THE EARLY SUMMER FLOWERS. 185 
Nature as viewed by the naturalist rather than by the 
biologist, naturally form a part of my library. 
So I find it pleasant to wander in imagination by 
the side of gentle Izaak Walton through the sweet 
English meadows, listening to the song of lark and 
nightingale and milkmaid, breathing the delicious odor 
of the hawthorn hedges, filling my basket with the finny 
treasures of the stream and filling my mind with sweet- 
ness and light, as he discourses on the old-fashioned but 
choicely-good poetry of Kit Marlow and Sir Walter 
Raleigh and George Herbert and Edmund Waller and 
other poets of the time. It does not matter now that 
the modern angler studies his art in other books or from 
other masters, the perennial charm of the style of ‘The 
Compleat Angler,” which has stood the test of nearly 
250 years, has gained for its author a literary immor- 
tality. 
It is now a little more than a hundred years since 
Gilbert White’s “Natural History of Selborne” was first 
printed, perhaps the most famous book of its kind in 
any language. The feeling of many readers toward it 
has been best expressed by John Burroughs in his “ In- 
door Studies.” He says: ‘I was moved to take down 
my White’s ‘Selborne’ and examine it again for the 
source of delight I had had in it, on hearing a distin- 
guished literary man, the late Richard Grant White, 
say it was a book he could not read with any degree of 
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