but the woman whose bonnet does not come up to the mark is at best a blue-stocking."
So clever an observation upon anything in nature as that is hard to find in the Journals.
To observe is to discriminate and take note of all the factors.
One day while walking in my vineyard, lamenting the damage the storm of yesterday had wrought in it, my ear caught, amid the medley of other sounds and songs, an unfamiliar bird-note from the air overhead. Gradually it dawned upon my consciousness that this was not the call of any of our native birds, but of a stranger. Looking steadily in the direction the sound came, after some moments I made out the form of a bird flying round and round in a large circle high in air, and momentarily uttering its loud sharp call. The size, the shape, the manner, and the voice of the bird were all strange. In a moment I knew it to be an English skylark, apparently adrift and undecided which way to go. Finally it seemed to make up its mind, and then bore away to the north. My ear had been true to its charge.
The man who told me that some of our birds took an earth bath, and some of them a water bath, and a few of them took both, had looked closer into this matter than I had. The sparrows usually earth their plumage, but the English sparrow does both. The farm boy who told a naturalist a piece of news about the turtles, namely, that the reason why we never see any small turtles about the fields is because for two or three years the young turtles bury
themselves in the ground and keep quite hidden from sight, had used his eyes to some purpose. This was a real observation.
Just as a skilled physician, in diagnosing a case, picks out the significant symptoms and separates them from the rest, so the real observer, with eye and ear, seizes what is novel and characteristic in the scenes about him. His attention goes through the play at the surface and reaches the rarer incidents beneath or beyond.
Richard Jefferies was not strictly an observer; he was a living and sympathetic spectator of the nature about him, a poet, if you please, but he tells us little that is memorable or suggestive. His best books are such as the "Gamekeeper at Home," and the "Amateur Poacher," where the human element is brought in, and the descriptions of nature are relieved by racy bits of character drawing. By far the best thing of all is a paper which he wrote shortly before his death, called "My Old Village." It is very beautiful and pathetic, and reveals the heart and soul of the man as nothing else he has written does. I must permit myself to transcribe one paragraph of it. It shows how he, too, was under the spell of the past, and such a recent past, too:—
"I think I have heard that the oaks are down. They may be standing or down, it matters nothing to me; the leaves I last saw upon them are gone for evermore, nor shall I ever see them come there again, ruddy in spring. I would not see them
again, even if I could; they could never look again as they used to do. There are too many memories there. The happiest days become the saddest afterward; let us never go back, lest we, too, die. There are no such oaks anywhere else, none so tall and straight, and with such massive heads, on which the sun used to shine as if on the globe of the earth, one side in shadow, the other in bright light. How often I have looked at oaks since, and yet have never been able to get the same effect from them! Like an old author printed in another type, the words are the same, but the sentiment is different. The brooks have ceased to run. There is no music now at the old hatch where we used to sit, in danger of our lives, happy as kings, on the narrow bar over the deep water. The barred pike that used to come up in such numbers are no more among the flags. The perch used to drift down the stream and then bring up again. The sun shone there for a very long time, and the water rippled and sang, and it always seemed to me that I could feel the rippling and the singing and the sparkling back through the centuries. The brook is dead, for where man goes, nature ends. I dare say there is water there still, but it is not the brook; the brook is gone, like John Brown's soul [not our John Brown]. There used to be clouds over the fields, white clouds in blue summer skies. I have lived a good deal on clouds; they have been meat to me often; they bring something to the spirit which even the trees do not. I see clouds now sometimes when the iron gripe of hell