OUR FRIEND JOHN BURROUGHS


We all claim John Burroughs as our friend. He is inextricably
blended with our love for the birds and the flowers, and for all
out of doors; but he is much more to us than a charming writer of
books about nature, and we welcome familiar glimpses of him as one
welcomes anything which brings him in closer touch with a friend.

A clever essayist, in speaking of the "obituary method of
appreciation," says that we feel a slight sense of impropriety
and insecurity in contemporary plaudits. "Wait till he is well
dead, and four or five decades of daisies have bloomed over him,
says the world; then, if there is any virtue in his works, we will
tag and label them and confer immortality upon him." But Mr.
Burroughs has not had to wait till the daisies cover him to be
appreciated. A multitude of his readers has sought him out and
walked amid the daisies with him, listened with him to the birds,
and gained countless delightful associations with all these things
through this personal relation with the author; and these friends
in particular will, I trust, welcome some "contemporary plaudits."

As a man, and as a writer, Mr. Burroughs has been in the public
eye for many years. At the age of twenty-three he had an article
printed in the "Atlantic Monthly," and in 1910 that journal
celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his contributions to its
columns. Early in his career he received marked recognition from
able critics, and gratifying responses from readers. It is rare in
the history of an author that his books after fifty years of writing