vi INTRODUCTION 



writer who helps us to see Nature clearly and at the same time to feel profoundly. 

 Sir Thomas Browne sounded more stops than his predecessors, but not this one. 

 Even Robert Burton's infinite variety includes nothing nearer to what we seek 

 than passages like that beginning : "To take a boat in a pleasant evening, and 

 with musick to row upon the waters." Izaak Walton was too blithe and un- 

 troubled to have discovered the sources of natural magic, though he has chance 

 effects which are not unlike it. And though Arnold seems in one place inclined 

 to give credit to Gilbert White for the power, I do not see that his view of Nature 

 was far different from Sir Roger de Coverley's except in its curiosity. 



In our own day Nature has been used by many of the best writers of fiction 

 as a magical background. It is hardly necessary to mention names, but those 

 of Messrs. Hardy, Meredith, Hudson, Cunninghame Graham and Conrad will 

 at once suggest their diversity. And it is becoming every year more and more 

 characteristic of our literature to study this background of " inanimate nature " 

 and the animals for its own sake. Cowper's hare is interesting only because 

 Cowper was fond of it and kind to it, Burns' mouse chiefly because it moved 

 his passion ; but it would not be hard to point to passages in the work of living 

 men where the animal emerges free from any human taint, grand, wild, with 

 all its savage perfume about it, in the desert attitude, and with a spiritual 

 quality not of the writer's but of its own. The typical modern writer does 

 actually suggest in written words that violent shock of the beautiful but in- 

 human which we have when suddenly the tall hare leaps across our path, or the 

 dog fox's bark on the Downs makes twenty centuries of civilization nothing. 



This interpretative literature has an immense field before it. There is no 

 fact in Nature which some day it will not evoke into shining, melodious 

 perfumed, tangible life. It is trying hard to do so ; perhaps it is a little 

 troubled by the size of the field. It denies no fact, just as it rejects no intuition. 

 The best of its exponents have a sound knowledge of the facts of Nature and 

 an inexorable curiosity, coupled, as they have hardly been before, with a deep 

 and sometimes passionate and mournful love of all that takes place in the 

 open air and in the human mind under its influence. They have, too, a 

 curious interest in character the character of birds, for example, of snakes, 

 of places. Their writing adds considerably to pure knowledge, and, by their 

 sense of the poetry in life, appeals to every one with an intellectual and spirit- 

 ual life, whether naturalist or not ; and it gives an interesting view of the 



