Chapter D: A. Wasson

Of the early nature papers which Mr. Burroughs wrote for the New York "Leader," and which were grouped under the general title, "From the Back Country," there were five or six in number, of two or three columns each. One on "Butter-Making," of which I will quote the opening passage, fairly makes the mouth water:--

With green grass comes golden butter. With the bobolinks and the swallows, with singing groves, and musical winds, with June,--ah, yes! with tender, succulent, gorgeous June,--all things are blessed. The dairyman's heart rejoices, and the butter tray with its virgin treasure becomes a sight to behold. There lie the rich masses, fold upon fold, leaf upon leaf, fresh, sweet, and odorous, just as the ladle of the dairymaid dipped it from the churn, sweating great drops of buttermilk, and looking like some rare and precious ore. The cool spring water is the only clarifier needed to remove all dross and impurities and bring out all the virtues and beauties of this cream-evolved element. How firm and bright it becomes, how delicious the odor it emits! what vegetarian ever found it in his heart, or his palate either, to repudiate butter? The essence of clover and grass and dandelions and beechen woods is here. How wonderful the chemistry that from elements so common and near at hand produces a result so beautiful and useful! Eureka! Is not this the alchemy that turns into gold the commonest substances? How can transformation be more perfect?

During the years of this early essay-writing, Mr. Burroughs was teaching country schools in the fall and winter, and working on the home farm in summer; at the same time he was reading serious books and preparing himself for whatever was in store for him. He read medicine for only three months, in the fall of 1862, and then resumed teaching. His first magazine article about the birds was written in the summer or fall of 1863, and appeared in the "Atlantic" in the spring of 1885. He learned from a friend to whom Mr. Sanborn had written that the article had pleased Emerson.

It was in 1864, while in the Currency Bureau in Washington, that he wrote the essays which make up his first nature book, "Wake-Robin." His first book, however, was not a nature book, but was "Walt Whitman as Poet and Person." It was published in 1867, preceding "Wake-Robin" by four years. It has long been out of print, and is less known than his extended, riper work, "Whitman, A. Study," written in 1896.

A record of the early writings of Mr. Burroughs would not be complete without considering also his ventures into the field of poetry. In the summer of 1860 he wrote and printed his first verses (with the exception of some still earlier ones written in 1856 to the sweetheart who became his wife), which were addressed to his friend and comrade E. M. Allen, subsequently the husband of Elizabeth Akers, the author of "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight." The lines to E. M. A. were printed in the "Saturday Press." Because they are the first of our author's verses to appear in print, I quote them here:--

TO E. M. A.

A change has come over nature
Since you and June were here;
The sun has turned to the southward
Adown the steps of the year.

The grass is ripe in the meadow,
And the mowers swing in rhyme;
The grain so green on the hillside
Is in its golden prime.

No more the breath of the clover
Is borne on every breeze,
No more the eye of the daisy
Is bright on meadow leas.

The bobolink and the swallow
Have left for other clime--
They mind the sun when he beckons
And go with summer's prime.

Buttercups that shone in the meadow
Like rifts of golden snow,
They, too, have melted and vanished
Beneath the summer's glow.

Still at evenfall in the upland
The vesper sparrow sings,
And the brooklet in the pasture
Still waves its glassy rings.

And the lake of fog to the southward
With surges white as snow--
Still at morn away in the distance
I see it ebb and flow.

But a change has come over nature,
The youth of the year has gone;
A grace from the wood has departed,
And a freshness from the dawn.

Another poem, "Loss and Gain," was printed in the New York "Independent" about the same time.

LOSS AND GAIN

The ship that drops behind the rim
Of sea and sky, so pale and dim,
Still sails the seas
With favored breeze,
Where other waves chant ocean's hymn.

The wave that left this shore so wide,
And led away the ebbing tide,
Is with its host
On fairer coast,
Bedecked and plumed in all its pride.

The grub I found encased in clay
When next I came had slipped away
On golden wing,
With birds that sing,
To mount and soar in sunny day.

No thought or hope can e'er be lost--
The spring will come in spite of frost.
Go crop the branch
Of maple stanch,
The root will gain what you exhaust.

The man is formed as ground he tills--
Decay and death lie 'neath his sills.
The storm that beats,
And solar heats,
Have helped to form whereon he builds.

Successive crops that lived and grew,
And drank the air, the light, the dew,
And then deceased,
His soil increased
In strength, and depth, and richness, too.

From slow decay the ages grow,
From blood and crime the centuries blow,
What disappears
Beneath the years,
Will mount again as grain we sow.

These rather commonplace verses, the first showing his love for comrades, the others his philosophical bent, were the forerunners of that poem of Mr. Burroughs's--"Waiting"--which has become a household treasure, often without the ones who cherish it knowing its source. "Waiting" was Written in the fall of 1862. In response to my inquiry as to its genesis, its author said:--

I was reading medicine in the office of a country doctor at the time and was in a rather gloomy and discouraged state of mind. My outlook upon life was anything but encouraging. I was poor. I had no certain means of livelihood. I had married five years before, and, at a venture, I had turned to medicine as a likely solution of my life's problems. The Civil War was raging and that, too, disturbed me. It sounded a call of duty which increased my perturbations; yet something must have said to me, "Courage! all will yet be well. You are bound to have your own, whatever happens." Doubtless this feeling had been nurtured in me by the brave words of Emerson. At any rate, there in a little dingy back room of Dr. Hull's office, I paused in my study of anatomy and wrote "Waiting." I had at that time had some literary correspondence with David A. Wasson whose essays in the "Atlantic" I had read with deep interest. I sent him a copy of the poem. He spoke of it as a vigorous piece of work, but seemed to see no special merit in it. I then sent it to "Knickerbocker's Magazine," where it was printed, in December, I think, in 1862. It attracted no attention, and was almost forgotten by me till many years afterwards when it appeared in Whittier's "Songs of Three Centuries." This indorsement by Whittier gave it vogue. It began to be copied by newspapers and religious Journals, and it has been traveling on the wings of public print ever since. I do not think it has any great poetic merit. The secret of its success is its serious religious strain, or what people interpret as such. It embodies a very comfortable optimistic philosophy which it chants in a solemn, psalm-like voice. Its sincerity carries conviction. It voices absolute faith and trust in what, in the language of our fathers, would be called the ways of God with man. I have often told persons, when they have questioned me about the poem, that I came of the Old School Baptist stock, and that these verses show what form the old Calvinistic doctrine took in me.

Let me quote here the letter which Mr. Wasson wrote to the author of "Waiting," on receiving the first autograph copy of it ever written:--

Worcester, Dec. 22,1862.

Mr. Burroughs,--

My Dear Sir,--I beg your pardon a thousand times for having neglected so long to acknowledge the letter containing your vigorous verses. Excess of work, and then a dash of illness consequent upon this excess, must be my excuse--by your kind allowance.

The verses are vigorous and flowing, good in sentiment, and certainly worthy of being sent to "some paper," if you like to print them. On the other hand, they do not indicate to me that you have any special call to write verse. A man of your ability and fineness of structure must necessarily be enough of a poet not to fail altogether in use of the poetical form. But all that I know of you indicates a predominance of reflective intellect--a habit of mind quite foreign from the lyrical. I think it may be very good practice to compose in verse, as it exercises you in terse and rhythmical expression; but I question whether your vocation lies in that direction.

After all, you must not let anything which I, or any one, may say stand in your way, if you feel any clear leading of your genius in a given direction. What I have said is designed to guard you against an expenditure of power and hope in directions that may yield you but a partial harvest, when the same ought to be sown on more fruitful fields. I think you have unusual reflective power; and I am sure that in time you will find time and occasion for its exercise, and will accomplish some honorable tasks.

Very truly yours,