Little Rivers: A Book of Essays in Profitable Idleness was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1895, and it represents Van Dyke’s manifesto as a nature writer: the argument that the small, the intimate, and the overlooked are more worthy of attention than the grand and spectacular. The title essay makes the case explicitly: great rivers are impressive but impersonal; little rivers — the brooks, creeks, and streams that thread through settled country — are where the human relationship with water is most intimate and most revealing.
The essays range across the northeastern landscape: the Adirondacks, the Canadian maritime provinces, Pennsylvania trout streams, and the fields and woods of New Jersey. Van Dyke writes about walking, fishing, camping, and simply sitting and observing with a combination of precision and warmth that distinguishes his work from both the transcendentalist tradition (Thoreau’s sometimes severe self-sufficiency) and the adventure-writing tradition (the emphasis on danger and physical challenge).
Van Dyke’s nature is not wilderness but landscape — nature as it coexists with human settlement, streams as they flow through farms and villages, forests as they border roads and fields. This is a democratic vision of nature: available to anyone with a free afternoon and the willingness to pay attention.
Collecting Little Rivers
First edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1895): Green cloth, gilt.
Market values:
- First edition: $25–$70
- Later editions: $8–$20