The one, the elder, intent
on his bees, his thoughts by day revolving about his hives, or
concerned with the weather and the daily happenings; at night, as
he idly drums with his fingers, dreaming of the old days on the
farm--of how he used to dig out rocks to build the fences, of the
sugar-making, of cradling the oats in July; while the other--ah!
the other, of what was he not thinking!--of the little world of the
hives (his thoughts yielding the exquisite "Idyl of the Honey-Bee"),
of boyhood days upon the farm, of the wild life around his cabin, of
the universe, and of the soul of the poet Whitman, that then much
misunderstood man, than whom no one so much as he has helped us to
appreciate. Going out and in, attending to his homely tasks (for
these brothers did their own housework), the younger brother was
all the time thinking of that great soul, of all that association
with him had meant to him, and of all that Whitman would mean to
America, to the world, as poet, prophet, seer--thinking how out of
his knowledge of Whitman as poet and person he could cull and sift
and gather together an adequate and worthy estimate of one whom his
soul loved as Jonathan loved David!
The mystery of personality--how shall one fathom it? I asked myself
this one rainy afternoon, as I sat in the Burroughs homestead and
looked from one brother to another, the two so alike and yet so
unlike.
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