ike such a man as Cowper for a tenant, where any bargains
were to be made, or any lambs to be killed; nor do I think that the
mere memory of his verse would have put me upon that July walk from
Newport to Weston; but his letters and his sad life, throughout which
trees and flowers were made almost his only confidants, led me to the
scene where that strange marriage with Nature was solemnized. And though
the day was balmy, and the sun fairly golden, the garden and the alley
and the trees and the wilderness were like a widow in her weeds.

* * * * *

Gilbert White, of Selborne, belongs to this epoch; and no lover of the
country or of country-things can pass him by without cordial recognition
and genial praise. There is not so much of incident or of adventure in
his little book as would suffice to pepper the romances of one issue of
a weekly paper in our day. The literary mechanicians would find in him
no artful contrivance of parts and no rhetorical jangle of language. It
is only good Parson White, who, wandering about the fields and the
brook-sides of Selborne, scrutinizes with rare clearness and patience a
thousand miracles of God's providence, in trees, in flowers, in stones,
in birds,--and jots down the story of his scrutiny with such simplicity,
such reverent trust in His power and goodness, such loving fondness for
almost every created thing, that the reading of it charms like Walton's
story of the fishes.

We Americans, indeed, do not altogether recognize his chaffinches and
his titlarks; his daws and his fern-owl are strange to us; and his
robin-redbreast, though undoubtedly the same which in our nursery-days
flitted around the dead "Children in the Wood," (while tears stood in
our eyes,) and

"painfully
Did cover them with leaves,"

is by no means our American redbreast. For one, I wish it were
otherwise; I wish with all my heart that I could identify the old,
pitying, feathered mourners in the British wood with the joyous,
rollicking singer who perches every sunrise, through all the spring,
upon the thatch of the bee-house, within stone's-throw of my window, and
stirs the dewy air with his loud _bravura_.

Notwithstanding, however, the dissimilarity of species, the studies of
this old naturalist are directed with a nice particularity, and are
colored with an unaffected homeliness, which are very charming; and I
never hear the first whisk of a swallow'