John Burroughs

"John is so calm, so poised, so much at home with himself, so much a familiar spirit of the forests," wrote Walt Whitman of his friend, the naturalist and writer John Burroughs. "He is a child of the woods, fields, hills - native to them in a rare sense (in a sense almost a miracle)." Henry James called Burroughs "a more humorous, more available and more sociable Thoreau. James wrote that "the minuteness of Burroughs's observation, the keenness of his perception, give. Him a real originality, and his sketches have a delightful oddity, vivacity, and freshness." Burroughs was born in 1837, the…