THE BANKS AND BRAES O' BONNIE DOON.”

Oft hae I roved by bonnie Doon,

To see the rose and woodbine twine;
And ilka bird sang o' his luve.
And fondly sae did I o' mine.
Etching from a Photograph.

JOHN BURROUGHS

(1837-)

OHN BURROUGHS was born in Roxbury, New York, April 3d, 1837, and like many other American youths who later in life became distinguished, he went to school winters and worked on the farm in summer. He grew up among people who neither read books nor cared for them, and he considers this circumstance best suited to his development. Early intercourse with literary men would, he believes, have dwarfed his original faculty.

He began to write essays at the age of fourteen, but these early literary efforts give little hint of his later work, of that faculty for seeing, and commenting on all that he saw in nature, which became his chief characteristic. He was especially fond of essays; one of his first purchases with his own money was a full set of Dr. Johnson, and for a whole year he lived on The Idler' and 'The Rambler and tried to imitate their ponderous prose. His first contributions to literature, modeled on these essays, were promptly returned. By chance he picked up a volume of Emerson, the master who was to revolutionize his whole manner of thinking; and as he had fed on Dr. Johnson he fed on the 'Essays and Miscellanies,' until a paper he wrote at nineteen on 'Expressions' was accepted by the editor of the Atlantic, with a lurking doubt whether it had not come to him on false pretenses, as it was very much like an early essay of Emerson.

JOHN BURROUGHS

Mr. Burroughs ascribes to Emerson, who stimulated his religious. nature, his improved literary expression; while Whitman was to him. a great humanizing power, and Matthew Arnold taught him clear thinking and clean writing. He had passed through these different influences by the time he was twenty-one or twenty-two; had taught for a while; and from 1863 to 1873 was vault-keeper and afterwards chief of the organization division of the Bureau of National Banks, in the Treasury Department. For several years afterward he was a special national bank examiner.

The literary quality of his writings from the first captivates the reader. He has the interpretive power which makes us see what he