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 Mr. 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; Mr. 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. And whatever the literary quality of our other nature-writers, no one of them has come any nearer than Mr. 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. Take Mr. Burroughs’s work as a whole, and it is beyond dispute the most complete, the most revealing, of all our outdoor literature. His pages lie open like the surface of a pond, sensitive to every wind, or calm as the sky, holding the clouds and the distant blue, and the dragon-fly, stiff-winged and pinned to the golden knob of a spatter-dock. All outdoor existence, all outdoor phenomena, are deeply interesting to him. There is scarcely a form of outdoor life, scarcely a piece of landscape, or natural occurrence characteristic of the Eastern States, which has not been dealt with suggestively in his pages: the rabbit under his porch, the paleozoic pebble along his path, the salt breeze borne inland by the Hudson, the whirl of a snowstorm, the work of the honeybees, the procession of the seasons over Slabsides, even the abundant soil out of which he and his grapes grow and which, “incorruptible and undefiled,” he calls divine. He devotes an entire chapter to the bluebird, a chapter to the fox, one to the apple, another to the wild strawberry. The individual, the particular thing, is always of particular interest to him. But so is its habitat, the whole of its environment. He sees the gem, not cut and set in a ring, but rough in the mine, where it glitters on the hand of nature, and glitters all the more that it is worn in the dark. Naturally Mr. Burroughs has written much about the birds; yet he is not an ornithologist. His theme has not been this or that, but nature in its totality, as it is held within the circle of his horizon, as it surrounds, supports, and quickens him.