GILBEET white's BOOK 165 



hurly-buily outside world do not enter. Being thus 

 surrounded and thus inclined, in the fall, when you 

 first build a fire in your grate and begin to feel 

 again like browsing along the old paths, open 

 White's "Selborne," and read a chapter here and 

 there, and bend your ear attentively to his quiet, 

 cheerful, but earnest talk. Bach letter shall seem 

 addressed to you personally with news from the 

 fields and byways you so lately visited. The pas- 

 toral quiet and sweetness and harmony of the Eng- 

 lish landscape pervade them all, with just that tinge 

 of reminiscence, that flavor of human sympathy and 

 human absorption, that English fields suggest. The 

 style is like a rich, tender sward, simple and unob- 

 trusive, with scarcely a flower of rhetoric anywhere, 

 but very pleasing and effective and entirely ade- 

 quate: it is nature and art perfectly married, each 

 seconding the other. Its brevity, its directness, its 

 simplicity, its dealings with familiar and near-at- 

 hand objects, shows, occurrences, etc., make it a 

 book which never sates and never tires the reader. 

 It is little more than an appetizer, but as such it 

 takes high rank. As a stimulus and spur to the 

 study of natural history, it has no doubt had more 

 influence than any other work of the century. Its 

 merits in this direction alone would perhaps account 

 for its success. But, while it has other merits, and 

 great ones, it has been a fortunate book: it has had 

 little competition; it has had the wind always with 

 it, so to speak. It furnished a staple the demand 

 for which was always steady and the supply small. 



