[Illustration: Cradle in which John Burroughs was rocked.
From a photograph by Dr. John D. Johnson]
It has been my good fortune to spend many delightful summers with
Mr. Burroughs at his old home, and also at Woodchuck Lodge. On my
first visit he led me to a hilltop and pointed off toward a deep
gorge where the Pepacton, although it is a placid stream near
Roxbury, rises amid scenery wild and rugged. It drains this high
pastoral country, where the farms hang upon the mountainsides
or lie across the long, sloping hills. The look of those farms
impressed me as the fields of England impressed Mr. Burroughs--"as
though upon them had settled an atmosphere of ripe and loving
husbandry." I was often reminded in looking upon them of that
line of Emerson's: "The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the
wide, warm fields." There is a fresh, blue, cleansed appearance
to the hills, "like a newly-washed lamp chimney," as Mr. Burroughs
sometimes said.
Our writer's overmastering attachment to his birthplace seems due
largely to the fact that the springs, the hills, and the wooded
mountains are inextricably blended with his parents and his youth.
As he has somewhere said, "One's own landscape comes in time to be
a sort of outlying part of him; he has sown himself broadcast upon
it .
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