Burroughs,--simple, forceful language, with homely,
everyday expressions; English that shows the man to have been
country-bred, albeit he has wandered from the home pastures to
distant woods and pastures new, browsing in the fields of literature
and philosophy, or wherever he has found pasturage to his taste.
Or, to use a figure perhaps more in keeping with his main pursuits,
he is one who has flocked with birds not of a like feather with
those that shared with him the parent nest. Although his kin knew
and cared little for the world's great books, he early learned
to love them when he was roaming his native fields and absorbing
unconsciously that from which he later reaped his harvest. It is to
writers of /this/ kind of "English in shirt-sleeves" that we return
again and again. In them we see shirt-sleeves opposed to evening
dress; naturalness, sturdiness, sun-tan, and open sky, opposed to
the artificial, to tameness, constriction, and characterless
conformity to prescribed customs.
Do we not turn to writers of the first class with eagerness, slaking
our thirst, refreshing our minds at perennial springs? How are
we glad that they lead us into green pastures and beside still
waters, away from the crowded haunts of the conventional, and
the respectably commonplace society garb of speech! What matter
if occasionally one even gives a wholesome shock by daring to come
into the drawing-room of our minds in his shirt-sleeves, his hands
showing the grime of the soil, and his frame the strength that comes
from battling with wind and weather? It is the same craving which
makes us say with Richard Hovey:--
"I am sick of four walls and a ceiling;
I have need of the sky,
I have business with the grass.
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