Thoreau and Burroughs had almost nothing in common except their love of nature, and in that they were farther apart than in anything else, Thoreau searching by night and day in all wild places for his lost horse and hound while Burroughs quietly worshiped, as his rural divinity, the ruminating cow. 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 John Burroughs they amounted 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 John 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 John 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 John Burroughs wrote in his shirt-sleeves, as a recent critic says he did, it was because he went about his writing as he went about his vineyarding--for grapes, for thoughts, and not to see how pretty he could make a paragraph look, or into what fantastic form he could train a vine. The vine is lovely in itself--if it bear fruit. And so is language. Take John Burroughs's manner in any of its moods: its store of single, sufficient words, for instance, especially the homely, rugged words and idioms, and the flavor they give, is second to the work they do; or take his use of figures--when he speaks of De Quincey's "discursive, roundabout style, herding his thoughts as a collie dog herds sheep"--and unexpected, vivid, apt as they are, they are even more effective. One is often caught up by the poetry of these essays and borne aloft, but never on a gale of words; the lift and sweep are genuine emotion and thought.