te me:--

The only significant thing about my first essays, written between the
ages of eighteen and twenty-three, is their serious trend of thought;
but the character of my early reading was serious and philosophical.
Locke and Johnson and Saint-Pierre and the others no doubt left their
marks upon me. I diligently held my mind down to the grindstone of
Locke's philosophy, and no doubt my mind was made brighter and sharper
by the process. Out of Saint-Pierre's "Studies of Nature," a work I had
never before heard of, I got something, though it would be hard for
me to say just what. The work is a curious blending of such science
as there was in his time, with sentiment and fancy, and enlivened by a
bright French mind. I still look through it with interest, and find that
it has a certain power of suggestion for me yet.

He confessed that he was somewhat imposed upon by Dr. Johnson's
high-sounding platitudes. "A beginner," he said, "is very apt to feel
that if he is going to write, the thing to do is to write, and get as
far from the easy conversational manner as possible. Let your utterances
be measured and stately." At first he tried to imitate Johnson, but soon
gave that up. He was less drawn to Addison and Lamb at the time, because
they were less formal, and seemingly less profound; and was slow in
perceiving that the art of good writing is the art of bringing one's
mind and soul face to face with that of the reader. How different
that early attitude from the penetrating criticism running through his
"Literary Values"; how different his stilted beginnings from his own
limpid prose as we know it, to read which is to forget that one is
reading!

Mr. Burroughs's very first appearance in print was in a paper in
Delaware County, New York,--the Bloomfield "Mirror,"--on May 18, 1856.
The article--"Vagaries vs. Spiritualism"--purports to be written
by "Philomath," of Roxbury, New York, who is none other than John
Burroughs, at the age of nineteen. It starts out showing impatience at
the unreasoning credulity of the superstitious mind, and continues in
a mildly derisive strain for about a column, foreshadowing the
controversial spirit which Mr. Burroughs displayed many years later
in taking to task the natural-history romancers. The production was
evidently provoked by a too credulous writer on spiritualism in a
previous issue of the "Mirror." I will quote its first paragraph:--

Mr. Mirror,--Notwithstanding the gene