If his failure to enlist in the army was the greatest miss of his life, his friendship with Whitman was its greatest gain. They took to the open road together, the best of boon companions, and Burroughs came to know the poet as he knew the birds. His essay “The Flight of the Eagle,” is one of the most spirited and heartfelt tributes that one great man ever paid another.
One should, however, hear Mr. Burroughs talk about the poet and watch his kindling enthusiasm. He had been teaching us how to roast shad under the ashes of our camp-fire one day when a chance remark put him in a reminiscent mood. We all felt that evening as if we had come in actual touch with the poet.
“You see,” our host concluded, “Whitman was himself his own best poem--a man, take him all in all. Do you remember how George Eliot said of Emerson, ‘He is the first man I have ever met’? Many people felt that way about Whitman.”
As I looked at Whitman’s friend I found myself thinking, “Surely here is a man, take him all in all--a man in whom the child’s heart, the youth’s vision, the poet’s enthusiasm, the scientist’s faithfulness, and the thinker’s insight, are all wonderfully blended.”
After the years in Washington, his work as a bank examiner made Mr. Burroughs seek a place for his home near New York City. The spot selected was a small farm on the Hudson, not far from Poughkeepsie, which he called Riverby. Here, in his eager delight over the planting of his roof-tree, he helped, so far as his time permitted, in the building, placing many of the rough-hewn stones himself. He tells with some relish a story of the Scotch mason, who, on looking back one evening as he was being ferried across to his home on the east shore of the river, saw, to his great anger another man at work on his job. Returning in fury to see why he had been supplanted, he surprised the owner himself in the act of putting in place some of the stones for the chimney.
“Weel, you are a hahndy malm!” he exclaimed.
The big river never appealed to Mr. Burroughs, however, as the friendly Pepacton and the other silver-clear streams where he had caught trout as a boy. It brought too close the noise of the world, the fever of getting and spending. Besides, its rising and ebbing tides, its big steamers and busy tugs, its shad and herring, were all strange to him; his boyhood home had known nothing of these things.