In those days men loved the country simply as their home, not because they were shut away from it they took it as a matter of course, and seldom wrote about it. But in the last century there was no need to pine, when there was hardly a town from which a man could not escape into the fields when he would, without toiling through grimy suburbs where the problems of economic science force themselves at every turn on his mind. We pine for pure air, for the sight of growing grass, for the footpath across the meadow, for the stile that invites you to rest before you drop into the deep lane under the hazels. Surely the spread of the factory system, and the consequent growth of huge towns, has rather strengthened than weakened this love of all things rural. John Burroughs and Miss Mary Wilkins have lately made us aware how strongly it survives in him in the nineteenth. Even with the American the same passion still lives he took it with him to New England in the seventeenth century, and the books of Mr. With all his commercial instincts and his town- bred vulgarity, his phases of stern Puritanism and political excitement, he has never yet lost that love of the country which is rooted in the life of the manor and the village. But the Englishman has always been a strange and self-contradictory creature. It is strange at first sight that this should be so at a time when we seem passing from a period of poetry and romance into one of stern reality, when the rural population is being drained into the towns, when the squire and the parson are going down in the world, when leisure such as White enjoyed is a rarity and almost a crime, and when the study of economic problems should be driving out of our heads the delights of wild nature or of sport. (Foldout frontispiece from Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.) (source) North East View of Selborne From the Short Lythe.

Birds of Selborne by Gilbert White