Wake-Robin.
“To interpret Nature is not to improve upon her: it is to draw her out; it is to have an emotional intercourse with her, absorb her, and reproduce her tinged with the colors of the spirit": First edition of John Burroughs' Wake-Robin
Wake-Robin.
BURROUGHS, John.
$400.00
Item Number: 139475
New York: Published by Hurd and Houghton at the Riverside Press, 1871.
First edition of the author’s first commercially published book in BAL’s binding A; the most elaborate of the three variant first edition bindings, of which there is no known priority. BAL 2135. Octavo, original publisher’s cloth with gilt titles and tooling to the spine and front panel, pale yellow endpapers. In very good condition with the gilt decorations very bright. Housed in a custom folding chemise case.
"Burroughs' first book, Notes on Walt Whitman, is something of a literary anomaly, being possibly written in part by Whitman himself. In his second, he steps into his proper field. Though not published until he was nearly forty, Wake-Robin is a book of youthful ardor. Its freshness is unquestioned, its philosophy charming and its manner that of distinguished literature. As a popular essayist on nature Burroughs was the successor of Thoreau, -- less imbued than the latter with a sense of its ethical significance, yet equally sympathetic and far exceeding him in scientific spirit" (Fullerton).
