Our Friend John Burroughs

We all claim John Burroughs as our friend. He is inextricably blended with our love for the birds and the flowers, and for all out of doors; but he is much more to us than a cha...

"I have no genius for making gifts," Mr. Burroughs once said to me, but how his works belie his words! In these letters, and in many others which his unknown friends have receiv...

"The last time I saw him," he said with a sigh, "was at Holmes's seventieth-birthday breakfast, in Boston. But then his mind was like a splendid bridge with one span missing; he...

Father and Mother first went to keeping house on Grandfather Burroughs's old place--not in the log house, but in the frame house of which you saw the foundations. Brother Hiram...

"'That's the book, is it?' he replied, showing no curiosity about it, or desire to look into it, but kept drumming on the table--a habit of his that was very annoying to me at t...

Time has worn down the hills and mountains so that all the outlines of the country are gentle and flowing. The valleys are long, open, and wide; the hills broad and smooth, no a...

(In August, 1902, Mr. Burroughs wrote me of a visit to Cooperstown, after all these years: "I found Cooperstown not much changed. The lake and the hills were, of course, the sam...

As a youth I never went to Sunday-school, and I was not often seen inside the church. My Sundays were spent rather roaming in the woods and fields, or climbing to "Old Clump," o...

I was once tempted into making an excursion for one of the magazines to a delightful place along the Jersey coast in company with an artist, and a memorable day it was, too, wit...

The South American Indian who discovered the silver mines of Potosi by the turning up of a bush at the roots, which he had caught hold of to aid his ascent while pursuing a deer...

No thought or hope can e'er be lost-- The spring will come in spite of frost. Go crop the branch Of maple stanch, The root will gain what you exhaust.

There has always been a haunting suggestiveness to me about the expression _Rue du Temps Perdu_--the Street of Lost Time. Down this shadowy vista we all come to peer with tear-d...

"Down in the Hollow," as they call the village of Robbery, he drew my attention to the building which was once the old academy, and where he had his dream of going to school. He...

Mr. Burroughs, on the contrary, is not a ready talker; he gives of his best in his books. He establishes intimate relations with his reader, Mr. Muir with his listener. He is mo...

Mr. Muir's knowledge of the physiognomy and botany of most of the countries of the globe is extensive, and he has recently added South America and South Africa to his list; ther...

But it will not do to carry this analogy too far in writing of Mr. Burroughs lest it be inferred that I regard the author's work as having in it something of the uncouth, or the...