head. He saw it but for a moment, noted a white spot on its wing, and it was gone. The boy's brothers were lying by his side, and doubtless saw the same bird, but to them it was simply a bird whose name they did not know. To him, it was a messenger from a world into which he must enter: so subtly and so surely is Wisdom known of her children, wherever she finds them.
This boy was John Burroughs, "seeker of birds" from that day forth: and because of that little bird's chance flying over John Burroughs' head on that Sunday afternoon, he has written, and we hold in our hands to-day, a most delicious book for summer reading, called "Wake-Robin." (Hurd & Houghton.) "Wake-Robin" is the common name of the white Trillium, which is in bloom in all our woods when the birds arrive. Mr. Burroughs finds in it, therefore, a fitting title for a book mainly about birds; but he gives this explanation half apologetically, and says that a "more specific title" would have suited him better. If he had found that "more specific title" his book would have lost, to our thinking, a part of its subtile charm. Nothing could be more daintily delightful on a title-page than is the word "Wake-Robin," (with its initial letters in scarlet, red-breasted, as one might say), and with a canopying bar overhead, in which a tiny Jenny Wren, under a sunshade, listens to the love-making of Robin himself. It is to be questioned whether "specific titles" to books are not mistakes in nine cases out of ten, as indeed all specifies are in danger of being. At any rate, the books most enchanting in atmosphere and spirit are the books to which it is impossible to give titles which are technical or specific. Such books are also difficult to describe or analyze. Wake-Robin is especially so. With comparatively little which could be called exact ornithological information, it yet is so graphic in its touches that one rises from it feeling as if he knew all about every bird mentioned in it. This is because the "touches" are from the hand of a student who might have written an ornithology if he had chosen. But many men have written ornithologies who could not have written Wake-Robin. Mr. Burroughs loves all nature, and is at home in all her ways.
"I sit down, with hands full of the pink azalea, to listen," he says. That is the difference between the mere man of specialties and the lover. The man with his hands full of pink azalea will hear more than he who passes the azalea by: "secrets lurk on all sides; there is news in every bush," for him. To him also will be given a fine felicity of descriptive phrase, such as lifetimes of patience less warm-hearted could never compass. This is perhaps the most notable charm in Mr. Burroughs's book. Witness these few sentences taken almost at random:
"That free, fascinating, half-work and half play pursuit,—sugar-making." "Even the hen has a homely, contented carol." "Few writers award any song to that familiar little sparrow the Socialis; yet who that has observed him, sitting by the wayside, and repeating with devout attitude that fine sliding chant, does not recognize the neglect?" "It is Downy beating a reveille to Spring;" (the woodpecker's note early in March). "The strange clairvoyant call," (of the cuckoo). "The poet of the plain unadorned pastures," (the field-sparrow). "The parodist of the woods," (the cat-bird). "The ground warblers all have one notable feature,—very beautiful legs, as white and delicate as if they had always worn silk stockings and satin slippers." "A little grassy lane, golden with buttercups, or white with daisies, or wading waist-deep in the red raspberry bushes." "That scene-shifter, the wind." "What can be more welcome to the ear than these early first sounds? They have such a margin of silence." "The flowers that overleap all bounds in this section are the Houstonias. By the first of April they are very noticeable in warm, damp places along the borders of the woods, and in half. cleared fields, but by May these localities are clouded with them. They become visible from the highway across wide fields, and look like little puffs of smoke lying close to the ground."
All lovers of the Houstonia will linger with delight over this sentence. We know of no other which gives fitting picture of the evanescent look of that lowly fairy blossom.
The chapter, "In the Hemlocks," closes with this paragraph: "Mounting toward the upland again, I pause reverently as the hush and stillness of twilight come upon the woods. It is the sweetest, ripest hour of the day. And as the hermit's (the hermit thrush) evening hymn goes up from the deep solitude below me, I experience that serene exaltation of sentiment of which music, literature, and religion are but the faint types and symbols."
This paragraph reminds one, in its "serene exaltation," of some of the prose which Col. Higginson writes when he writes of Nature. We cannot give it higher praise. In fact, we recognize all through the book so much and so rare kinship of occupations and loves, and even of expression, between the two men, that it is a surprise to find Mr. Burroughs making a hardly courteous mention, and an interpretation not quite fair, of a statement in the Out-Door Papers in regard to the trill of the hair-bird. The sentence referred to is perhaps ambiguously worded, but it certainly does not say that the trill of the hair-bird is "produced by" the fluttering of its wings on its sides, but that it is produced "with the aid of" a fluttering motion of the wings, like that which insects make in chirping. Whether this motion of the wings has or has not anything to do with the trill, it has certainly been observed to take place at the same time.
It is a little unfortunate that in the same sentence where Mr. Burroughs mentions this supposed mistake of a brother lover of birds, he should have overlooked so considerable an error (typographical, we presume) as the printing of the hair-bird's generic name "Fringillia," instead of " Fringilla." There are other beauties, other portions of "Wake-Robin" which we had meant to notice; but we must leave them to speak for themselves to the fortunate finders of the book. All lovers of woods will be sure to find it sooner or later; and to all those poor souls, spiritually halt and maimed, who do not love woods, we recommend it as heartily as we would recommend crutches for cripples, or glasses for eyes blinded by shortness of sight.