Or, read another of his boyish excursions, and you find yourself
on that first spring outing to a distant, low-lying meadow after
"cowslips"; another, and you are trudging along with your brother
after the cows, stopping to nibble spearmint, or pick buttercups
by the way. Prosaic recollections, compared to spring paths and
trout brooks in the Catskill valleys, yet this is what our author's
writings do--re-create for each of us our own youth, with our own
childhood scenes and experiences, invested with a glamour for us,
however prosy they seem to others; and why? Because, though
nature's aspects vary, the human heart is much the same the world
over, and the writer who faithfully adds to his descriptions of
nature his own emotional experiences arouses answering responses in
the soul of his reader.
Perhaps the poet in Mr. Burroughs is nowhere more plainly seen
than in his descriptions of bird life, yet how accurately he
gives their salient points; he represents the bird as an object
in natural history, but ah! how much more he gives! Imagine our
bird-lover describing a bird as Ellery Channing described one, as
something with "a few feathers, a hole at one end and a point at
the other, and a pair of wings"! We see the bird Mr. Burroughs
sees; we hear the one he hears.
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