THE TRAVELER who stands on the western coast of Manhattan Island can step to the right and reach the continent of America, or to the left and wake up not very much later in Europe. It is only a matter of taking the ferry boat or the ocean steamer as they lie side by side. Paris and New York are neighbors. All the great cities of the world are brought into close touch intellectually, morally, and immorally by steam and electricity. As a result the fin de siècle literature of the nineteenth century in America stood in sore need of John Burroughs and of men like-minded with him, bold enough to turn their backs on the inevitable artificiality of city-bred literature and learn from the infinite simplicities of nature that only the most natural can be the most beautiful. No one moralizes less than he, but no mere moralizer could have done what he has done and what he is still doing to restore moral health to American literature. But for him we might find so much to admire in the Villons and the Verlaines of the Parisian pavement that we might lose the higher music and nobler lesson of our own woods and fields. With the love of nature which inspired Audubon and the philosophical insight of Thoreau, he has created a class of American essays which are more genuine, more natural, and more attractive than anything in the related literature of England. He will not be forgotten while White of Selborne is remembered and to White’s keenness of vision he adds the ease and grace of Washington Irving.

  He was born on a farm near Roxbury, New York, April 3d, 1837. After experience as a journalist in New York and in the civil service at Washington, he retired to a farm in his native State, intending to devote himself “to literature and fruit culture.” If he has thriven in fruit culture as in literature, he has done well indeed, for in “Pepacton,” “Birds and Poets,” “Wake Robin,” “Locusts and Wild Honey,” and in essays as yet uncollected, he has earned the gratitude of every lover of nature. He is still writing and still learning from the woods and fields that which the civilization of cities and libraries needs as the salt to save its best virtues from corruption.