SELBORNE.
GILBERT WHITE'S HOUSE.
SUN-DIAL IN GILBERT WHITE'S GARDEN.
Crossing from Midhurst over the border into Hampshire, the village of Selborne is reached, one of the smallest but best known places in England from the care and minuteness with which Rev. Gilbert White has described it in his Natural History of Selborne. It is a short distance south-east of Alton and about fifty miles south-west of London, while beyond the village the chalk-hills rise to a height of three hundred feet, having a long hanging wood on the brow, known as the Hanger, made up mainly of beech trees. The village is a single straggling street three-quarters of a mile in length, in a sheltered valley and running parallel with the Hanger. At each end of Selborne there rises a small rivulet, the one to the south becoming a branch of the Arun and flowing into the Channel, while the other is a branch of the Wey, which falls into the Thames. This is the pleasant little place, located in a broad parish, that Gilbert White has made famous, writing of everything concerning it, but more especially of its natural history and peculiarities of soil, its trees, fruits, and animal life. He was born at Selborne in 1720, and died there in 1793, in his seventy-third year. He was the father of English natural history, for much of what he wrote was equally applicable to other parts of the kingdom. His modest house, now overgrown with ivy, is one of the most interesting buildings in the village, and in it they still keep his study about as he left it, with the close-fronted bookcase protected by brass wire-netting, to which hangs his thermometer just where he originally placed it. The house has been little if any altered since he was carried to his last resting-place. He is described by those who knew him as "a little thin, prim, upright man," a quiet, unassuming, but very observing country parson, who occupied his time in watching and recording the habits of his parishioners, quadruped as well as feathered. At the end of the garden is still kept his sun-dial, the lawn around which is one of the softest and most perfect grass carpets in England.
SELBORNE CHURCH, FROM THE ALTON ROAD.
The pleasant little church over which White presided is as modest and almost as attractive as his house. It was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and measures fifty-four by forty-seven feet, being almost as broad as it is long, consisting of three aisles, and making no pretensions, he says, to antiquity. It was built in Henry VII.'s reign, is perfectly plain and unadorned, and without painted glass, carved work, sculpture, or tracery. Within it, however, are low, squat, thick pillars supporting the roof, which he thinks are Saxon and upheld the roof of a former church, which, falling into decay, was rebuilt on these massive props because their strength had preserved them from the injuries of time. They support blunt Gothic arches. He writes that he remembers when the beams of the middle aisle were hung with garlands in honor of young women of the parish who died virgins. Within the chancel is his memorial on the wall, and he rests in an unassuming grave in the churchyard. The belfry is a square embattled tower forty-five feet high, built at the western end, and he tells pleasantly how the three old bells were cast into four in 1735, and a parishioner added a fifth one at his own expense, marking its arrival by a high festival in the village, "rendered more joyous by an order from the donor that the treble bell should be fixed bottom upward in the ground and filled with punch, of which all present were permitted to partake." The porch of the church to the southward is modern and shelters a fine Gothic doorway, whose folding doors are evidently of ancient construction. The vicarage stands alongside to the westward, an old Elizabethan house.
ROCKY LANE LEADING TO ALTON.
THE WISHING STONE.
Among the singular things in Selborne to which White calls attention are two rocky hollow lanes, one of which leads to Alton. These roads have, by the traffic of ages and the running of water, been worn down through the first stratum of freestone and partly through the second, so that they look more like water-courses than roads. In many places they have thus been sunken as much as eighteen feet beneath the level of the fields alongside, so that torrents rush along them in rainy weather, with miniature cascades on either hand that are frozen into icicles in winter. These lanes, thus rugged and gloomy, affright the timid, but, gladly writes our author, they "delight the naturalist with their various botany." The old mill at Selborne, with its dilapidated windsails, presents a picturesque appearance, and up on the chalk-hills, where there is a far-away view over the pleasant vale beyond, is the Wishing Stone, erected on a little mound among the trees. All these things attracted our author's close attention, and as his parish was over thirty miles in circumference, as may be supposed his investigations covered a good deal of ground. His work is chiefly written in the form of a series of letters to friends, and he occasionally digresses over the border into the neighboring parishes to speak of their peculiarities or attractions. They all had in his day little churches, and the parish church of Greatham, not far from Selborne, is a specimen of the antique construction of the diminutive chapels that his ancestors handed down to their children for places of worship, each surrounded by its setting of ancient gravestones. The History of Selborne shows how the country parson in the olden time, whose flock was small, parish isolated, and visitors few, amused himself; but he has left an enduring monument that grows the more valuable as the years advance. In fact, it is a text-book of natural history; and so complete have been his observations that he not only describes all the plants and animals, birds, rocks, soils, and buildings, but he also has space to devote to the cats of Selborne, and to tell how they prowl in the roadway and mount the tiled roofs to capture the chimney swallows. How he loved his home is shown in the poem with which his work begins. We quote the opening stanza, and also some other characteristic portions of this ode, which describes the attractions of Selborne in the last century:
"See Selborne spreads her boldest beauties round,
The varied valley, and the mountain ground
Wildly majestic: what is all the pride
Of flats with loads of ornament supplied?
Unpleasing, tasteless, impotent expense,
Compared with Nature's rude magnificence.
Oft on some evening, sunny, soft, and still,
The Muse shall hand thee to the beech-grown hill,
To spend in tea the cool, refreshful hour,
Where nods in air the pensile, nest-like bower;
Or where the Hermit hangs his straw-clad cell,
Emerging gently from the leafy dell:
Romantic spot! from whence in prospect lies
Whate'er of landscape charms our feasting eyes;
The pointed spire, the hall, the pasture-plain,
The russet fallow, and the golden grain;
The breezy lake that sheds a gleaming light,
Till all the fading picture fails the sight....
Now climb the steep, drop now your eye below,
Where round the verdurous village orchards blow;
There, like a picture, lies my lowly seat,
A rural, sheltered, unobserved retreat.
Me far above the rest, Selbornian scenes.
The pendant forest and the mountain-greens,
Strike with delight: ... There spreads the distant view
That gradual fades, till sunk in misty blue."
GREATHAM CHURCH.