John Burroughs began his literary career (and may he so end it!) by writing an essay for the “Atlantic Monthly,” as good an introduction (and conclusion), speaking by the rhetoric, as a lifelong composition need have. That first essay entitled “Expression,” “a somewhat Emersonian Expression,” says its author, was printed in the “Atlantic” for November, 1860, which was fifty years ago. Fifty years are not threescore and ten; many men have lived past threescore and ten, but not many men have written continuously for the “Atlantic” for fifty years with eye undimmed and natural force unabated. Mr. Burroughs’s eye for the truth of nature has grown clearer during these fifty years, and the vigor of his youth has steadied into a maturity of strength which in some of his latest essays--“The Long Road,” for instance--lifts one and bears one down the unmeasured reaches of geologic time, compassing the timelessness of time, its beginninglessness, its endinglessness, as none of his earlier chapters have done. Many men have written more than Mr. Burroughs. His eighteen or twenty books, as books may be turned out, are nothing remarkable for fifty years of work. It is not their numbers, but the books, that are remarkable, that among them should be found “Wake-Robin,” “Winter Sunshine,” “Birds and Poets,” “Locusts and Wild Honey,” “Pepacton,” “Fresh Fields,” “Signs and Seasons,” “Riverby,” “Far and Near,” “Ways of Nature,” and “Leaf and Tendril”; for these eleven nature-books, as a group, stand alone and at the head of the long list of books written about the out-of-doors since the days of the _Historia Animalium_, and the mediæval “Fables” and “Beasteries.” These eleven volumes are Mr. Burroughs’s characteristic, his important work. 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?