If Burroughs were to start from my door for a tramp over these small Hingham hills he would cross the trout-brook by my neighbor's stone bridge, and, nibbling a spear of peppermint on the way, would follow the lane and the cow-paths across the pasture. Thoreau would pick out the deepest hole in the brook and try to swim across; he would leap the stone walls of the lane, cut a bee-line through the pasture, and drop, for his first look at the landscape, to the bottom of the pit in the seam-face granite quarry. Here he would pull out his notebook and a gnarly wild apple from his pocket, and, intensely, critically, chemically, devouring said apple, make note in the book that the apples of Eden were flat, the apples of Sodom bitter, but this wild, tough, wretched, impossible apple of the Hingham hills united all ambrosial essences in its striking odor of squash-bugs. 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,--and highly irritating too. But Thoreau stands alone. "Walden Pond" is one of America's certain contributions to the world's great books. 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. "Walden Pond" is something more than a nature book. There is a clear sky to most of Burroughs's pages, a rural landscape, wide, gently rolling, with cattle standing here and there beneath the trees. 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, 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.