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 fully reveals his personality. In his sketches of nature we see what he sees; in his critiques, what he feels and thinks. The cry of discovery he made when 'Leaves of Grass' fell into his hands found response in England and was re-echoed in this country till Burroughs's strange delight in Whitman seemed no longer strange, but an accepted fact in the history of poetry. The essay on Emerson, his master, shows the same discriminating mind. But as a revelation of both author and subject there are few more delightful papers than Burroughs's essay on Thoreau. In manner it is as pungent and as racy as Thoreau's writings, and as epigrammatic as Emerson's; and his defense of Thoreau against the English reviewer who dubbed him a "skulker" has the sound of the trumpet and the martial tread of soldiers marching to battle. SHARP EYES From 'Locusts and Wild Honey'