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Under the Maples
Under the Maples By John Burroughs
78 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2001
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About the author
John Burroughs
916 books174 followersIn 1837, naturalist John Burroughs was born on a farm in the Catskills. After teaching, and clerking in government, Burroughs returned to the Catskills, and devoted his life to writing and gardening. He knew Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir and Walt Whitman, writing the first biography of Whitman. Most of his 22 books are collected essays on nature and philosophy. In In The Light of Day (1900) he wrote about his views on religion: "If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go." "When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what is it that I really see there, I am constrained to say, 'There is no God' . . . " In his journal dated Feb. 18, 1910, he wrote: "Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all—that has been my religion." He died on his 83rd birthday. The John Burroughs Sanctuary can be found near West Park, N.Y., and his rustic cabin, Slabsides, has been preserved. D. 1921.
According to biographers at the American Memory project at the Library of Congress, John Burroughs was the most important practitioner after Henry David Thoreau of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay. By the turn of the 20th century he had become a virtual cultural institution[peacock term] in his own right: the Grand Old Man of Nature at a time when the American romance with the idea of nature, and the American conservation movement, had come fully into their own. His extraordinary popularity and popular visibility were sustained by a prolific stream of essay collections, beginning with Wake-Robin in 1871.
In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs' special identity was less that of a scientific naturalist than that of "a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world." The result was a body of work whose perfect resonance with the tone of its cultural moment perhaps explains both its enormous popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since.
Since his death in 1921, John Burroughs has been commemorated by the John Burroughs Association. The association maintains the John Burroughs Sanctuary in Esopus, New York, a 170 acre plot of land surrounding Slabsides, and awards a medal each year to "the author of a distinguished book of natural history".
Twelve U.S. schools have been named after Burroughs, including public elementary schools in Washington, DC and Minneapolis, Minnesota, public middle schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Los Angeles, California, a public high school in Burbank, California, and a private secondary school, John Burroughs School, in St. Louis, Missouri. Burroughs Mountain in Mount Rainier National Park is named in his honor.There was a medal named after John Burroughs and the John Burroughs Association publicly recognizes well-written and illustrated natural history publications. Each year the Burroughs medal is awarded to the author of a distinguished book of natural history, with the presentation made during the Association's annual meeting on the first Monday of April.
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bur...
http://research.amnh.org/burroughs/
According to biographers at the American Memory project at the Library of Congress, John Burroughs was the most important practitioner after Henry David Thoreau of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay. By the turn of the 20th century he had become a virtual cultural institution[peacock term] in his own right: the Grand Old Man of Nature at a time when the American romance with the idea of nature, and the American conservation movement, had come fully into their own. His extraordinary popularity and popular visibility were sustained by a prolific stream of essay collections, beginning with Wake-Robin in 1871.
In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs' special identity was less that of a scientific naturalist than that of "a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world." The result was a body of work whose perfect resonance with the tone of its cultural moment perhaps explains both its enormous popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since.
Since his death in 1921, John Burroughs has been commemorated by the John Burroughs Association. The association maintains the John Burroughs Sanctuary in Esopus, New York, a 170 acre plot of land surrounding Slabsides, and awards a medal each year to "the author of a distinguished book of natural history".
Twelve U.S. schools have been named after Burroughs, including public elementary schools in Washington, DC and Minneapolis, Minnesota, public middle schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Los Angeles, California, a public high school in Burbank, California, and a private secondary school, John Burroughs School, in St. Louis, Missouri. Burroughs Mountain in Mount Rainier National Park is named in his honor.There was a medal named after John Burroughs and the John Burroughs Association publicly recognizes well-written and illustrated natural history publications. Each year the Burroughs medal is awarded to the author of a distinguished book of natural history, with the presentation made during the Association's annual meeting on the first Monday of April.
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bur...
http://research.amnh.org/burroughs/
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 23, 2025
4 stars. I’m starting to notice a pattern with Burroughs. The first page or two are good, then it gets boring and I have to make myself pull through, then it gets interesting again. This book was mostly composed of compiled sketches. There was a bit of Burroughs’ lovely description but actually not much. What I enjoyed what the descriptions of his bird-hunting with Roosevelt and camping with Ford and Edison. It is so interesting to hear of those historical personages from the POV of a friend. The POV of the book is very evolutionary (he quotes Darwin many times) and Nature is the great force. So I didn’t agree with many of his ideas, especially when he says we cannot known God personally, that prayer is useless, and that “it was Joshua’s mind that stopped, not the sun.” For the most part, however, I found this book interesting and the parts on his life in the 1900s is fascinating!
A Favourite Quote: “The born naturalist is one of the most lucky men in the world. Winter or summer, rain or shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, his pleasures are always near at hand. The great book of nature is open before him and he has only to turn the leaves.”
A Favourite Beautiful Quote: “The strain of the hermit thrush which floats down to me from the wooded heights above day after day at all hours, but more as the shades of night are falling—what does this pure, serene, exalted strain mean but that, in Browning's familiar words, God's in his heaven—All's right with the world!”
A Favourite Humorous Quote: “One evening as we sat in the lamplight, he reading Lord Cromer on Egypt, and I a book on the man-eating lions of Tsavo, and Mrs. Roosevelt sitting near with her needlework, suddenly Roosevelt's hand came down on the table with such a bang that it made us both jump, and Mrs. Roosevelt exclaimed in a slightly nettled tone, ‘Why, my dear, what is the matter?’
“He had killed a mosquito with a blow that would almost have demolished an African lion.”
A Favourite Quote: “The born naturalist is one of the most lucky men in the world. Winter or summer, rain or shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, his pleasures are always near at hand. The great book of nature is open before him and he has only to turn the leaves.”
A Favourite Beautiful Quote: “The strain of the hermit thrush which floats down to me from the wooded heights above day after day at all hours, but more as the shades of night are falling—what does this pure, serene, exalted strain mean but that, in Browning's familiar words, God's in his heaven—All's right with the world!”
A Favourite Humorous Quote: “One evening as we sat in the lamplight, he reading Lord Cromer on Egypt, and I a book on the man-eating lions of Tsavo, and Mrs. Roosevelt sitting near with her needlework, suddenly Roosevelt's hand came down on the table with such a bang that it made us both jump, and Mrs. Roosevelt exclaimed in a slightly nettled tone, ‘Why, my dear, what is the matter?’
“He had killed a mosquito with a blow that would almost have demolished an African lion.”
January 13, 2014
The edition I own is the Houghton Mifflin 1921, not this.
July 7, 2021
This is the first of the two posthumous collections that were put out by Burroughs's girlfriend. Some of the pieces are insufficiently polished, as a result, but there was an eager public for whatever came from his pen, so she did a public service by bringing them to publication.
I first discovered John Burroughs from Riverside Literature Series editions that I found in antique stores, but I pretty quickly was scouring book fairs to assemble a complete edition. I realize now that the books I was reading back then were about a hundred years old at the time, and that I've taken as long reading him as he took publishing, so I'm still reading volumes that are right around a hundred years old.
Clara Barrus designed this volume to appeal to Burroughs's nature-writing fans, and she sandwiches the selection so that the bulk of the first half and the ending are about the details of nature rather than discussions of Nature. It's good to read Burroughs the observer, even if there's less observation per rumination than his best work. I read most of this volume on the porch in the early mornings, with a Peterson bird guide at hand.
There were fewer memorable observations in this volume, but I did copy this one out:
--As a rule, young mountains always wear the look of age, from their deep lines and jagged and angular character, while the really old mountains wear the look of youth from their comparative smoothness, their unwrinkled appearance, their long, flowing lines. Time has taken the conceit all out of them.
There are two travelogues that were quite amusing, as well. Burroughs was friends with Teddy Roosevelt, which helped generate the National Park system. There's a whole book about that in his Works, but here we have a short piece that couldn't really be published until after Teddy was gone. It's entitled "With Roosevelt at Pine Knot" and includes this bit:
*
[John Burroughs is at Pine Knot, Roosevelt's rural cabin in Virginia.]
It occurred to me later that evening how risky it was for the President of the United States to be so unprotected -- without a guard of any kind -- in that out-of-the-way place, and I expressed something of this to him, suggesting that some one might "kidnap" him.
"Oh," he answered, slapping his hand on his hip pocket, "I go armed, and they would have to be mighty quick to get the drop on me."
Shortly after that, to stretch my legs a little and listen to the night sounds in the Virginia woods, I went out around the cabin and almost immediately heard some animal run heavily through the woods not far from the house. I thought perhaps it was a neighboring dog, but, on speaking of it to Mrs. Roosevelt, was told that two secret service men came every night at nine o'clock and stood on guard till morning, spending the day at a farmhouse in the vicinity. She did not let the President know of this because it would irritate him.
[It should be noted that about four years later Roosevelt would, in fact, be shot; and would give a 90-minute speech with the blood staining his shirt, before accepting medical attention.]
*
The second travelogue has Burroughs on a road trip that seems to have started in Philadelphia, followed the Lincoln Highway to around Greensburg, PA, and then gone down to the Great Smoky Mountains. Who was on this trip with Burroughs? Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone.
That's the good stuff, but there was a sharp downside to this volume as well, which reduced my rating. One can notice a decline in Burroughs's mental powers in the last few volumes, and it's both sad and annoying. World War I has made him bitter, and he blames Darwin for it. He is unable to distinguish Social Darwinism (which Darwin himself had no time for) from Darwin's work; and he has boiled all of Darwin down to a couple of off-hand remarks that the man made in letters or in reported conversation. The War brings out racist remarks that had never been a feature of his work, as well. Burroughs, in other words, has run right off the rails.
What's annoying here is that he once "got it" about Darwin; but now he's making comments that he should know better than to do. And he's clearly looking to walk back his atheism, though he keeps tripping over himself while he does it. This makes for painful reading, and I've written some very rude remarks in the margins. I simply have no respect for a sentence that begins, "Darwin failed utterly in his theory of the origin of species,..." and you just want to slap the guy.
There's a lot of personifying Nature in this volume, almost all of it nonsense. His brain was going. It's painful to watch.
I first discovered John Burroughs from Riverside Literature Series editions that I found in antique stores, but I pretty quickly was scouring book fairs to assemble a complete edition. I realize now that the books I was reading back then were about a hundred years old at the time, and that I've taken as long reading him as he took publishing, so I'm still reading volumes that are right around a hundred years old.
Clara Barrus designed this volume to appeal to Burroughs's nature-writing fans, and she sandwiches the selection so that the bulk of the first half and the ending are about the details of nature rather than discussions of Nature. It's good to read Burroughs the observer, even if there's less observation per rumination than his best work. I read most of this volume on the porch in the early mornings, with a Peterson bird guide at hand.
There were fewer memorable observations in this volume, but I did copy this one out:
--As a rule, young mountains always wear the look of age, from their deep lines and jagged and angular character, while the really old mountains wear the look of youth from their comparative smoothness, their unwrinkled appearance, their long, flowing lines. Time has taken the conceit all out of them.
There are two travelogues that were quite amusing, as well. Burroughs was friends with Teddy Roosevelt, which helped generate the National Park system. There's a whole book about that in his Works, but here we have a short piece that couldn't really be published until after Teddy was gone. It's entitled "With Roosevelt at Pine Knot" and includes this bit:
*
[John Burroughs is at Pine Knot, Roosevelt's rural cabin in Virginia.]
It occurred to me later that evening how risky it was for the President of the United States to be so unprotected -- without a guard of any kind -- in that out-of-the-way place, and I expressed something of this to him, suggesting that some one might "kidnap" him.
"Oh," he answered, slapping his hand on his hip pocket, "I go armed, and they would have to be mighty quick to get the drop on me."
Shortly after that, to stretch my legs a little and listen to the night sounds in the Virginia woods, I went out around the cabin and almost immediately heard some animal run heavily through the woods not far from the house. I thought perhaps it was a neighboring dog, but, on speaking of it to Mrs. Roosevelt, was told that two secret service men came every night at nine o'clock and stood on guard till morning, spending the day at a farmhouse in the vicinity. She did not let the President know of this because it would irritate him.
[It should be noted that about four years later Roosevelt would, in fact, be shot; and would give a 90-minute speech with the blood staining his shirt, before accepting medical attention.]
*
The second travelogue has Burroughs on a road trip that seems to have started in Philadelphia, followed the Lincoln Highway to around Greensburg, PA, and then gone down to the Great Smoky Mountains. Who was on this trip with Burroughs? Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone.
That's the good stuff, but there was a sharp downside to this volume as well, which reduced my rating. One can notice a decline in Burroughs's mental powers in the last few volumes, and it's both sad and annoying. World War I has made him bitter, and he blames Darwin for it. He is unable to distinguish Social Darwinism (which Darwin himself had no time for) from Darwin's work; and he has boiled all of Darwin down to a couple of off-hand remarks that the man made in letters or in reported conversation. The War brings out racist remarks that had never been a feature of his work, as well. Burroughs, in other words, has run right off the rails.
What's annoying here is that he once "got it" about Darwin; but now he's making comments that he should know better than to do. And he's clearly looking to walk back his atheism, though he keeps tripping over himself while he does it. This makes for painful reading, and I've written some very rude remarks in the margins. I simply have no respect for a sentence that begins, "Darwin failed utterly in his theory of the origin of species,..." and you just want to slap the guy.
There's a lot of personifying Nature in this volume, almost all of it nonsense. His brain was going. It's painful to watch.
September 16, 2024
Lovely, soothing.
September 25, 2014
Patchwork of ideas. I liked the first hand observations of T.R., Edison and Ford juxtaposed with lots about birds.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews