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108 ...................................... 4 THE REENCHANTMENT OF THE FARM John Burroughs Goes Back to the Land How can a man take root and thrive without land? He writes his history upon his field. John Burroughs, “Phases of Farm Life,” 1886 Leaving Washington By the close of the year 1872, John Burroughs had begun to establish himself as both literary critic and nature writer. Although Burroughs had self-published his first book, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867), he was warmly invited by publisher Oscar Houghton to send material for a new volume. Burroughs’s occasional essays, appearing in such magazines as Putnam’s, the New York Leader, and the Atlantic Monthly, were becoming increasingly popular, and Houghton, a personal fan of Burroughs’s work, anticipated a growing readership for such pieces. Wake-Robin emerged in 1871 as a gathering of nature essays old and new. It was well received by the critics and widely read by the public. Among the educated middle-class, Burroughs was beginning to become a familiar name.1 After years of eking out an existence with short-term teaching jobs and the occasional foray into unlikely business ventures, Burroughs had also managed, finally, to establish some financial security for himself and his wife, Ursula.2 He had obtained a position as a clerk with the newly formed Currency Bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department in January 1864 and had risen steadily through the ranks, serving ultimately as the chief of the Organization Division of the Bureau of National Banks. Significantly (for Ursula especially), Burroughs had also managed to clear up his debts sufficiently to be able to buy land and have a house built. By 1867, after ten years of marriage, John and Ursula had settled into a comfortable domestic life at 1332 V Street, just north of Washington’s city The Reenchantment of the Farm 109 center.3 From their new vantage point, Burroughs could reap the advantages of both country (room for a cow and a garden) and city (frequent social visits from his friend Whitman and a host of other literary and bohemian Washingtonians). Following a tumultuous start in acquiring gainful employment, literary recognition , and domestic stability, John Burroughs, by 1872, seemed to have created for himself a successful Washington existence. But in that same year, Burroughs suddenly resigned his position with the Treasury Department, agreed to take a temporary position as receiver of a failed bank in Middleton, New York, and returned to his homeland to begin a life of farming and writing, particularly writing about life in and around his farm. By the turn of the century, Burroughs’s farm at West Park on the Hudson and later his nearby cabin, known as Slabsides, became a pilgrimage site for thousands .4 Having refreshed themselves with Burroughs’s nature essays, these seekers pursued both Burroughs himself and their own firsthand experiences of his natural surround. Burroughs soon became an Emersonian “representative man” for a middle-class culture caught up in the first flush of a back-to-nature craze.5 In hindsight and in terms of future fame, fortune, and literary success, Burroughs ’s move back to the land was a success. But Burroughs neither predicted nor particularly desired such success. Moreover, his life in Washington seemed well situated to produce the modest success he did desire: a means of making a living, access to the natural world, and opportunity to write. His job at the Treasury provided not only money but sometimes also the time and space (both physical and psychological) to do the literary work that Ursula deemed “scribbling ” at home.6 More important, Washington proved to be an ideal city for a nature lover such as Burroughs. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, we may find it difficult to imagine how Washington would have provided sufficient grist for Burroughs’s literary-naturalist mill. But Washington in the post–Civil War period was still a young city from which access to outdoor rambles could be acquired simply by foot. The essays in Winter Sunshine (1875)—many of which are based on his weekend rambles in Washington, Virginia, and Maryland—reveal a seemingly limitless selection of trails, mountains, farmlands, and birds’ nests for the young author-ornithologist to explore. Burroughs’s comments on the Washington sunshine reveal that the atmosphere of the capital city was rarefied in more than the political sense. “It seemed as if I had never seen but a second-rate article...

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