Part 6 (2/2)

My summer at Cooperstoas an enjoyable and a profitable one I studied Latin, French, English literature, algebra, and geometry If I remember correctly, I stood first in composition over the whole school

I joined the Websterian Society and frequently debated, and was one of the three or four orators chosen by the school to ”orate” in a grove on the shore of the lake, on the Fourth of July I held forth in the true spread-eagle style

I entered into the sports of the school, ball-playing and rowing on the lake, with the zest of youth

One significant thing I remember: I was always on the lookout for books of essays It was at this time that I took reen apple--not that he was unripe, but I wasn't ripe for hiain, and said, ”Why, this tastes good”; and took a bigger bite; then soon devoured everything of his I could find

I say I was early on the lockout for books of essays, and I wanted the essay to begin, not in a casual way by some reeneral truth, as ht dick's works on the strength of his opening sentence--”Man is a coes in taste he passes through!

About the ti, Pope was my favorite poet

His wit and cohts” also struck reater writer than Emerson Shakespeare I did not come to appreciate till years later, and Chaucer and Spenser I have never learned to care for

I aht lines--from the formal and the coe seems written, that is, theequal, the ht of his style, as such; yet if his sentences are clothed like the lilies of the field, so much the better

Unconscious beauty that flows inevitably and spontaneously out of the subject, or out of the writer'swere, of course, crude enough It tooktime to put aside all affectation andit, and get down to what I really saw and felt But I think now I can tell dead wood inwhen I see it--tell when I fulance off and fail to reach the quick

(In August, 1902, Mr Burroughs wrote me of a visit to Cooperstown, after all these years: ”I found Cooperstown not ed The lake and the hills were, of course, the sao, and the main street seemed but little altered Of the old se, and the trees had so grown about it that I hardly knew the place I again dipped rave, and threaded some of the streets I had known so well I wished I could have been alone there

I wanted to muse and dream, and invoke the spirit of other days, but the spirits would not rise in the presence of strangers I could not quite get a glimpse of the world as it appeared to me in those callow days It was here that I saw otistical Chapter') and first dipped into E the Se student worked on the ho school at Buffalo Grove, Illinois, where he taught until the following spring, returning East to irl I left behind ht in various schools in New York and New Jersey, until the fall of 1863 As a rule, in the su this period he was reading

There was a short inters in a patent buckle, and for a brief period he had dreams of wealth But the buckle project failed, the dreaan to read

Fro much, on philosophical subjects mainly

It was in 1863 that he first became interested in the birds--C B)

Ever since the tie bird in the woods of which I have told you, the thought had frequently occurred toca of '63, when I was teaching school near West Point In the library of the Military Academy, which I frequently visited of a Saturday, I chanced upon the works of Audubon I took fire at once It was like bringing together fire and powder! I was ripe for the adventure; I had leisure, I was in a good bird country, and I had Audubon to sti to the Acadeerly and joyously I took up the study! It fitted in so ith ; it turned ave to rove and wood as a new storehouse of possible treasures I could go fishi+ng or ca noith my resources for enjoyment doubled That first hooded warbler that I discovered and identified in a near-by bushy field one Sunday ave ust I ith three friends into the Adirondacks, no day or place or detention ca on every hand; a neorld was opened to me in the midst of the old

At once I was an my first paper, ”The Return of the Birds,” that fall, and finished it in Washi+ngton, whither I went in October, and where I lived for ten years

Writing about the birds and always treating them in connection with the season and their environovernain s and influences The paper just referred to is, as you may see, mainly written out of my otten in ave value to all my youthful experiences and observations of the birds

(This brings us to the time when our subject is fairly launched on early ular employment--a clerkshi+p in the office of the Coenial in itself, affords his he th and efficiency as an essayist--C B)

SELF-analYSIS