6 PREFACE 



gained of schools nor books; and it is given forth in the 

 hope that sufficient of the freshness of bush mornings re- 

 mains to counteract any drabness that may have accumu- 

 lated from the "ripening" influence of city and study. True 

 enough, many of the chapters are "bookish" in the sense 

 that verse quotations are numerous. But for this the 

 poets are as much to blame as were the birds and the 

 flowers in another aspect. Blessings upon all three for 

 Springtime (and world-wide) monopolists of youthful heads 

 and hearts! 



It was a custom of mine in the frankly impressionable 

 period the years immediately succeeding the catapult stage 

 to go bushwards with camera and field glasses over 

 shoulders and a book of good verse or prose in a pocket. 

 Leigh Hunt recommended much the same treatment for 

 Shakespeare on Shakespeare's birthday, but held himself 

 ready to drop the book at the call of living Nature. Simi- 

 larly, my reading in the Australian bush has been entirely 

 desultory. Did the birds prove unusually coy, the sunlight 

 would play on the pages of the book for quite a long time. 

 But there were occasions when, in a manner of speaking, the 

 curtain rose a few minutes after the spectator was seated. 

 Reading was usually out of the question then. Probably 

 the book had been read before and would be read again, but 

 it did not follow that the precise little secrets of the bush 

 being revealed would ever be chanced upon again. Withal, 

 a good deal of reading was accomplished in all those odd 

 moments, and so the echoes from the poets are portions of 

 the gleanings of early bush days. The affinity seems 

 natural enough, too; certainly, one could say of lyric verse, 

 equally with the songs of birds, "The music in my heart I 

 bore long after it was heard no more." 



It is quite true, as the late John Burroughs remarked long 

 ago, that you cannot run and read the book of Nature. Too 

 many would-be naturalists, lured by the greenness of dis- 

 tant fields, rush about their own and other countries, to the 

 neglect of the opportunity for more fraternal study near at 

 hand. I have sought acquaintance with wild birds in many 

 parts of Australia, but intimacy has come only by dalliance. 

 This is the kind of thing, of course, that old Belarius, of 

 Shakespeare's Cymbeline, preached to the two young princes 



