My Boyhood

My Boyhood

The Project Gutenberg EBook of My Boyhood, by John Burroughs
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Title: My Boyhood
Author: John Burroughs
Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7280] [This file was first posted
on April 6, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, MY
BOYHOOD ***

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MY BOYHOOD
BY
JOHN BURROUGHS
WITH A CONCLUSION BY HIS SON
JULIAN BURROUGHS

FOREWORD
In the beginning, at least, Father wrote these sketches of his boyhood
and early farm life as a matter of self-defense: I had made a determined
attempt to write them and when I did this I was treading on what was to
him more or less sacred ground, for as he once said in a letter to me,
"You will be homesick; I know just how I felt when I left home forty-
three years ago. And I have been more or less homesick ever since. The
love of the old hills and of Father and Mother is deep in the very
foundations of my being." He had an intense love of his birthplace and
cherished every memory of his boyhood and of his family and of the
old farm high up on the side of Old Clump--"the mountain out of
whose loins I sprang"--so that when I tried to write of him he felt it was
time he took the matter in hand. The following pages are the result.
JULIAN BURROUGHS.

CONTENTS
MY BOYHOOD By John Burroughs
MY FATHER By Julian Burroughs

WAITING
Serene, I fold my hands and wait, Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea; I

rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate, For lo! my own shall come to me.
I stay my haste, I make delays, For what avails this eager pace? I stand
amid the eternal ways, And what is mine shall know my face.
Asleep, awake, by night or day, The friends I seek are seeking me; No
wind can drive my bark astray, Nor change the tide of destiny.
What matter if I stand alone? I wait with joy the coming years; My
heart shall reap where it hath sown, And garner up its fruit of tears.
The waters know their own, and draw The brook that springs in yonder
heights; So flows the good with equal law Unto the soul of pure
delights.
The stars come nightly to the sky; The tidal wave comes to the sea; Nor
time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, Can keep my own away from me.

MY BOYHOOD
BY
JOHN BURROUGHS
You ask me to give you some account of my life--how it was with me,
and now in my seventy-sixth year I find myself in the mood to do so.
You know enough about me to know that it will not be an exciting
narrative or of any great historical value. It is mainly the life of a
country man and a rather obscure man of letters, lived in eventful times
indeed, but largely lived apart from the men and events that have given
character to the last three quarters of a century. Like tens of thousands
of others, I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the
activities--political, commercial, sociological, scientific--of the times in
which I have lived. My life, like your own, has been along the by-paths
rather than along the great public highways. I have known but few great
men and have played no part in any great public events--not even in the
Civil War which I lived through and in which my duty plainly called
me to take part. I am a man who recoils from noise and strife, even
from fair competition, and who likes to see his days "linked each to
each" by some quiet, congenial occupation.
The first seventeen years of my life were spent on the