84 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



artistic axiom that he who shall lose his personality shall 

 save it. Mr. W. H. Hudson, on paying a visit to 

 Selborne, was reminded in a very beautiful piece of 

 imaginative writing of Nicholas Culpepper's line — " His 

 image stamped is on every grass " — ^and when I went 

 to Selborne myself, before reading Mr. Hudson's account, 

 I did feel his presence with extraordinary, almost 

 physical, vividness. There is at any rate no doubt 

 that " his image stamped " is on every line of his 

 work, limited as it is in scope and prosaic in temper, 

 and the accomplishment of a man who hardly ever left 

 the boimdaries of his own sequestered parish. White, 

 with his grave, courteous manner, and in his lucid, 

 composed idiom, told us all about a certain place, but 

 that is by no means a corollary of the artistic genius 

 of place. This is an immaterial thing, a spiritual en- 

 dowment, and one feels it by an awareness of his 

 presence in the shadows of the old churchyard yew as 

 behind his workaday language. It is surely one of the 

 wonders of art, embracing man and nature, the living 

 and the dead, that the correspondence of this country 

 stay-at-home should have made that parish a mental 

 rambling haunt for the whole of the English reading 

 world, and more abiding and famous in story than a 

 hundred battle-fields. But perhaps the most permanent 

 impression we receive from reading White is not the 

 place he lived in nor the history nor the art, but the 

 man. Art and natural history both take their truth 

 of being from character, and here is a whole, real, 

 simple man, born two hundred years ago, and as actual 

 and genuine a human person to us who live after him, 

 as he was to his parishioners. This is the immortality 

 of art, which embraces man and nature, the living and 

 the dead. 



After Gilbert White — Selborne, and I shall here give 

 an account of one of my visits there. If a man, be he 

 ornithologist or lover, wishes to get the hang both of 

 Gilbert White and Selborne, let him read Mr. W. H. 

 Hudson's account of his first visit to this remote 



