This book was well named, not only because it suggested something of the spirit and feeling of the essays, but also because it was the herald of several other delightful volumes such as “Signs and Seasons,” “Winter Sunshine,” “Birds and Poets.”
Do you remember how Emerson says in his poem “Each and All”
I thought the sparrow’s note from Heaven, Singing at dawn on the alder bough; I brought him home in his nest at even; He sings the song, but it cheers not now, For I did not bring home the river and sky; He sang to my ear, they sang to my eye.
When John Burroughs writes about the birds, he brings with their life and song the feeling of the “perfect whole”--the open fields, the winding river, the bending sky, and the cool, fragrant woods. For he always gives, with the glimpses of nature that he culls, something of himself, something of his own clear-seeing, open-hearted appreciation.
The ten years spent in Washington were memorable not only for his first success as a nature writer, but also for the experiences brought through the Civil War and his friendship with the “good gray poet,” Walt Whitman. Years after, Mr. Burroughs said that his not having gone into the army was probably the greatest miss of his life. He went close enough to the firing-line on one occasion to hear “the ping of a rifle-bullet overhead, and the thud it makes when it strikes the ground.” Surely there should be enough of the spirit of his grandfather, who was one of Washington’s Valley Forge veterans, to make a soldier! How well he remembered the old Continental’s thrilling tales as they angled for trout side by side, graybeard and eager urchin of nine! How well he remembered the hair-raising stories of witches and ghosts that made many shadowy spots spook-ridden. He had learned to stand his ground in the woods at nightfall, and at the edge of the big black hole under the barn, and so to put to flight the specters before and the phantoms behind. But when, that night on the battle-field, he saw a company of blue-coated men hurrying toward a line of rifle-flashes that shone luridly against the horizon, he concluded that his grandfather had “emptied the family powder-horn” in those Revolutionary days, and that there was no real soldier stuff in the grandson.