The keen joy in the feel of the creative sunlight and springing earth--the eager tasting of every sight and sound and scent that the days brought--were not more a part of his own throbbing life than the desire to know and understand. When he was fifteen he had the promise that he might go to the academy in a neighboring town. That fall, as he plowed the lot next the sugar-bush, each furrow seemed to mark a step on the way.
When the time drew near, however, it proved as strange and unusual a desire as that for the algebra. The district school had been good enough for his brothers. So he put his disappointment behind him as he went for another winter to the Roxbury school. “Yet I am not sure but I went to Harpersfield after all,” said Mr. Burroughs; “the long, long thoughts, the earnest resolve to make myself worthy, the awakening of every part and fiber of me, helped me on my way as far, perhaps, as the unattainable academy could have done.”
The next year found the youth of seventeen teaching a country school for eleven dollars a month and “board around.” How homesick he felt for the blue hills at home, for the old barn, with the nests of the swallows and phœbe-birds beneath its roof, for the sugar-bush, and the clear, laughing trout-streams. He could see his mother hurrying through her churning so that she might go berrying on the sunny slope of Old Clump, and he knew what she brought back with the strawberries--dewy dreams of daisies and buttercups, lilting echoes of bobolinks and meadow-larks.
In October the long term was over and he went home with nearly all his earnings,--over fifty dollars,--enough to pay his way at the Hedding Literary Institute for the winter term.
In the spring of 1855 he went to New York City for the first time, hoping to find a position as teacher. He was not successful in this quest, but the trip was memorable for a raid on the second-hand book-stalls. He reached home some days later “with an empty pocket and an empty stomach, but with a bagful of books.”
Always attracted chiefly to essays, the works of Emerson influenced him greatly. He absorbed their spirit as naturally and completely as he had absorbed the sights and sounds of his native hill-country. His first article--an essay called “Expression,” which was printed without signature in _The Atlantic Monthly_--was by many attributed to Emerson. Lowell, who was at that time editor of _The Atlantic_, told, with much amusement, that before accepting the contribution he had looked through all of Emerson’s works expecting to find it and confound this plagiarizing Burroughs with a proof of his rascality.