Our Friend John Burroughs | Page 7

thinks likewise of his hidden farm high on the wooded hills that overlook the Hudson, nearly opposite Poughkeepsie. It is there that he has built himself a picturesque retreat, a rustic house named Slabsides. I find that, to many, the word "Slabsides" gives the impression of a dilapidated, ramshackle kind of place. This impression is an incorrect one. The cabin is a well-built two-story structure, its uneuphonious but fitting name having been given it because its outer walls are formed of bark-covered slabs. "My friends frequently complain," said Mr. Burroughs, "because I have not given my house a prettier name, but this name just expresses the place, and the place just meets the want that I felt for something simple, homely, secluded--something with the bark on."
Both Gilbert White and Thoreau became identified with their respective environments almost to the exclusion of other fields. The minute observations of White, and his records of them, extending over forty years, were almost entirely confined to the district of Selborne. He says that he finds that "that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined." The thoroughness with which he examined his own locality is attested by his "Natural History of Selborne." Thoreau was such a stay-at-home that he refused to go to Paris lest he miss something of interest in Concord. "I have traveled a good deal in Concord," he says in his droll way. And one of the most delicious instances of provinciality that I ever came across is Thoreau's remark on returning Dr. Kane's "Arctic Explorations" to a friend who had lent him the book--"Most of the phenomena therein recorded are to be observed about Concord." In thinking of John Burroughs, however, the thought of the author's mountain home as the material and heart of his books does not come so readily to consciousness. For most of us who have felt the charm, of his lyrical prose, both in his outdoor books and in his "Indoor Studies," were familiar with him as an author long before we knew there was a Slabsides--long before there was one, in fact, since he has been leading his readers to nature for fifty years, while the picturesque refuge we are now coming to associate with him has been in existence only about fifteen years.
Our poet-naturalist seems to have appropriated all outdoors for his stamping-ground. He has given us in his limpid prose intimate glimpses of the hills and streams and pastoral farms of his native country; has taken us down the Pepacton, the stream of his boyhood; we have traversed with him the "Heart of the Southern Catskills," and the valleys of the Neversink and the Beaverkill; we have sat upon the banks of the Potomac, and sailed down the Saguenay; we have had a glimpse of the Blue Grass region, and "A Taste of Maine Birch" (true, Thoreau gave us this, also, and other "Excursions" as well); we have walked with him the lanes of "Mellow England"; journeyed "In the Carlyle Country"; marveled at the azure glaciers of Alaska; wandered in the perpetual summerland of Jamaica; camped with him and the Strenuous One in the Yellowstone; looked in awe and wonder at that "Divine Abyss," the Grand Canon of the Colorado; felt the "Spell of Yosemite," and idled with him under the sun-steeped skies of Hawaii and by her morning-glory seas.
Our essayist is thus seen not to be untraveled, yet he is no wanderer. No man ever had the home feeling stronger than has he; none is more completely under the spell of a dear and familiar locality. Somewhere he has said: "Let a man stick his staff into the ground anywhere and say, 'This is home,' and describe things from that point of view, or as they stand related to that spot,--the weather, the fauna, the flora,--and his account shall have an interest to us it could not have if not thus located and defined."
[Illustration: Riverby from the Orchard. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott]
Before hunting out Mr. Burroughs in his mountain hermitage, let us glance at his conventional abode, Riverby, at West Park, Ulster County, New York. This has been his home since 1874. Having chosen this place by the river, he built his house of stone quarried from the neighboring hills, and finished it with the native woods; he planted a vineyard on the sloping hillside, and there he has successfully combined the business of grape-culture with his pursuits and achievements as a literary naturalist. More than half his books have been written since he has dwelt at Riverby, the earlier ones having appeared when he was a clerk in the Treasury Department in Washington, an atmosphere supposedly unfriendly to literary work. It was not until he gave up his work in Washington, and his later position as