more direct; and by his tender particularity of detail he has given to the winged and creeping creatures of his pleasant Hampshire downs the freedom of all lands. It is true, indeed--as I have said in another connection--that we Americans do not altogether recognize his chaffinches and his titlarks; his daws and his fern-owl are strange to us; and his robin red-breast--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," {262} is by no means our American red-breast. 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 rollicking, joyous singer who perches every sunrise, through all the spring, upon some near tree, within stone's throw of my window, and stirs the dewy air with his loud _bravura_. Another noticeable thing about this old country parson is his freedom from all the artifices and buckram and abbreviations of learning, so that he is delightfully comprehensible by everybody. If only we could have an edition of Gray's Botany--for instance--with some ten lines of Parson White's homely descriptive English about the height and bigness, and color and habit of the flowers, instead of symbols and Latin genealogies and scholastic reticence--what a God-send it would be to the average country gentleman or country woman! I want specially to call the attention of those young people in whose interest I am supposed to talk--to that homely truthfulness, and unabating care of this old gentleman, as giving value to a {263} book or to any literary work whatever. They are not qualities, to be sure, which of themselves carry performance to a high poetic level; but they are qualities which give to it practical and picturesque values, and which--well laid in--will make work survive.