3 quotations linked to Winter Sunshine by or associated with John Burroughs, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Winter observation, walking, seasonal beauty, travel, gratitude, attention, natural forms and the mental exhilaration Burroughs finds outdoors.
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“But, whichever way I go, I am glad I came.”
The pleasure of walking is not confined to one perfect route because attention and openness allow value to emerge from whichever road is actually taken.
Source note: Winter Sunshine, essay “The Exhilarations of the Road.” The sentence follows Burroughs’s comparison of winter walks in different directions and precedes his claim that all roads lead toward the walker’s sought-for Jerusalem.
“He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter.”
Seasonal change does not exhaust nature’s capacity for wonder; attention can discover beauty in austerity as readily as in abundance.
Source note: Winter Sunshine, title essay; Project Gutenberg #4279. Burroughs follows by contrasting summer pageantry with winter’s enduring elements, sky, stars, moon and simplified landscape.
“There is everywhere the vigorous and masculine winter air, and the impalpable sustenance the mind draws from all natural forms.”
Burroughs describes winter landscape as mentally sustaining, suggesting that austere natural forms can nourish attention even when seasonal abundance is absent.
Source note: Winter Sunshine, “The Exhilarations of the Road.” “Masculine” is Burroughs’s nineteenth-century descriptive adjective in this sentence; this collection preserves rather than modernizes the historical wording.