and soul close at hand, is a vicarious satisfaction that here, at
least, is one who has known what he wanted to do and has done it.
We are glad that Gilbert White made pastoral calls on his outdoor
parishioners,--the birds, the toads, the turtles, the snails, and
the earthworms,--although we often wonder if he evinced a like
conscientiousness toward his human parishioners; we are glad that
Thoreau left the manufacture of lead pencils to become, as Emerson
jocosely complained, "the leader of a huckleberry party",--glad
because these were the things their natures called them to do,
and in so doing they best enriched their fellows. They literally
went away that they might come to us in a closer, truer way than
had they tarried in our midst. It must have been in answer to a
similar imperative need of his own that John Burroughs chose to
hie himself to the secluded yet accessible spot where his mountain
cabin is built.

"As the bird feathers her nest with down plucked from her own
breast," says Mr. Burroughs in one of his early essays, "so one's
spirit must shed itself upon its environment before it can brood
and be at all content." Here at Slabsides one feels that its master
does brood and is content. It is an ideal location for a man of his
temperament; it affords him the peace and seclusion he desires, yet
is not so remote that he is shut off from human fellowship. For he
is no recluse; his sympathies are broad and deep. Unlike Thoreau,
who asserts that "you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and
nature," and that "those qualities that bring you near to the one
estrange you from the other," Mr. Burroughs likes his kind; he is
doubtless the most accessible of all notable American writers,--a
fact which is perhaps a drawback to him in his literary work, his
submission to being hunted out often being taken advantage of, no