Who would look for a true country idyl to-day in the city of Philadelphia? Yet one came out of there yesterday, and lies here open before me, on the table. It is a slender volume, called “With the Birds, An Affectionate Study,” by Caroline Eliza Hyde. The author is discussing the general subject of nomenclature and animal distribution, and says:-- “When the Deluge covered the then known face of the earth, the birds were drowned with every other living thing, except those that Noah, commanded by God, took two by two into the Ark. “When I reflect deeply and earnestly about the Ark, as every one should, thoughts crowd my mind with an irresistible force.” [And they crowd my mind, too.] “Noah and his family had preserved the names of the birds given them by Adam. This is assured, for Noah sent a raven and a dove out to see if the waters had abated, and we have birds of that name now. Nothing was known of our part of the globe, so these birds must have remained in the Holy Land for centuries. We do not hear of them until America was discovered.... “Bats come from Sur. They are very black mouse-like birds, and disagreeable.... The bobolink is not mentioned in the Bible, but it is doubtless a primitive bird. The cock that crows too early in the morning ... can hardly be classed with the song-birds. The name of the hummingbird is not mentioned in the Bible, but as there is nothing new under the sun, he is probably a primitive bird.” Mr. Burroughs will agree that the hummingbird is probably a primitive bird; and also that this is a true idyl, and that he could not write a true idyl if he tried. No one could write like that by trying. And what has any happy combination of circumstances to do with it? No, a book essentially is only a personality in type, and he who would not be frustrated of his hope to write a true idyl must himself be born a true idyl. A fine Miltonic saying! Mr. Burroughs is not an idyl, but an essayist, with a love for books only second to his love for nature; a watcher in the woods, a tiller of the soil, a reader, critic, thinker, poet, whose chief business these fifty years has been the interpretation of the out-of-doors. Upon him as interpreter and observer, his recent books, “Ways of Nature” and “Leaf and Tendril,” are an interesting comment.