WHITE OF SELBORNE. 
43 
believe that I am rendering them a service for which many, at 
least, will be grateful. To me, apart from the choice of language 
and the flow of the music, there is in Mr. Bridges’ verses 
the quality of absolute fidelity to Nature which I find in the 
prose of Richard Jefferies, and which gives to both a special 
charm. 
I am enabled, by the kindness of the author, to print in 
Nature Notes a sonnet dealing with the same period, which has 
hitherto appeared only in his privately printed volume. The 
Growth of Love. Those who already know the Shorter Poems will 
be glad to add this to their collection. 
While yet we wait for Spring, and from the dry 
And blackening east that so embitters March, 
Well housed must watch gray fields and meadows parch 
And driven dust and withering snowflakes fly : 
Already in glimpses of the tarnished sky 
The sun is warm and beckons to the larch, 
And where the covert hazels interarch 
Their tasselled twigs, fair beds of primrose lie. 
Beneath the crisp and wintry carpet hid 
A million buds but stay their blossoming. 
And trustful birds have built their nests amid 
The shuddering boughs, and only wait to sing 
Till one soft shower from the south shall bid 
And hither tempt the pilgrim steps of Spring. 
WHITE OF SELBORNE.- 
i’HIS year is the centenary of White of Selborne, the 
country rector whose name, like Walton’s and 
Herbert’s, “ smells sweet and blossoms in the dust.” 
He was a naturalist of the kind that every man may 
be who lives in the country and is not short-sighted. The 
advantages of short-sight are numerous, but no one who is 
“ myope” can be a naturalist. To such a one, most birds are 
much alike : a blot or a flash, and that is all. He cannot tell a 
missel-thrush from a mavis, and at most distinguishes a hawk 
from a hand-saw. Consequently the excitement into which an 
early swallow or a martin throws his neighbours is unfamiliar 
to the short-sighted person, and how anybody can distinguish 
one of these fowls from another is what surprises him. To him 
a hoopoe might appear with perfect safety — he would never 
think of shooting it ; nor does he distinguish between a heron 
(except on the wing) and a bustard. The capercailzie, unless it 
attacks him, as this ferocious bird is fabled to do, leaves him 
cold ; and he would not discriminate between a cassowary and 
* We are indebted to the Editor of the Daily News for permission to reprint 
this interesting article from its columns of January 21st — E d. N.N. 
