My study windows

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, By JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. Copyright, 1899, By MABEL LOWELL BURNETT. All rights reserved.
MY former volume of Essays has been so kindly received that I am emboldened to make another and more miscellaneous collection. The papers here gathered have been written at intervals during the last fifteen years, and I knew no way so effectual to rid my mind of them and make ready for a new departure, as this of shutting them between two covers where they can haunt me, at least, no more. I should have preferred a simpler title, but publishers nowadays are inexorable on this point, and I was too much occupied for happiness of choice. That which I have desperately snatched is meant to imply both the books within and the world without, and perhaps may pass muster in the case of one who has always found his most fruitful study in the open air.
TO PROFESSOR F. J. CHILD.
My dear Child,—
You were good enough to like my Essay on Chaucer (about whom you know so much more than I), and I shall accordingly so far presume upon our long friendship as to inscribe the volume containing it with your name.
Always heartily yours,
J. R. LOWELL.
Cambridge, Christmas, 1870.

ONE of the most delightful books in my father’s library was White’s Natural History of Selborne. For me it has rather gained in charm with years. I used to read it without knowing the secret of the pleasure I found in it, but as I grow older I begin to detect some of the simple expedients of this natural magic. Open the book where you will, it takes you out of doors. In our broiling July weather one can walk out with this genially garrulous Fellow of Oriel and find refreshment instead of fatigue. You have no trouble in keeping abreast of him as he ambles along on his hobby-horse, now pointing to a pretty view, now stopping to watch the motions of a bird or an insect, or to bag a specimen for the Honourable Daines Barrington or Mr. Pennant. In simplicity of taste and natural refinement he reminds one of Walton; in tenderness toward what he would have called the brute creation, of Cowper. I do not know whether his descriptions of scenery are good or not, but they have made me familiar with his neighborhood. Since I first read him, I have walked over some of his favorite haunts, but I still see them through his eyes rather than by any recollection of actual and personal vision. The book has also the delightfulness of absolute leisure. Mr. White seems never to have had any harder work to do than to study the habits of his feathered fellow-townsfolk, or to watch the ripening of his peaches on the wall. His volumes are the journal of Adam in Paradise,