As time passes, the world becomes more and
more a Golgotha,--a place of graves,--even if one does not actually
lose by death his friends and kindred. The days do not merely
pass, we bury them; they are of us, like us, and in them we bury
our own image, a real part of ourselves." Perhaps, among the poems
of Mr. Burroughs, next to "Waiting" the verses that have the most
universal appeal are those of--
THE RETURN
He sought the old scenes with eager feet--
The scenes he had known as a boy;
"Oh, for a draught of those fountains sweet,
And a taste of that vanished joy!"
He roamed the fields, he wooed the streams,
His school-boy paths essayed to trace;
The orchard ways recalled his dreams,
The hills were like his mother's face.
Oh, sad, sad hills! Oh, cold, cold hearth!
In sorrow he learned this truth--
One may return to the place of his birth,
He cannot go back to his youth.
But a half-loaf is better than no bread, and Mr. Burroughs has now
yielded to this deep-seated longing for his boyhood scenes, and has
gone back to the place of his birth amid the Catskills; and one who
sees him there during the midsummer days--alert, energetic, curious
concerning the life about him--is almost inclined to think he has
literally gone back to his youth as well, for the boy in him is
always coming to the surface.
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