Of all the great nature students of our time, Richard Jeffries ranks as the one most closely in touch with the sub-human world, the earth and all the life it bears in and on its bosom. His whole soul seems exquisitely in tune with the cosmos. He breathes with the respirations of the earth; he sighs with the breath of the winds; his senses and his thoughts sway with the bending of the grain and the waving of the tree-tops. “To know him,” says his eulogist, Mr. Ellwanger, “is to approach nearer the heart of the flower, the mystic concave of the sky, and the elusive verge of the horizon.” But in this respect he has a peer in William Hamilton Gibson. No man ever lived on friendlier terms with nature. As close, as accurate, as patient in his observation as any of the classic characters in nature love, he has a distinction all his own, a peculiar personal attitude toward all extra-human life. He feels and he expresses a sort of fellowship with life in other than human form. He accepts the lesser things as little brothers and sisters of the human. He gives the right hand of fellowship to whatever has life. He humanizes, if one may so term it, the life which lies below man’s in the vital scale. What writer since the days of the primeval fairy tales ever brought the worlds of human life and other life so near each other? He seems a modern Siegfried, into whose ears the birds talk, and the grass whispers as it grows. When he comes back from an exploration into the insect realm close to his own doorstep, he reports what he has seen and heard precisely as if he were recounting the talk and doings of his own kind. He translates this life of beetle and spider and bee and ant and bird into the terms of human life and activity. He makes all life seem related to our lives, all being to appear of one substance, all to be worthy of interest, sympathy, love, and reverence. More than any other mind of his generation he leads us to feel that kinship of all life which Drummond has asserted in “The Ascent of Life,” and which Professor Shaler has condensed into a phrase in calling it “The Bond of the Generations.” That was a shrewd and sagacious disclosure of character, as well as a bit of fun, which led his mother to write, in the letter already quoted, “How are your friends and dear companions, the worms?” He was on terms of friendship with all living things. But to any mind at all sensitive to the real and deeper meaning of nature, to its spiritual origin, its profound unity, this underlying affinity of all its forms of life, there was a bit of true philosophy in the mother’s comment. It was certainly truer and wiser than the criticism once made upon his intellectual temperament in the columns of the “Tribune.” “So thoroughly,” said this reviewer, “was he absorbed in the life of the humbler animals and plants that one suspects he was quite out of his element elsewhere. He was incapable of assigning them a relative place. To him they were always supreme.