



Produced by Patricia C. Franks, Lisa Carter, Danette Dulny,
Charles Duvall, Cheri Ripley, and Cheryl Sullivan






BIRDS AND BEES

SHARP EYES

AND OTHER PAPERS


By John Burroughs


With An Introduction

By Mary E. Burt


And A Biographical Sketch


CONTENTS


Biographical Sketch

Introduction By Mary E. Burt

Birds

  Bird Enemies

  The Tragedies of the Nests

Bees

  An Idyl of the Honey-Bee

  The Pastoral Bees




BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.


Nature chose the spring of the year for the time of John Burroughs's
birth. A little before the day when the wake-robin shows itself, that
the observer might be on hand for the sight, he was born in Roxbury,
Delaware County, New York, on the western borders of the Catskill
Mountains; the precise date was April 3, 1837. Until 1863 he remained
in the country about his native place, working on his father's farm,
getting his schooling in the district school and neighboring academies,
and taking his turn also as teacher. As he himself has hinted, the
originality, freshness, and wholesomeness of his writings are probably
due in great measure to the unliterary surroundings of his early life,
which allowed his mind to form itself on unconventional lines, and to
the later companionships with unlettered men, which kept him in touch
with the sturdy simplicities of life.

From the very beginnings of his taste for literature, the essay was his
favorite form. Dr. Johnson was the prophet of his youth, but he soon
transferred his allegiance to Emerson, who for many years remained his
"master enchanter." To cure himself of too close an imitation of
the Concord seer, which showed itself in his first magazine article,
Expression, he took to writing his sketches of nature, and about this
time he fell in with the writings of Thoreau, which doubtless confirmed
and encouraged him in this direction. But of all authors and of all men,
Walt Whitman, in his personality and as a literary force, seems to have
made the profoundest impression upon Mr. Burroughs, though doubtless
Emerson had a greater influence on his style of writing.

Expression appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1860, and most of his
contributions to literature have been in the form of papers first
published in the magazines, and afterwards collected into books. He more
than once paid tribute to his teachers in literature. His first book,
now out of print, was Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person,
published in 1867; and Whitman: A Study, which appeared in 1896, is a
more extended treatment of the man and his poetry and philosophy. Birds
and Poets, too, contains a paper on Whitman, entitled The Flight of the
Eagle, besides an essay on Emerson, whom he also treated incidentally in
his paper, Matthew Arnold on Emerson and Carlyle, in Indoor Studies; and
the latter volume contains his essay on Thoreau.

In the autumn of 1863 he went to Washington, and in the following
January entered the Treasury Department. He was for some years an
assistant in the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and later
chief of the organization division of that Bureau. For some time he was
keeper of one of the vaults, and for a great part of the day his only
duty was to be at his desk. In these leisure hours his mind traveled off
into the country, where his previous life had been spent, and with the
help of his pen, always a faithful friend and magician, he lived over
again those happy days, now happier still with the glamour of all
past pleasures. In this way he wrote Wake-Robin and a part of Winter
Sunshine. It must not be supposed, however, that he was deprived of
outdoor pleasures while at Washington. On the contrary, he enjoyed many
walks in the suburbs of the capital, and in those days the real country
came up to the very edges of the city. His Spring at the Capital, Winter
Sunshine, A March Chronicle, and other papers bear the fruit of his life
on the Potomac. He went to England in 1871 on business for the Treasury
Department, and again on his own account a dozen years later. The record
of the two visits is to be found mainly in his chapters on An October
Abroad, contained in the volume Winter Sunshine, and in the papers
gathered into the volume Fresh Fields.

He resigned his place in the Treasury in 1873, and was appointed
receiver of a broken national bank. Later, until 1885, his business
occupation was that of a National Bank Examiner. An article contributed
by him to The Century Magazine for March, 1881, on Broken Banks and Lax
Directors, is perhaps the only literary outcome of this occupation, but
the keen powers of observation, trained in the field of nature, could
not fail to disclose themselves in analyzing columns of figures. After
le