NA TURE-POETR V. 
67 
whole species of British hirundines many individuals never leave 
this island, but remain in a benumbed state throughout the 
winter months. His correspondent Daines Barrington held a 
similar opinion, and believed that the martins concealed them- 
selves amid rocky fissures, and the swallows buried themselves 
under water below the frost line. These were the views that had 
been held a century before by Walton, one of the very earliest 
idyllists of the country, and it was not till quite recent times 
that the details about migration had been completely made out. 
Whoever reads the letters of Gilbert White cannot fail to be 
impressed by his attentive consideration of almost everything 
that belongs to out-door life. Anticipating Darwin, he has 
devoted a letter to earth-worms, wherein he refers to them as 
the great promoters of vegetation, and says that a good mono- 
graph on the subject would open a large and new field of 
natural history. Our author’s Naturalist's Calendar reads like 
a complete eclogue of the seasons. From it we learn when 
robin, skylark, missel-thrush, greenfinch, nightingale, and the 
rest of the winged minstrels begin their harmony ; when ^vych- 
elm flowers and death-watch beats ; when the raven builds and 
the ivy sheds its leaves ; when frogs pipe and trout begin to 
rise ; when wood-spurge and yellow pimpernel unfold their 
blossoms, and the foxglove uplifts its purple spire ; when the 
tortoise retires to his hibernaculum, and martins and swallows 
congregate ; when swifts plume their southward flight and 
greenfinches flock, and the last swallow flits over the crimsoning 
hill. Having ascertained, by his own pitch-pipe, that owls 
hooted in B flat, and been afterwards informed by a musical 
friend that they hooted sometimes in F sharp, sometimes in 
A flat, and at others in B flat, he tried to find out whether 
these different notes proceeded from three different species 
or only from various individuals. There is hardly a single 
object of country-life, from echoes to owls’ notes, or a single 
mode in which each may be viewed, that has not been noticed 
by this wonderful observer. Of such a bucolic idyllist it is truly 
lamentable that we have no portrait or outward presentment 
whatever ; his personality is entirely sunk in his work ; thus 
what we can conceive of him is left altogether to our imagination. 
For forty years he carried on his minute observations in a region 
which, owing to the abrupt and uneven nature of the land, and 
its numerous woods and hills, was especially frequented by birds. 
There, amid the springing curves of chalk hills and the flickering 
shade of beechen groves, he had at hand sheep-walks, downs, 
bogs, heaths, lanes, woodlands and champaign-fields ; and in 
such exquisite scenery he lived a bachelor, quite alone, in an 
out-of-the-world village which was then difficult of access, and 
is not much better even in our day, Selborne being still quite 
off the railway, and not even yet disfigured by a railway station. 
There he meditated a book that deserves to be classed among 
country idylls, if only for its character in fostering a closer 
