ken by seeming to pass her by,
intent on other matters. What he does not find out for himself, people
tell him. From a hedge-cutter he learns that some of the birds take an
earth-bath and some a water-bath, while a few take both; a farmer boy
confided to him that the reason we never see any small turtles is
because for two or three years the young turtles bury themselves in the
ground and keep hidden from observation. From a Maine farmer he heard
that both male and female hawks take part in incubation. A barefooted
New Jersey boy told him that "lampers" die as soon as they have built
their nests and laid their eggs. How apt he is in similes! The pastoral
fields of Scotland are "stall-fed," and the hill-sides "wrinkled and
dimpled, like the forms of fatted sheep."

And what other bird-lover has such charming fancies about birds, in whom
he finds a hundred human significances? "The song of the bobolink," he
says, "expresses hilarity; the sparrow sings faith, the bluebird love,
the catbirds pride, the white-eyed fly-catchers self-consciousness, that
of the hermit thrush spiritual serenity, while there is something
military in the call of the robin." Mr. Burroughs has been compared with
Thoreau, but he seems closer to White of Selborne, whom he has
commemorated in one of his most charming essays. Like White, he is a
literary man who is a born naturalist in close intimacy with his brute
neighbors and "rural nature's varied shows." In both, the moral element
is back of nature and the source of her value and charm. Never nature
for her own sake, but for the sake of the soul that is above all and
over all. Like White, too, though by nature solitary, Burroughs is on
cordial terms with his kind. He is an accurate observer, and he takes
Bryant to task for giving an odor to the yellow violet, and Coleridge
for making a lark perch on the stalk of a foxglove. He gloats over a
felicitous expression, like Arnold's "blond meadow-sweet" and Tennyson's
"little speedwell's darling blue"; though in commenting on another poet
he waives the question of accuracy, and says "his happy literary talent
makes up for the poverty of his observation."

And again as with White, he walks through life slowly and in a
ruminating fashion, as though he had leisure to linger with the
impression of the moment. Incident he uses with reserve, but with
picturesque effects; figures do not dominate his landscape but humanize
it.

As a critic Mr. Burroughs most