Explore "The Face of the Fields" by Dallas Lore Sharp on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
John Burroughs began his literary career (and may he so end it! ) by writing an essay for the "Atlantic Monthly," as good an introduction (and conclusion), speaking by the rhetoric, as a lifelong composition need have. That first essay entitled "Expression," "a somewhat Emersonian Expression," says its author, was printed in the "Atlantic" for November, 1860, which was fifty years ago. Fifty years are not threescore and ten; many men have lived past threescore and ten, but not many men have written continuously for the "Atlantic" for fifty years with eye undimmed and natural force unabated.
Mr. Burroughs's eye for the truth of nature has grown clearer during these fifty years, and the vigor of his youth has steadied into a maturity of strength which in some of his latest essays -- "The Long Road," for instance -- lifts one and bears one down the unmeasured reaches of geologic time, compassing the timelessness of time, its beginninglessness, its endinglessness, as none of his earlier chapters have done.