ture: one must admire the man's untiring enthusiasm, but his book is
mainly a storehouse of facts; how rarely does he invest the facts with
charm! To pry into nature's secrets and conscientiously report them
seems to be the aim of the English parson; but we get so little of the
parson himself. What were his feelings about all these things he has
been at such pains to record? The things themselves are not enough. It
is not alluring to be told soberly:--

Hedge-hogs abound in my garden and fields. The manner in which they eat
the roots of the plaintain in the grass walk is very curious; with their
upper mandible, which is much larger than the lower, they bore under
the plant, and so eat the root off upward, leaving the tuft of leaves
untouched.

And so on. By way of contrast, see how Mr. Burroughs treats a similar
subject. After describing the porcupine, mingling description and human
encounter, thereby enlisting the reader's interest, he says:--

In what a peevish, injured tone the creature did complain of our unfair
tactics! He protested and protested, and whimpered and scolded like some
infirm old man tormented by boys. His game after we led him forth was
to keep himself as much as possible in the shape of a ball, but with two
sticks and the cord we finally threw him over on his back and exposed
his quill-less and vulnerable under side, when he fairly surrendered and
seemed to say, "Now you may do with me as you like."

Here one gets the porcupine and Mr. Burroughs too.

Thoreau keeps his reader at arm's length, invites and repels at the
same time, piques one by his spiciness, and exasperates by his
opinionatedness. You want to see his bean-field, but know you would be
an intruder. He might even tell you to your face that he was happiest
the mornings when nobody called. He likes to advise and berate, but at
long range. Speaking of these two writers, Whitman once said, "Outdoors
taught Burroughs gentle things about men--it had no such effect upon
Thoreau."

Richard Jefferies appeals to lovers of nature and lovers of literature
as well. He has the poet's eye and is a sympathetic spectator, but
seldom gives one much to carry away. His descriptions, musical as they
are, barely escape being wearisome at times. In his "Pageant of Summer"
he babbles prettily of green fields, but it is a long, long summer and
one is hardly sorry to see its close. In some of his writings he affects
one unpleasantly, gives an uncan