GILBERT WHITE AND SELBORNE 85 



Hampshire village. Mr. Hudson sat under that famous, 

 patriarchal yew in the churchyard, and there, not the 

 ghost, but a kind of earthly emanation, a " residuum 

 of life," a faint surviving image of the man, appeared 

 to him. The two conversed and compared notes, the 

 eighteenth century questioning, the twentieth respond- 

 ing. And this duet is a piece of really inspired prose, 

 by which w^ are made to comprehend how far we 

 have advanced from the eighteenth century to the 

 modern attitude to nature. Nor, in a few lines, could 

 the personality of the gentle, domestic, old scholar of 

 nature be more magically summoned out of the 

 past. 



This, then, was the message of Selborne, and made 

 the walk to it something of a quest, almost an initia- 

 tion, as though, hidden beneath some grass-blade or 

 in the ivy of the church tower, there was to be found 

 a minute " crock of gold." 



When, therefore, I set out for Selborne over the high 

 table-land from Petersfield through Froxfield and East 

 Tisted, I felt I was doing the best I could for the 

 emotional promise of the day by keeping an attentive 

 eye for the birds in my neighbourhood and an atten- 

 tive inward ear for that refined and spiritualized con- 

 versation, like the vivid though leisurely intonations 

 of two blackbirds. 



I had not gone far when I heard a willow-wren mur- 

 muring from the bough of a hornbeam by the side of 

 the road. It was one of the first I had heard that 

 spring, for though the willow-wren is one of the earliest 

 migrants hither, it takes longer to get into its musical 

 stride than do chiff-chaff, blackcap, wood-wren or garden- 

 warbler. Warde Fowler has given a very exact des- 

 cription of the bird's " dying fall " ; Burroughs, the 

 much overpraised American ornithologist, who paid our 

 warblers a visit, speaks of its " long, tender, delicious 

 warble — ^the song of the chaffinch refined and idealized " 

 (I cannot myself see the faintest resemblance in it to 

 the chaffinch's song), and Mr. Hudson of the Hkeness 

 of the notes in the finished cadence to the human voice, 

 and so appeal to human sympathy. It is not at all 



