Locusts and Wild Honey

John Burroughs was the Thoreau of his generation, a man who made an art of looking at the world until it looked back. Locusts and Wild Honey collects his luminous observations of the natural world, essays written in 1879 that still read like dispatches from a country that no longer exists - not geographically, but in temper. His bees emerge from their winter hives in spring, and Burroughs watches them with the patience of a man who has nowhere else to be. He tracks them from bloom to bloom, records the geometry of their combs, contemplates the silent empire of the queen. This is not nature writing as data collection; it is nature writing as a form of attention, almost prayer. The collection ranges further afield - trout in their cold streams, birds invisible and then suddenly everywhere, strawberries ripening in the sun, the particular quality of light before a storm. Burroughs asks nothing of his readers but that they slow down. Those who do will find a world so densely populated with wonder that it feels almost unfair that most people pass through it without noticing.