Burroughs has coupled some of his sketches of outdoor nature with a few chapters of a more purely literary character. A wonderful compilation of the author's literary essays coupled with his delightful ornithological outdoor sketches 'to follow out these lessons of the earth and air, and behold their application to higher matters. Included is an essay on Walt Whitman, whom Burroughs calls "the strongest poetic pulse that has yet beat in America, or perhaps in modern times."
John Burroughs was one of the earliest and most articulate pioneers of the United States conservation movement, publishing twenty-eight books on the natural world during the height of the Industrial Revolution. As an author, teacher, and poet, he wrote with intimacy and feeling, illustrating verbal landscapes and providing philosophical insights about the environment. People by the hundreds of thousands relished his writings. His friends included Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and John Muir. Burroughs was dedicated to studying the world and making nature come to life on the written page.
In the last decades of the 19th century, his prolific nature essays helped spawn the nature study movement and made him an international celebrity.
