146 
NATURE NOTES 
great deal more, in the sense of personal influence and effort, 
towards inculcating the true love of Nature ? In our walks, in 
our gardens, in our museums those of us who know but little 
science will never fail to find the voices of Nature, the higher 
and better existence which belongs to things unswayed by man’s 
petty influence. I do not wish to appear sentimental or vaporous ; 
the ideal I have before me is Gilbert White, than whom no 
man was more sane. True, he had a very fair knowledge of 
science, and even ventured to extol Linnaeus in days when it 
was the fashion to belittle that savant. But if you read White’s 
journals and his letters you will see what I mean when I urge 
that we should seek Nature and ensue her. He was imbued, so 
should be every Selbornian. Maeterlinck writes of the Bee, yet 
Maeterlinck was no mere apiculturist. He was in the best sense 
a Selbornian. To him the life of the bees was a system of vivid 
philosophy; their work, their loves, their strivings, lifted a corner 
in the veil of Nature’s inscrutable world and taught parables. 
Every child, each man and woman “ who has passed Jordan,” 
is at heart a philosopher. It is only the busy, keen, impassioned 
life between 20 and 40 which accepts things to be as they seem. 
The child finds pixies and brownies in his cowslips and hare- 
bells, the older man begins to suspect latent forces, undreamt- 
of meanings in the workings of Nature and the turmoil of the 
world’s advance. Each, the child and the elder, is a little aloof 
from the throng, and studies and asks the meanings of things. 
So it is with us. We seek something more than classification 
from our flowers, to us a sunset is not a mere “ effect,” and 
Nature-study includes all the problems of the immutable laws 
of life, the hidden mysteries behind the succession of genera- 
tion to generation, the cruelty and rapine of the world as we 
know it. I would plead then, that Selbornians should foster a 
larger and a wider appreciation of Nature, and enforce by 
example and precept a love of essential beauty alike in Nature 
and in social life. 
The vulgarity, the sordidness, the snobbery rampant in the 
world to-day should be scouted by those who find comfort in 
the simple life of the hillside and quarry, and the repose of the 
woods at the dawn of day. There is only one life worth the 
living, and it is the life which is attuned to the countless voices 
of Nature, the divine diapason of wood and fell and stream. 
To teach to live such a life, I submit, is one, if not the chiefest, 
of the objects to be striven for by the Selborne Society. 
