JOHN BURROUGHS is an author who goes to school out doors and learns lessons from the birds, an example for many a round-shouldered recluse. An improvement on Thoreau, healthier in mind and body, his only tinge of insanity is an overestimate of Walt Whitman, whom he is pleased to consider the Apostle of Purity. The title of his last collection of essays is "Birds and Poets,"† and with him the birds have the chief place. The highest compliment he can pay to a poet's singing is an ingenious comparison of his style to some bird-note. Keats and Shelley have, he says, more than other English poets, the bird organization and the piercing wild-bird cry; the sharp semi-tones of the sparrows and larks. Emerson is a winter bird with a clear, saucy, cheery call, and Whitman soars aloft as an eagle (undoubtedly the bird of freedom). Such enthusiasm and intimate acquaintance with nature is inspiring and instructive. Burroughs studies birds, books, and men with equal earnestness, and puts the flavor of the wild wood and the melody of the groves into his own musical prose. Nature is to him a merciless power, all wise and infinite; reckless of individuals while carrying out her mighty plans. But all her moods are alike admirable to this passionate lover. He applauds her fierceness and grandeur and revels in her sweetness, and brings to those who have neither the time nor capacity for learning her unwritten language many a beautiful thought and wholesome lesson. Several of the essays included in this volume were originally published in the "Galaxy," among them that giving Mr. Burroughs' estimate of Emerson, which is singularly impartial and just. The closing chapter of the book is a characteristic rhapsody on Whitman.
†"Birds
and Poets." By J. BURROUGHS.
Hurd & Houghton, Publishers.