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And this same restoration I find in his books. John Burroughs began that long line of books by writing an essay for the "Atlantic Monthly," entitled "Expression," – "a somewhat Emersonian Expression," says its author, – which was printed in the "Atlantic" for November, 1860, sixty-one years ago; and in each of those sixty-one years he has not failed to publish one or more essays here where "Expression" led the way.

Sixty-one years are not threescore and ten, being nine years short. Many men have lived and wrought for more than threescore and ten years; but Burroughs's "Atlantic" years are unique. To write without a break for sixty-one years, and keep one's eye undimmed, one's natural force unabated, one's soul unfagged and as fresh as dawn, is of itself a great human achievement.

Only a few weeks before his death he sent me a copy of the last book that he should see through the press, and who shall say that "Accepting the Universe" lacks anything of the vigor or finish or freshness found in his earliest books? It is philosophical, theological, indeed, in matter, and rather controversial in style; its theme is like that of "The Light of Day," a theme his pen was ever touching, but nowhere with more largeness and beauty (and inconsistency) than here. For Burroughs, though deeply religious, was a poor theologian. He hated cant, and feared the very vocabulary of theology as he feared the dark. Life was remarkably single with Burroughs and all of a piece. In a little diary, one of the earliest he has left us, he asks, under date of October 8, 1860 (a month before his first essay appeared in the "Atlantic"):

"Is there no design of analogy in this Universe? Are these striking resemblances that wed remote parts, these family traits that break out all through nature and that show the unity of the creating mind, the work of chance? Are these resemblances and mutual answerings of part to part that human intelligence sees and recognizes only in its most exalted moments – when its vision is clearest – a mere accident?"

That was written in pencil filling a whole page of his diary for 1860. On page 220 of "Accepting the Universe," published sixty-one years later, and only a short time before his death, we find this attempted answer:

"So, when we ask, Is there design in Nature? we must make clear what part or phase of Nature we refer to. Can we say that the cosmos as a whole shows any design in our human sense of the word? I think not. The Eternal has no purpose that our language can compass. There can be neither center nor circumference to the Infinite. The distribution of land and water on the globe cannot be the result of design any more than can the shapes of the hills and mountains, or Saturn's rings, or Jupiter's moons. The circular forms and orbits of the universe must be the result of the laws of matter and force that prevail in celestial mechanics; this is not a final solution of the riddle, but is as near as we can come to it. One question stands on another question, and that on another, and so on, and the bottom question we can never reach and formulate."

It is a beautiful illustration of the continuity, the oneness of this singularly simple life; and it is as good an illustration of how the vigor of his youth steadies into a maturity of strength with age, which in many a late essay – as in "The Long Road," for instance – lifts one and bears one down the unmeasured reaches of geologic time as none of his earlier chapters do.

Many men have written more than John Burroughs. His twenty-five volumes are perhaps nothing remarkable for sixty years of steady writing. But it is remarkable to come up to four and eighty with one book just off the press, two more books in manuscript to appear after the light has failed; for there is still a book of miscellaneous papers, and some studies on Emerson and Thoreau yet to be published.

And I think it a rather remarkable lot of books, beginning with "Wake-Robin," running down through the titles, with "Winter Sunshine," "Birds and Poets," "Locusts and Wild Honey," "Pepacton," "Fresh Fields," "Signs and Seasons," "Riverby," "Far and Near," "Ways of Nature," "Leaf and Tendril," "The Summit of the Years," "Time and Change," "The Breath of Life," "Under the Apple-Trees," and "Field and Study," to "Accepting the Universe," for these books deal very largely with nature, and by themselves constitute the largest, most significant group of nature-books that have come, perhaps, from any single pen.

These sixteen or seventeen volumes are John Burroughs's most characteristic and important work. If he has done any desirable thing, made any real contribution to American literature, that contribution will be found among these books. His other books are eminently worth while: there is reverent, honest thinking in his religious essays, a creedless but an absolute and joyous faith; there is simple and exquisite feeling in his poems; close analysis and an unmitigatedness wholly Whitmanesque in his interpretation of Whitman; and no saner, happier criticism anywhere than in his "Literary Values." There are many other excellent critics, however, many poets and religious writers, many other excellent nature-writers, too; but is there any other who has written so much upon the ways of nature as they parallel and cross the ways of men, upon so great a variety of nature's forms and expressions, and done it with such abiding love, with such truth and charm?

Yet such a comparison is beyond proof, except in the least of the literary values – mere quantity; and it may be with literature as with merchandise: the larger the cask the greater the tare. Charm? Is not charm that which I chance to like, or you chance to like? Others have written of nature with as much love and truth as has John Burroughs, and each with his own peculiar charm: Audubon, with the spell of wild places and the thrill of fresh wonder; Traherne, with the ecstasy of the religious mystic; Gilbert White, with the sweetness of the evening and the morning; Thoreau, with the heat of noonday; Jefferies, with just a touch of twilight shadowing all his pages. We want them severally as they are; John Burroughs as he is, neither wandering "lonely as a cloud" in search of poems, nor skulking in the sedges along the banks of the Guaso Nyero looking for lions. We want him at Slabsides, near his celery fields, or at Woodchuck Lodge overlooking the high fields that run down from the sky into Montgomery Valley. And whatever the literary quality of our other nature-writers, no one of them has come any nearer than John Burroughs to that difficult ideal – a union of thought and form, no more to be separated than the heart and the bark of a live tree.