re tiresome than John Bunyan's opinions on theology; but to go with
him among the birds and the plants, to hope with him that the soaring
lark of England may find its way down through Canada to our hedges, to
look with him into the nests in the shrubs that border our roads is to
begin to feel that joy in being an American of the soil that no other
author gives. He cured the young New England poets and the singers of
the Berkshire Hills and of the Catskills of celebrating the English
thrush and the nightingale, as if those birds sang on the Palisades.

There is an epithet I should like to apply to John Burroughs, but he
might not like it if he were alive. I recall the case of a pleasant
Englishman who admired two American girls very much, because, as he
said, they were "so homely." In fact, they were rather pretty girls, and
he had not used the term in reference to their looks. It is the word
with which I like to describe John Burroughs. Forty years ago, I met him
at Richard Watson Gilder's. He was young then, and delightfully
"homely" in the sense in which the Englishman used the word. Some of the
refined ladies at Mrs. Gilder's objected to his "crude speech," for even
in the eighties there were still _pr['e]cieuses_. The truth is that his
rural use of the vernacular was part of the charm. It never spoiled his
style; but it gave that touch of homeliness to it which smelt of the
good soil of the country.

Thoreau's "Walden" always reminds me--a far-fetched comparison but I
will not apologize for it--of "As You Like It" played in one way by
Dybwad, the Norwegian actress, and by Julia Marlowe in another. Madame
Dybwad, being nearer to the Elizabethan time in her daily life, gives us
an Elizabethan maiden with a touch of "homeliness"; but Julia Marlowe's,
like Ada Rehan's "Rosalind," has something of the artificial character
of Watteau. "Walden," then, is somewhat too varnished; but "Riverby" and
"Pepacton" are "homely" and "homey."

To return to memoirs for a moment, that most delightful of all mental
dissipations for a leisurely man. In looking for the second volume of
"Walden"--for fear that I should have done Thoreau an injustice--I find
the "Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne." One cannot imagine anything
more unlike Madame de Boigne than Thoreau and John Burroughs! Why is
Madame de Boigne on the same shelf with these two lovers of nature?
Madame de Boigne was never a lover of nature. She loved the world and
the manif