The man might stand in his writings for the countryside of
England, incarnate and articulate. He not only leads you ever out of
doors, but he is just that, the very spirit of the open air, the out-
of-doors of a country where alone in Europe one can be in the lanes, in
the meadows, on the hills under the low soft sky with delight every day
of the year. He teaches, as Nature herself teaches; we seem to move in
his books as though they were the fields and the woods, and there the
flowers blow and the birds sing. It is not so much that his observation
is extraordinarily wide and accurate, but that we see with his eyes,
hear with his ears, and the phenomena, beautiful or wonderful, which he
describes, we experience too, and because of him with something of his
love, his interest and carefulness. What other book ever written upon
Natural History can we read, who are not Naturalists, over and over and
over again, and for its own sake, not for the myriad facts he gathered
through a long lifetime, the acute observation and record of which have
won him the homage of his fellow scientists, but for the pure human and
literary pleasure we find there, a pleasure the like of which is to be
found nowhere else in such books in the same satisfying quantity, and
at all, only because of him.
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