Whitman: A Study By John BurroughsTHE writing of this preliminary
chapter, and the final survey and revision of my Whitman essay, I am
making at a rustic house I have built at a wild place a mile or more
from my home upon the river. I call this place Whitman Land, because in
many ways it is typical of my poet, an amphitheatre of precipitous rock,
slightly veiled with a delicate growth of verdure, enclosing a few acres
of prairie-like land, once the site of an ancient lake, now a garden of
unknown depth and fertility. Elemental ruggedness, savageness, and
grandeur, combined with wonderful tenderness, modernness, and geniality.
There rise the gray scarred cliffs, crowned here and there with a dead
hemlock or pine, where, morning after morning, I have seen the
bald-eagle perch, and here at their feet this level area of tender
humus, with three perennial springs of delicious cold water flowing in
its margin a huge granite bowl filled with the elements and potencies of
life. The scene has a strange fascination for me, and holds me here day
after day. From the highest point of rocks I can overlook a long stretch
of the river and of the farming country beyond I can hear owls hoot,
hawks scream, and roosters crow. Birds of the garden and orchard meet
birds of the forest upon the shaggy cedar posts that uphold my porch. At
dusk the call of the whippoorwill mingles with the chorus of the
pickerel frogs, and in the morning I hear through the robins' cheerful
burst the sombre plaint of the mourningdove. When I tire of my
manuscript, I walk in the woods, or climb the rocks, or help the men
clear up the ground, piling and burning the stumps and rubbish. This
scene and situation, so primitive and secluded, yet so touched with and
adapted to civilization, responding to the moods of both sides of the
life and imagination of a modern man, seems, I repeat, typical in many
ways of my poet, and is a veritable Whitman land. Whitman does not to me
suggest the wild and unkempt as he seems to do to many he suggests the
cosmic and the elemental, and this is one of the dominant thoughts that
run through my dissertation. Scenes of power and savagery in nature were
more welcome to him, probably more stimulating to him, than the scenes
of the pretty and placid, and he cherished the hope that he had put into
his "Leaves" some of the tonic and fortifying quality of Nature in her
more grand and primitive aspects.
