66 
NATURE-POETRY. 
{Continued from page 33.) 
UITE a modern type of poetry is that used by Burns 
when he apostrophized the mouse and the daisy that 
had been turned out by his ploughshare ; and the same 
has been displayed in our day by Christina Rossetti 
and Jean Ingelow, and perhaps best of all by the Dorsetshire 
poet Barnes, who presents us with many such examples of it 
as this : — 
“ A yellow-banded bee did come, and softly pitch with buzzing hum 
Upon a bean, and there did sip, upon a swaying blossom’s lip ; 
And there he mused, “ Ay, I can see the blossoms all are sent for me.” 
These modern forms of Nature-poetry were inaugurated in 
the eighteenth century by two writers, one in poetry and the 
other in prose. The prose writer was Gilbert White, who may 
be looked upon as the founder of the school of poet-naturalists to 
whom, as has been shown, we owe so much. After a good 
education in the University of Oxford, Gilbert White settled 
for the rest of a delightfully quiet life at the pleasant village 
of Selborne in Hampshire, where he published, in 1789, four 
years before he died, at the ripe age of seventy-three, the book 
that created the literature of the fields. This charming book, 
which consists of one hundred letters sent by White from his 
pleasant village to some eminent literary friends in London, has 
made the name of Selborne known to the whole of the English- 
speaking races, and has recalled them to that return to Nature 
which had been elsewhere proclaimed by Rousseau, and in 
which they have themselves ever since taken the lead. .Though 
Gilbert White was a prose writer mainly, yet he wrote in a 
truly beautiful style ; so that, if read aright, his volume well 
deserves to be enshrined in the library of every nature-lover 
along with the Idylls of Theocritus and the Georgies of Virgil. 
Now and then he deviates into downright verse, and very pretty 
verses he writes. In the Naturalist's Evening Walk, amid 
delightfully pastoral sentiments, we find the following lines on 
the instinct that prompts the arrival and departure of the summer 
migrants : — 
“ Amusive birds ! say where your hid retreat 
When the frost rages and the lemjresls beat ; 
Whence your return by such nice instinct led, 
When spring, soft season, lifts her blooming head ? 
Such baflled searches mock man’s prying pride. 
The God of nature is your secret guide ! ” 
To the very end of his quiet life he was perplexed about 
problems of migration and hybernation, and to solve these 
problems he repeatedly excavated the caves of the bank-martin, 
and examined places likely to afford concealment to swallows, 
contending from various data that he had collected, that of two 
