know.
But bookish themes--how I flounder about amid them, and have to work and
delve long to get down to the real truth about them in my mind!

In writing upon Emerson, or Arnold, or Carlyle, I have to begin, as it
were, and clear the soil, build a log hut, and so work up to the point
of view that is not provincial, but more or less metropolitan.

My best gift as a writer is my gift for truth; I have a thoroughly
honest mind, and know the truth when I see it. My humility, or modesty,
or want of self-assertion, call it what you please, is also a help in
bringing me to the truth. I am not likely to stand in my own light; nor
to mistake my own wants and whims for the decrees of the Eternal. At
least, if I make the mistake to-day, I shall see my error to-morrow.

(The discerning reader can hardly fail to trace in the foregoing
unvarnished account of our subject's ancestry and environment many of
the factors which have contributed to the unique success he has attained
as a writer. Nor can he fail to trace a certain likeness, of which our
author seems unconscious, to his father. To his mother he has credited
most of his gifts as a writer, but to that childlike unselfconsciousness
which he describes in his father, we are doubtless largely indebted for
the candid self-analysis here given.

But few writers could compass such a thing, yet he has done it simply
and naturally, as he would write on any other topic in which he was
genuinely interested. To be naked and unashamed is a condition lost by
most of us long ago, but retained by a few who still have many of the
traits of the natural man. C.B.)

THE EARLY WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS

I once asked Mr. Burroughs about his early writings, his beginnings. He
replied, "They were small potatoes and few in a hill, although at the
time I evidently thought I was growing some big ones. I had yet to
learn, as every young writer has to learn, that big words do not
necessarily mean big thoughts." Later he sent me these maiden efforts,
with an account of when and where they appeared.

These early articles show that Mr. Burroughs was a born essayist. They
all took the essay form. In his reading, as he has said, any book of
essays was pretty sure to arrest his attention. He seems early to have
developed a hunger for the pure stuff of literature--something that
would feed his intellect at the same time that it appealed to his
aesthetic sense. Concerning his first essays, he wro