White’s book diffuses a sort of rural England atmosphere through the mind. It is not the work of a city man who went down into the country to write it up, but of a born countryman,--one who had in the very texture of his mind the flavor of rural things. Then it is the growth of a particular locality. Let a man stick his staff into the ground anywhere and say, “This is home,” and describe things from that point of view, or as they stand related to that spot,--the weather, the fauna, the flora,--and his account shall have an interest to us it could not have if not thus located and defined. This is one secret of White’s charm. His work has a home air, a certain privacy and particularity. The great world is afar off; Selborne is as snug and secluded as a chimney corner; we get an authentic glimpse into the real life of one man there; we see him going about intent, lovingly intent, upon every phase of nature about him. We get glimpses into humble cottages and into the ways and doings of the people; we see the bacon drying in the chimneys; we see the poor gathering in Wolmer Forest the sticks and twigs dropped by the rooks in building their nests; we see them claiming the “lop and top” when the big trees are cut. Indeed, the human touches, the human figures here and there in White’s pages, add much to the interest. The glimpses we get of his own goings and comings--we wish there were more of them. We should like to know what took him to London during that great snowstorm of January, 1776, and how he got there, inasmuch as the roads were so blocked by the snow that the carriages from Bath with their fine ladies on their way to attend the Queen’s birthday, were unable to get through. “The ladies fretted, and offered large rewards to labourers if they would shovel them a track to London, but the relentless heaps of snow were too bulky to be removed.” The parson found the city bedded deep in snow, and so noiseless by reason of it that “it seemed to convey an uncomfortable idea of desolation.” When one reads the writers of our own day upon rural England and the wild life there, he finds that they have not the charm of the Selborne naturalist; mainly, I think, because they go out with deliberate intent to write up nature. They choose their theme; the theme does not choose them. They love the birds and flowers for the literary effects they can produce out of them. It requires no great talent to go out in the fields or woods and describe in graceful sentences what one sees there,--birds, trees, flowers, clouds, streams; but to give the atmosphere of these things, to seize the significant and interesting features and to put the reader into sympathetic communication with them, that is another matter.