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with his rural innocence (or both) in the fall of 1863, but he did fall in love. (There is, however, no evidence of a sexual encounter between them.) To Whitman, his twenty-six-year-old protégé was like an only son; also, Burroughs was an open-hearted romantic with an unjaded face like “a field of wheat.” Mentoring young men like Burroughs came easily to Whitman. He had come to Washington to help nurse the 70,000 Union and Confederate soldiers wounded in action and recuperating in poorly run, unsanitary hospitals. Under Whitman’s tutelage, Burroughs started writing about nature in a more intimate way, perfecting his literary craft as a prose stylist when he was not working at his desk in the Treasury Department. There was a refreshing hominess to Burroughs’s essays about bullfrogs, maple syrup, and trout spawning. As Burroughs explained, his privileged education under Whitman—who was meticulously working on his cycle of war poems Drum Taps when they met—led him to try to “liberate the birds from the scientists.” Unlike Roosevelt, Burroughs wasn’t overly interested in John James Audubon, the hunter and taxidermist extraordinaire, carting around arsenic paste and a shotgun. But Burroughs did want to become a writer about green spaces who would be celebrated as the “Audubon of prose.”14

For the most part Burroughs spent 1863 to 1873 in Washington, D.C., writing outdoors prose. His friendship with Whitman grew and grew; the gray-bearded poet calling the Catskills writer his own personal “naturalist-in-residence” who felt empathy even for quick-breeding insects. To Burroughs, Whitman’s controversial Leaves of Grass was “an utterance from Nature, and opposite to modern literature, which is an utterance from Art.”15 When Abraham Lincoln was shot, Whitman—who used to cher confrère with Lincoln whenever they passed on the street—mourned like a grieving widow. The great Lincoln, Whitman moaned, had been stolen away in his prime.16

Just before the assassination, Burroughs had hiked up Batavia Mountain in the Catskills seeking an afternoon of solitude. Pausing for a moment to catch his breath, he was suddenly mesmerized by the long, ethereal, flutelike song of a hermit thrush. The sounds of this bird held Burroughs transfixed, as if in a dream, for ten or fifteen minutes. Craning his neck high and low, looking up in tree branches and along the ground where the songster might have been foraging, Burroughs struck out. There would be no sighting of a hermit thrush that afternoon. All he took away was a comforting memory of the delicate ringing melody. Upon hearing Burroughs talk effusively about the hermit thrush, Whitman wrote his celebrated eulogy to Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” One verse went as follows:

Solitary the thrush,

The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,

Sings by himself a song.

Song of the bleeding throat.17

While Whitman worked on Leaves of Grass, Burroughs became his cheerleader, comparing him to Thoreau and Emerson. Encouraged by Whitman, confident that Leaves of Grass was the great American masterpiece, the very embodiment of democracy in verse, Burroughs wrote his own first book, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person.18 Whitman himself helped edit the manuscript, rearranging quotations and sentences. Walks through Washington’s parks now became commonplace for the two nature lovers, who often strolled through the White House gardens or Rock Creek Park in search of a veery thrush or ruby-crowned kinglet.19 And Whitman was the one who chose Wake-Robin—the trillium found in American woods—as a title for Burroughs’s second book. “He thinks natural history, to be true to life, must be inspired, as well as poetry,” Burroughs wrote of Whitman, following one of their hikes. “The true poet and true scientist are close akin. They go forth into nature like friends…. The interests of the two in nature are widely different, yet in no true sense are they hostile.”20 Whitman’s belief in the special connection between science and poetry was shared by Roosevelt.

As an ice-breaker