Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes, and Other Papers | Page 4

Roxbury,
Delaware County, New York, on the western borders of the Catskill
Mountains; the precise date was April 3, 1837. Until 1863 he remained
in the country about his native place, working on his father's farm,
getting his schooling in the district school and neighboring academies,
and taking his turn also as teacher. As he himself has hinted, the
originality, freshness, and wholesomeness of his writings are probably
due in great measure to the unliterary surroundings of his early life,
which allowed his mind to form itself on unconventional lines, and to
the later companionships with unlettered men, which kept him in touch

with the sturdy simplicities of life.
>From the very beginnings of his taste for literature, the essay was his
favorite form. Dr. Johnson was the prophet of his youth, but he soon
transferred his allegiance to Emerson, who for many years remained his
"master enchanter." To cure himself of too close an imitation of the
Concord seer, which showed itself in his first magazine article,
Expression, he took to writing his sketches of nature, and about this
time he fell in with the writings of Thoreau, which doubtless confirmed
and encouraged him in this direction. But of all authors and of all men,
Walt Whitman, in his personality and as a literary force, seems to have
made the profoundest impression upon Mr. Burroughs, though
doubtless Emerson had a greater influence on his style of writing.
Expression appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1860, and most of his
contributions to literature have been in the form of papers first
published in the magazines, and afterwards collected into books. He
more than once paid tribute to his teachers in literature. His first book,
now out of print, was Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person,
published in 1867; and Whitman: A Study, which appeared in 1896, is
a more extended treatment of the man and his poetry and philosophy.
Birds and Poets, too, contains a paper on Whitman, entitled The Flight
of the Eagle, besides an essay on Emerson, whom he also treated
incidentally in his paper, Matthew Arnold on Emerson and Carlyle, in
Indoor Studies; and the latter volume contains his essay on Thoreau.
In the autumn of 1863 he went to Washington, and in the following
January entered the Treasury Department. He was for some years an
assistant in the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and later
chief of the organization division of that Bureau. For some time he was
keeper of one of the vaults, and for a great part of the day his only duty
was to be at his desk. In these leisure hours his mind traveled off into
the country, where his previous life had been spent, and with the help
of his pen, always a faithful friend and magician, he lived over again
those happy days, now happier still with the glamour of all past
pleasures. In this way he wrote Wake-Robin and a part of Winter
Sunshine. It must not be supposed, however, that he was deprived of
outdoor pleasures while at Washington. On the contrary, he enjoyed
many walks in the suburbs of the capital, and in those days the real
country came up to the very edges of the city. His Spring at the Capital,

Winter Sunshine, A March Chronicle, and other papers bear the fruit of
his life on the Potomac. He went to England in 1871 on business for the
Treasury Department, and again on his own account a dozen years later.
The record of the two visits is to be found mainly in his chapters on An
October Abroad, contained in the volume Winter Sunshine, and in the
papers gathered into the volume Fresh Fields.
He resigned his place in the Treasury in 1873, and was appointed
receiver of a broken national bank. Later, until 1885, his business
occupation was that of a National Bank Examiner. An article
contributed by him to The Century Magazine for March, 1881, on
Broken Banks and Lax Directors, is perhaps the only literary outcome
of this occupation, but the keen powers of observation, trained in the
field of nature, could not fail to disclose themselves in analyzing
columns of figures. After leaving Washington Mr. Burroughs bought a
fruit farm at West Park, near Esopus, on the Hudson, and there building
his house from the stones found in his fields, has given himself the best
conditions for that humanizing of nature which constitutes the charm of
his books. He was married in 1857 to a lady living in the New York
village where he was at the time teaching. He keeps his country home
the year round, only occasionally visiting New York. The cultivation of
grapes absorbs the greater part of his time; but he has by no means
given