Fresh Fields

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | John Burroughs's Books. | | | | FRESH FIELDS. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25. | | | | BIRDS AND POETS, WITH OTHER P...

I had wondered why Shakespeare had made his seashores pebbly instead of sandy, and now I saw why: they are pebbly, with not a grain of sand to be found. This chalk formation, as...

says Tennyson. At a little distance, it has the mass and solidity of a rock. The same is true of the European maple, and when this tree is grown on our side of the Atlantic it k...

Every close view I got of the Scotch character confirmed my liking for it. A most pleasant episode happened to me down in Ayr. A young man whom I stumbled on by chance in a litt...

To see more of Ecclefechan and its people, and to browse more at my leisure about the country, I brought my wife and youngster down from Lockerbie; and we spent several days the...

as the bird really does not go till August. I got out my Gilbert White, as I should have done at an earlier day, and was still more disturbed to find that he limited the singing...

I soon learned to distrust young fellows and their girls who had heard nightingales in the gloaming. I knew one's ears could not always be depended upon on such occasions, nor h...

I proposed to be up and off at five o'clock in the morning, which seemed greatly to puzzle mine host. At first he thought it could not be done, but finally saw his way out of th...

The European cuckoo makes more music than ours, and their robin redbreast is a better singer than the allied species, to wit, the bluebird, with us. But it is mainly in the lark...

The greenfinch or green linnet is an abundant bird everywhere, but its song is less pleasing than that of several of our finches. The goldfinch is very rare, mainly, perhaps, be...

It is this tender and sheltering character of the mountains of the Lake district that is one main source of their charm. So rugged and lofty, and yet so mellow and delicate! No...

In crossing the Atlantic from the New World to the Old, one of the first intimations the traveler has that he is nearing a strange shore, and an old and populous one, is the gre...

Then add to these things the comparative immunity from the many dangers that beset the nests of our birds,--dangers from squirrels, snakes, crows, owls, weasels, etc., and from...

Emerson wants Emersonian epigrams from Carlyle, and Carlyle wants Carlylean thunder from Emerson. Each was unconsciously his own ideal. The thing which a man's nature calls him...

We are now close on to the cardinal fact of Carlyle's life and teachings, namely, the urgency of his quest for heroes and heroic qualities. This is the master key to him; the ma...

This has the real crushing Carlylean wit and picturesqueness of statement, but is it the case of democracy, of universal suffrage fairly put? The eternal verities appear again,...

"Daily and hourly," he says (at the age of thirty-eight), "the world natural grows more of a world magical to me; this is as it should be. Daily, too, I see that there is no tru...

Late one afternoon the clouds assumed a still more friendly and welcome shape. A long, purple, irregular range of them rose up from the horizon in the northwest, exactly stimula...

Scotland, first sight of, 2-7; mountains of, 6, 7, 21-25; tour through, 8; moorlands of, 25; streams and lakes of, 25, 26; plowing in, 53, 54; work of women and girls in the fie...