The Project Gutenberg EBook of Our Friend John Burroughs, by Clara Barrus

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Title: Our Friend John Burroughs

Author: Clara Barrus

Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6561]
Posting Date: March 28, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR FRIEND JOHN BURROUGHS ***

Produced by Joyce M. Noverr

OUR FRIEND JOHN BURROUGHS

By Clara Barrus

(Illustration of John Burroughs. From a photograph by Theona Peck
Harris)

CONTENTS

OUR FRIEND JOHN BURROUGHS

THE RETREAT OF A POET-NATURALIST

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
ANCESTRY AND FAMILY LIFE
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
SELF-ANALYSIS

THE EARLY WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS

A WINTER DAY AT SLABSIDES

BACK TO PEPACTON

CAMPINGING WITH BURROUGHS AND MUIR

JOHN BURROUGHS: AN APPRECIATION

OUR FRIEND JOHN BURROUGHS

We all claim John Burroughs as our friend. He is inextricably blended
with our love for the birds and the flowers, and for all out of doors;
but he is much more to us than a charming writer of books about nature,
and we welcome familiar glimpses of him as one welcomes anything which
brings him in closer touch with a friend.

A clever essayist, in speaking of the "obituary method of appreciation,"
says that we feel a slight sense of impropriety and insecurity in
contemporary plaudits. "Wait till he is well dead, and four or five
decades of daisies have bloomed over him, says the world; then, if
there is any virtue in his works, we will tag and label them and confer
immortality upon him." But Mr. Burroughs has not had to wait till the
daisies cover him to be appreciated. A multitude of his readers has
sought him out and walked amid the daisies with him, listened with him
to the birds, and gained countless delightful associations with all
these things through this personal relation with the author; and
these friends in particular will, I trust, welcome some "contemporary
plaudits."

As a man, and as a writer, Mr. Burroughs has been in the public eye for
many years. At the age of twenty-three he had an article printed in the
"Atlantic Monthly,