6 
NATURE NOTES 
thistles ; the reed grasses hiding the moor hen ; the bryony bine, 
at first crudely ambitious and lifted by force of youthful sap 
straight above the hedgerow to sink of its own weight presently 
and progress with crafty tendrils ; swifts shot through the air 
with outstretched wings like crescent-headed shaftless arrows 
darted from the clouds ; the chaffinch with a feather in her bill ; 
all the living staircase of the spring, step by step, upwards to the 
great gallery of the summer — let me watch the same succession 
year by year ” (Besant’s “ Eulogy of R. Jefferies,” pp. 226-7). 
His wish was gratified, for he never left the southern counties, 
and spent a great part of his life on one small tract of downs near 
Swindon. At first this county had appeared to him “ dull and 
monotonous,” but he ended by describing it in such wonderful 
terms that none could believe such a place existed : “ Men turn 
their faces away from me, so that, perhaps, after all, I was mis- 
taken, and there never was any such place, or any such meadows, 
and I was never there. And perhaps, in course of time, I shall 
find out also, when I pass away ph}’sically, that, as a matter of 
fact, there never was any earth.” As to White, we do not know 
his name apart from Selborne. That of Thoreau is equally allied 
to “ Walden ” — his cabin in the woods, where we are too apt to 
picture him a life-long hermit. As a matter of fact, his retreat 
only lasted two years and two months, and sometimes he con- 
fesses to have enjoyed a “ surfeit of human society and gossip.” 
This may well have been the case, for the town of Concord was 
only a mile and a half away, and a high road ran past the hut and 
patch of cultivated ground which constituted his small estate. 
Less than half a mile a\vay he must have been able to hear the 
trains pass. There may have been a special siding up to his door, 
for aught we know. His determination to cling to a single spot 
has something grotesque about it. A mere instinct or necessity in 
the case of Jefferies and of White becomes a principle in Thoreau, 
and he talks about it too much : “I think nothing is to be hoped 
from you if this bit of the world under your feet is not sweeter to 
you than any other ; ” and he remarked that “ most of the pheno- 
mena ” (concerning Kane’s arctic voyage) “ might be observed 
in Concord.” “ The grey squirrel and rabbit are brisk and 
playful in the remote glens . . . Here is our Lapland and 
Labrador, and for our Esquimaux and Knistenaux, Dog-ribbed 
Indians, Nova-Zemblaites and Spitzbergeners, are there not 
the ice-cutter and wood chopper, the fox, musk rat and mink ? 
This frame of mind is recommended in a charming passage by 
Geddes, too long to quote. For the geographical botanist, “ Each 
little scene stretches itself over the world map, as if by enchant- 
ment,” even though some great manufacturing town be only two 
miles away. The passage may be taken as a hint to members 
of the Selborne Society. But to return to Thoreau. We fear 
he was no more a genuine naturalist than he was a genuine 
hermit. Even an admiring biographer owns that “ he did not 
love bird or flower for their own sake, with the disinterested 
