It is the strain, in Thoreau, that wearies us; his sweating among the stumps and woodchucks, for a bean crop netting him eight dollars, seventy-one and one half cents. But such beans! Beans with minds and souls! Yet, for baking, plain beans are better than these transcendental beans, because your transcendental beans are always baked without pork. A family man, however, cannot contemplate that piddling patch with any patience, even though he have a taste for literature as real as his taste for beans. It is better to watch Mr. Burroughs pruning his grape-vines for a crop to net him one thousand, three hundred and twenty-five dollars, and _no_ cents, and no half-cents. Here are eighteen acres to be cultivated, whose fruit is to be picked, shipped, and sold in the New York markets at a profit--a profit plainly felt in Mr. Burroughs’s books. The most worthy qualities of good writing are those least noticeable,--negative qualities of honesty, directness, sincerity, euphony; noticeable only by their absence. Yet in Mr. Burroughs they amount to a positive charm. Indeed, are not these same negative qualities the very substance of good style? Such style as is had by a pair of pruning-shears, as is embodied in the exquisite lines of a flying swallow--the style that is perfect, purposeful adaptability? But there is more than efficiency to Mr. Burroughs’s style; there are strengths and graces existing in and for themselves. Here is a naturalist who has studied the art of writing. “What little merit my style has,” he declares, “is the result of much study and discipline.” And whose style, if it be style at all, is not the result of much study and discipline. Flourish, fine-writing, wordiness, obscurity, and cant are exorcised in no other way; and as for the “limpidness, sweetness, freshness,” which Mr. Burroughs says should characterize outdoor writing, and which do characterize his writing, how else than by study and discipline shall they be obtained? Outdoor literature, no less than other types of literature, is both form and matter; the two are mutually dependent, inseparably one; but the writer is most faithful to the form when he is most careful of the matter. It makes a vast difference whether his interest is absorbed by what he has to say, or by the possible ways he may say it. If Mr. Burroughs writes in his shirt-sleeves, as a recent critic says he does, it is because he goes about his writing as he goes about his vineyarding--for grapes, for thoughts, and not to see how pretty he can make a paragraph look, or into what fantastic form he can train a vine. The vine is lovely in itself,--if it bear fruit.