Famous Single Poems
ago,” she writes, “while spending a never-to-be-forgotten day at Slabsides, the poet inscribed this stanza for one of our party, and explained that he had composed it after his famous poem was committed to print. It adds an important element of psychic force to the fateful prophecy, ‘Mine own shall come to me.’”
So far as known, this stanza has not been preserved elsewhere; but it furnishes an altogether worthy conclusion to the poem and should perhaps be added to it.
Long before his death John Burroughs completely outgrew the iron-bound tenets of the Hardshell Baptists, and this was due, in no small degree, to his constantly growing intimacy with nature, and his observation of her moods.
“I didn’t start in the bird business until the spring of 1863,” he says in one of his talks. “I was twenty-five or twenty-six years old before birds began to interest me.” But from that time on, they interested him more and more—and not birds only, but all the manifestations of the world about him. It was characteristic of him that nothing seemed to him too minute or too commonplace to be unworthy his attention; but this study gave him an ever increasing sense of his own isolation.
As he phrases it, he became more and more
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