Underlying all of John Burroughs's thought and feeling, framing every one of his books, is a deep sense of the perfection of nature, the sharing of which is physical life, the understanding of which is spiritual life, is knowledge of God himself, in some part of His perfection. "I cannot tell what the simple apparition of the earth and sky mean to me; I think that at rare intervals one sees that they have an immense spiritual meaning, altogether unspeakable, and that they are the great helps, after all." How the world was made--its geology, its biology--is the great question, for its answer is poetry and religion and life itself. John Burroughs was serenely sure as to how the world was made; the theological speculation as to _why_ it was made, he answered by growing small fruits on it, living upon it, writing about it. Temperamentally John Burroughs was an optimist, as vocationally he was a writer, and avocationally a vine-dresser. He planted and expected to gather--grapes from his grapevines, books from his book-vines, years, satisfactions, sorrows, joys, all that was due him. The waters know their own and draw The brook that springs in yonder heights; So flows the good with equal law Unto the soul of pure delights. And what is it that was due him? Everything; everything essential; as everything essential is due the pine-tree, the prairie, the very planet. Is not this earth a star? Are not the prairie, the pine-tree, and man the dust of stars? each a part of the other? all parts of one whole--a universe, round, rolling, without beginning, without end, without flaw, without lack, a universe self-sustained, perfect? I stay my haste, I make delays, For what avails this eager pace? I stand amid the eternal ways, And what is mine shall know my face. John Burroughs came naturally by such a view of nature and its consequent optimism. It was due partly to his having been born and brought up on a farm where he had what was due him from the start. Such birth and bringing-up is the natural right of every boy. To know and to do the primitive, the elemental; to go barefoot, to drive the cows, to fish, and to go to school with not too many books, but with "plenty of real things"--these are nominated in every boy's bond. Serene, I fold my hands and wait, is the poem of a childhood on the farm, and the poem of a manhood on the farm, in spite of the critic who says: "We have never ceased to wonder that this friend of the birds, this kindly interpreter of nature in all her moods, was born and brought up on a farm; it was in that smiling country watered by the east branch of the Delaware. No man, as a rule, knows less about the colors, songs, and habits of birds, and is more indifferent to natural scenery than the man born to the soil, who delves in it and breathes its odors. Contact with it and laborious days seem to deaden his faculties of observation and deprive him of all sympathy with nature."