Mr. Burroughs takes us along with him. Thoreau comes upon us in the woods--jumps out at us from behind some bush, with a “_Scat!_” Burroughs brings us home in time for tea; Thoreau leaves us tangled up in the briars. It won’t hurt us to be jumped at now and then and told to “_scat!_” It won’t hurt us to be digged by the briars. It is good for us, otherwise we might forget that _we_ are beneath our clothes. It is good for us and highly diverting, but highly irritating too. For my part, when I take up an outdoor book I am glad if there is quiet in it, and fragrance, and something of the saneness and sweetness of the sky. Not that I always want sweet skies. It is ninety-eight degrees in the shade, and three weeks since there fell a drop of rain. I could sing like a robin for a sizzling, crackling thunder-shower--less for the sizzling and crackling than for the shower. Thoreau is a succession of showers--“tempests”; his pages are sheet-lightning, electrifying, purifying, illuminating, but not altogether conducive to peace. There is a clear sky to most of Mr. Burroughs’s pages, a rural landscape, wide, gently rolling, with cattle standing here and there beneath the trees. Mr. Burroughs’s natural history is entirely natural, his philosophy entirely reasonable, his religion and ethics very much of the kind we wish our minister and our neighbor might possess; and his manner of writing is so unaffected that we feel we could write in such a manner ourselves. Only we cannot. Since the time he can be said to have “led” a life, Mr. Burroughs has led a literary life; that is to say, nothing has been allowed to interfere with his writing; yet the writing has not been allowed to interfere with a quiet successful business,--with his raising of grapes. He has a study and a vineyard. Not many men ought to live by the pen alone. A steady diet of inspiration and words is hard on the literary health. The writing should be varied with some good wholesome work, actual hard work for the hands; not so much work, perhaps, as one would find in an eighteen-acre vineyard; yet Mr. Burroughs’s eighteen acres have certainly proved no check--rather, indeed, a stimulus--to his writing. He seems to have gathered a volume out of every acre; and he seems to have put a good acre into every volume. “Fresh Fields” is the name of one of the volumes, “Leaf and Tendril” of another; but the freshness of his fields, the leaves and the tendrils of his vineyard, enter into them all. The grapes of the vineyard are in them also. Here is a growth of books out of the soil, books that have been trimmed, trained, sprayed, and kept free from rot. Such books may not be altogether according to the public taste; they will keep, however, until the public acquires a better taste. Sound, ripe, fresh, early and late, a full crop! Has the vineyard anything to do with it?