fully reveals his personality. In his
sketches of nature we see what he sees; in his critiques, what he feels
and thinks. The cry of discovery he made when 'Leaves of Grass' fell
into his hands found response in England and was re-echoed in this
country till Burroughs's strange delight in Whitman seemed no longer
strange, but an accepted fact in the history of poetry. The essay on
Emerson, his master, shows the same discriminating mind. But as a
revelation of both author and subject there are few more delightful
papers than Burroughs's essay on Thoreau. In manner it is as pungent and
as racy as Thoreau's writings, and as epigrammatic as Emerson's; and his
defense of Thoreau against the English reviewer who dubbed him a
"skulker" has the sound of the trumpet and the martial tread of soldiers
marching to battle.

SHARP EYES

From 'Locusts and Wild Honey'

Noting how one eye seconds and reinforces the other, I have often amused
myself by wondering what the effect would be if one could go on opening
eye after eye, to the number, say, of a dozen or more. What would he
see? Perhaps not the invisible--not the odors of flowers or the fever
germs in the air--not the infinitely small of the microscope or the
infinitely distant of the telescope. This would require not so much more
eyes as an eye constructed with more and different lenses; but would he
not see with augmented power within the natural limits of vision? At any
rate, some persons seem to have opened more eyes than others, they see
with such force and distinctness; their vision penetrates the tangle and
obscurity where that of others fails, like a spent or impotent bullet.
How many eyes did Gilbert White open? how many did Henry Thoreau? how
many did Audubon? how many does the hunter, matching his sight against
the keen and alert senses of a deer, or a moose, or a fox, or a wolf?
Not outward eyes, but inward. We open another eye whenever we see beyond
the first general features or outlines of things--whenever we grasp the
special details and characteristic markings that this mask covers.
Science confers new powers of vision. Whenever you have learned to
discriminate the birds, or the plants, or the geological features of a
country, it is as if new and keener eyes were added.

Of course one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees.
The facts in the life of nature that are transpiring about us are like
written words that the observer is to arrange int