Four years elapsed between Burroughs’ first book of nature essays, Wake Robin, and his second collection, Winter Sunshine. During that time, Burroughs moved back home to New York State (January 1873) and a year later, purchased 9 acres in West Park, where he built his estate, Riverby. The Hudson Valley would be his home base for the remainder of his days, and out of its soil would emerge his finest writing. But not yet.
Winter Sunshine documents Burroughs’ rambling journey toward finding his voice, his roots, his place. It is a work of transition, and as such, not one of his strongest achievements, but vital to understanding how Burroughs would one day become “the Seer of Slabsides”. One of the first essays in the book, “The Exhilarations of the Road”, is a celebration of the nomadic life; a young and brash Burroughs longs to travel the world. “I think how much richer and firmer-grained life would be to me if I could journey afoot through Florida and Texas, or follow the windings of the Platte or the Yellow- stone, or stroll through Oregon, or browse for a season about Canada,” Burroughs announces. Indeed, most of the second half of the book is taken up with his impressions from a multi-week trip to England, France, and Ireland. His remaining essays are split between the Washington, D.C. area and upstate New York. Repeatedly, too, Burroughs makes comparisons between England and the United States in terms of culture and landscape. For instance, he contrasts the British love for walking and footpaths with the relative dearth of both back home. Birds, central to Wake Robin, rarely appear. Instead, Burroughs devotes an essay to all the animals leaving tracks in the snow during a Hudson River Valley winter — mostly mammals.
Another essay in the collection is a paean to the pleasures of apples. It is telling, I think, that Thoreau wrote an essay on “Wild Apples” while Burroughs emphasizes the more domesticated variety. Thoreau sought to keep a foot planted firmly in the wild and a foot in civilization; Burroughs places both feet firmly in the rural landscape that blends elements of both. Burroughs ends his essay by speaking of Thoreau’s work:
…the cow is the friend of the apple. How many trees she has planted about the farm, in the edge of the woods, and in remote fields and pastures! The wild apples, celebrated by Thoreau, are mostly of her planting….
I have alluded to Thoreau, to whom all lovers of the apple and its tree are under obligation. His chapter on Wild Apples is a most delicious piece of writing. It has a ‘tang and smack” like the fruit it celebrates, and is dashed and streaked with color in the same manner. It has the hue and perfume of the crab, and the richness and raciness of the pippin. But Thoreau loved other apples than the wild sorts, and was obliged to confess that his favorites could not be eaten indoors.
At some moments in the book, Burroughs seems to copy Thoreau in topic and outlook. For instance, Burroughs remarks early on about how he, like Thoreau, feels naturally drawn to the west on his walks. Thoreau also frequently explored how human beings are in sympathy with the forms and patterns of nature, including the journey of the seasons. When I first read the passage below from Burroughs’ essay, “Autumn Tides”, I could imagine it appearing somewhere in Thoreau’s Journal:
Does not the human frame yield to and sympathize with the seasons? Are there not more births in the spring and more deaths in the fall? In the spring one vegetates; his thoughts turn to sap; another kind of activity seizes him; he makes new wood which does not harden till past midsummer. For my part, I find all literary work irksome from April to August; my sympathies run in other channels; the grass grows where meditation walked. As fall approaches, the currents mount to the head again. But my thoughts do not ripen well till after there has been a frost. The burrs will not open much before that. A man’s thinking, I take it, is a kind of combustion, as is the ripening of fruits and leaves, and he wants plenty of oxygen in the air.
Literary work isn’t the only irksome thing to Burroughs during the summer months. Here, in quite a different tone, is his disdainful description of Washington D.C. at that time of year:
Think of the agonies of the heated term, the ragings of the dog-star, the purgatory of heat and dust, of baking, blistering pavements, of cracked and powdered fields, of dead, stifling night air, from which every tonic and antiseptic quality seems eliminated, leaving a residuum of sultry malaria and all-diffusing privy and sewer gases, that lasts from the first of July to near the middle of September!
Much of the book is filled with hasty generalizations about other races and cultures, not all of which are to Burroughs’ credit. These are not his finest pages — ones where he seeks to figure out the British, the Irish, the French, and colored people. Here are his observations on the latter, from the eponymous essay that opens the collection:
In my walks about Washington, both winter and summer, colored men are about the only pedestrians I meet; and I meet them everywhere, in the fields and in the woods and in the public road, swinging along with that peculiar, rambling, elastic gait, taking advantage of the short cuts and threading the country with paths and byways. I doubt if the colored man can compete with his white brother as walker; his foot is too flat and the calves of his legs too small, but he is certainly the most picturesque traveler to be seen on the road. He bends his knees more than the white man, and oscillates more to and fro, or from side to side. The imaginary line which his head describes is full of deep and long undulations. Even the boys and young men sway as if bearing a burden.
Along the fences and by the woods I come upon their snares, dead-falls, and rude box-traps. The freedman is a successful trapper and hunter, and has by nature an insight into these things. I frequently see him in market or on his way thither with a tame ’possum clinging timidly to his shoulders, or a young coon or fox led by a chain. Indeed, the colored man behaves precisely like the rude unsophisticated peasant that he is, and there is fully as much virtue in him, using the word in its true sense, as in the white peasant; indeed, much more than in the poor whites who grew up by his side; while there is often a benignity and a depth of human experience and sympathy about some of these dark faces that comes home to one like the best one sees in art or reads in books.
One touch of nature makes all the world akin, and there is certainly a touch of nature about the colored man; indeed, I had almost said, of Anglo-Saxon nature. They have the quaintness and homeliness of the simple English stock.
But Burroughs saves his most cringe-worthy descriptive passage for his brief stay in Ireland:
I hardly know why I went to Ireland, except it was to indulge the few drops of Irish blood in my veins, and maybe also with a view to shorten my sea voyage by a day. I also felt a desire to see one or two literary men there, and in this sense my journey was eminently gratifying; but so far from shortening my voyage by a day, it lengthened it by three days, that being the time it took me to recover from the effects of it; and as to the tie of blood, I think it must nearly all have run out, for I felt but few congenital throbs while in Ireland.
The Englishman at home is a much more lovable animal than the Englishman abroad, but Pat in Ireland is even more of a pig than in this country. Indeed, the squalor and poverty, and cold, skinny wretchedness one sees in Ireland, and (what freezes our sympathies) the groveling, swiny shiftlessness that pervades these hovels, no traveler can be prepared for. It is the bare prose of misery, the unheroic of tragedy. There is not one redeeming or mitigating feature.
Burroughs would gain his fame by inhabiting one corner of the world and studying it passionately and thoughtfully. But in these early days of his literary career, he shows what harm might be done by quick judgment and rash generalizations about the world. It is an object lesson for all of us, I think.
Just as Burroughs struggled to find his voice, so, too, did nature writers in America during the 1870s. As of now, having read over 60 titles, I can report that only three of them date to this decade: Among the Isles of Shoals by Celia Thaxter (1873), this work, and Into the Wilderness by Charles Dudley Warner (1878). Including 1880 and 1881 adds Friends Worth Knowing by Ernest Ingersoll (1880) and The Diary of a Bird by H. D. Minot (1880). For reasons I can only speculate about at this point, the two decades following Thoreau’s death in 1861 marked a relative dry spell for the nature genre in America, before a flood of writers would emerge during the “Nature Movement” (as Sharp called it) in the three decades that followed.