We lingered long after the other campers had
gone to rest, loath to bring to its close a day so replete with
sublimity and beauty. Mr. Burroughs summed it up as he said
good-night: "A day with the gods of eld--a holy day in the
temple of the gods."
JOHN BURROUGHS: AN APPRECIATION
"John is making an impression on his age--has come to stay--has
veritable, indisputable, dynamic gifts," Walt Whitman said
familiarly to a friend in 1888, in commenting on our subject's
place in literature. And of a letter written to him by Mr.
Burroughs that same year he said: "It is a June letter, worthy
of June; written in John's best outdoor mood. Why, it gets into
your blood, and makes you feel worth while. I sit here, helpless
as I am, and breathe it in like fresh air."
Minot Savage once asked in a sermon if it did not occur to his
hearers that John Burroughs gets a little more of June than the
rest of us do, and added that Mr. Burroughs had paid years of
consecration of thought and patient study of the lives of birds
and flowers, and so had bought the right to take June and all that
it means into his brain and heart and life; and that if the rest
of us wish these joys, we must purchase them on the same terms.
We are often led to ask what month he has not taken into his heart
and life, and given out again in his writings.
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