man.

discursiveness, and a considerable charm, and he is especially happy in a certain blending of natural and personal history. His book is "the harvest of a quiet eye," sober in tone, but thoroughly in keeping, with a gentle touch of humor, and with notes of observation in which we feel the naturalist, and which are evidently at first hand and made with the patience and instinct of the craftsIt is a delightfully local book: the facts fit the outside world (and how hard it is to get facts of natural history to do that!) if applied within the proper radius; the reminiscences and the humor will come home most enjoyably to readers whose own birth fell in a certain rock-sprinkled land with a centre of intellectual integrity, and whose own youth was surreptitiously nourished on a diet of hard apples, unripe grapes, huckleberries, and a fruit which Mr. Torrey omits from his list, the congenial chokecherry. For Mr. Torrey, like Thackeray, has his Memorials of Gormandizing; he has, too, his attendant spirit of boyhood, we find one on every ferryboat, as we get on in life, but he is not always so entertaining to an outside public of his elders as he is made in these pages. "There is a boy of perhaps ten years whose companionship is out of all reason dear to me; and nowhere am I surer to find him at my side, hand in hand, than in this same lonely road, though I know very well that those who meet or pass me there see only one person, and that a man of several times ten years."

find in him, as his author does, a kind of silent company. The book is a bit of New England reported by a New Englander, who cherishes the Yankee traits within as well as those about him, and writes without dialect, but with an undefinable relish of twang. Mr. Torrey has not a grain of Thoreau's passion for "going through a patch of scrub-oak in a bee-line;" it is not the wildness but the home quality of Nature that draws him most strongly to her; he gets lost on a mountain tramp, not "bewildered," as Daniel Boone was for three days, and does not blink the fact. He loves to identify himself with a home landscape; to cultivate the biological possibilities of his own plot of ground and get the poetic yield of his neighbor's; to turn over the soil of his mind, with a special liking for that layer of the past which has been most turned over and is become most familiar.

Although an enormous amount of labor, talent, and enthusiasm has been devoted to the identification, description, classification, and study of our American birds, perhaps more than to the bird fauna of any other country, there is still room for a considerable addition to the mass of bird literature, not alone in the line of discovery, but in the matter of bringing the birds into our every-day life and making them more generally and familiarly known. In spite of the fact that we are a practical people, we are a people of literary prepossessions, and our interest in the world about us regarded from other points of view than the immediately practical is a limited Partly from this cause; partly from the character of our bird population, which presents, with a large range of variety, many perplexing affinities and repetitions; perhaps also in a measure from the existence of tracts of little-visited country, even in a fairly populous region, we keep our birds at arm's-length, and are ignorant of many a blithe presence among us. Charles Kingsley quotes

one.

the phrase "He knows his Bewick" as commonly applicable to the English school-boy, but perhaps, like Macaulay, he stretched his school-boy a little. We do not teach Audubon in our public schools; he is a classic, and we all know what becomes of classics. Wilson, too, sweet soul, is laid by. Baird, Brewer, and Ridgeway, with many other investigators, are left to professional eyes. Nor is it easy to " name all the birds without a gun." Our very names for them are apt to be laboriously descriptive and familiar only to the ornithologist. Even the musical and pretty name of the vireo, or greenlet, sticks obstinately in the books, and the delicate wood-bird, which Mr. Torrey turned to in its own haunt, and tamed in a few days so that it ate from his hand while sitting on its nest, is very likely a stranger to the majority of his non-professional readers. The story of this "woodland intimacy" is a little idyl in natural history and a lesson in the patience and tact required by the naturalist, though we hope there will not be too many endeavors towards a literal repetition of the feat, which might be unfavorable to the peace of vireo households. Mr. Torrey speaks, by the way, of the solitary vireo as probably not exhibiting any marked race peculiarity as to timidity or fearlessness; but Dr. Brewer has an account of a female of this species which, at first very shy, in time"became more familiar, and would not leave her nest unless I attempted to lay hands on her;" and a sort of confidence and trustfulness, as well as close devotion to the nest, appears to be a general vireo trait. Our own memory of bird's-nesting days, when the birds were, alas apt to be, as Mr. Torrey says of the school-boy's collection of eggs, unnamed, misnamed, and nameless," affords record of a vireo, probably the yellowthroated, which sat confidently on its neatly woven cup, suspended in an alder bush, and looked at the intruder, standing but a cane's - length away, with a

66

glance so gentle, so feminine, as seemed to lessen the inaccessibility of the bird mind to the human.

For the task spoken of above, of domesticating the native birds, so to speak, in the native life and landscape, Mr. Torrey has special qualifications, both as observer and writer. His book is mellowed and pleasant, and its only dull feature is a tendency to repeat now and then in the set terms of moralizing what he has just indicated in racy parable,to point the moral without adorning the tale. But these digressions are brief withal, like the longueurs in the couplet of the French poet, and would not be noticeable were it not that a reader likes to have an author with whom he finds himself on such good terms put a little faith in him.

Mr. Abbott's volume1 is a naturalist's note-book, kept by the calendar, with a typical day selected from each month and set apart, with its meteorological aspects, its botanical and zoological facts, duly chronicled and compared. His observations are scrappy and miscellaneous, but the book is so full of matter, the author has turned over so many stones, that it can hardly fail to be of value to the outdoor student, if only for the many lines of investigation which it opens or suggests. It is a good stimulus to looking, a book with which to compare one's own observations, though the sarcasms thrown out in advance by the author for the benefit of students whose inquiries may lead them to a conclusion differing from his are fairly tough rods in pickle. The field naturalist of some years ago used to have an enduring target for his scorn in "the book naturalist; "Mr. Abbott has elected" the critic" to that post of honor. Under the circumstances it would be a delicate matter to venture upon any comment on his observations, any technical criticism of which should of course 1 Days Out of Doors. By CHARLES C. ABNew York: D. Appleton & Co. 1889.

BOTT.

be left by a merely literary reviewer to the professional naturalist. Mr. Abbott's hunting-ground is New Jersey, central New Jersey apparently, with excursions coastward, giving a fair range of river, marsh, and pine barren, all well-stocked ground for the naturalist. He is an enthusiast about birds. "No other form of life has the same importance to the rambler. I have seen mammals under the most instructive conditions, and followed in their wake thousands of reptiles, fishes, and insects; but my motive then was always simple curiosity, a desire to learn something of their ways of life, and little chagrin was mine if my labor went for naught. It is different when I meet with birds. Then my enthusiasm is all aroused, and pleasure or pain predominates as they venture near me or hold back in fear." His jottings on the coming and going of birds, particularly of non-migratory birds, a matter of especial interest, are among the most valuable parts of his book. He watches them in storms; notes the singing of a bluebird in a momentary lull of the March blizzard in 1888, and the flitting from branch to branch, on newfallen snow, of a ruby-crowned king let, which "scarcely left its mark, and never a footprint, as it rested on the delicate ridges of snow." Another interesting chapter is devoted to the pine-tree lizard, and to a series of simple experiments with its pineal gland, which is a rudimentary eye, showing its sensitiveness to light. In tone and manner the book is as different as can well be from Mr. Torrey's. The only path which Mr. Abbott deliberately essays to follow is that of Thoreau, and he does not always find the blazes, though he is fairly Thoreauesque in the remark, which has truth in it, that "Nature speaks freely

1 Up and Down the Brooks. By MARY E. BAMFORD. [Riverside Library for Young People. No. 4.] Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1889.

2 Birds Through an Opera Glass. By FLORENCE A. MERRIAM. [Riverside Library for

to the individual, but seldom harangues a crowd."

Frogs, Boys, and other Small Deer is the title of a chapter in Up and Down the Brooks,' by Miss Mary E. Bamford, who has taken hints from the delightful but, alas! now half-forgotten pages of the Rev. J. G. Wood, and writes natural history with side thrusts, hits at the stupidity of by-standers, stories of field adventure, and personifications of bug and beast, which latter may be clear to the intelligent child, but are a trifle confusing to the adult mind. The book gives directions for a fresh-water aquarium and accounts of the objects likely to come in the dredging-net, as well as of the chief haunters of the bottom or bank of the brook, a well-chosen company, and illustrated with very convenient little cuts.

Birds Through an Opera Glass, published in the same series for young people, is a collection of bird-portraits tossed off with a deft and vivid touch. Miss Merriam, in going over a ground by no means untraveled, has succeeded in bringing out freshly the more salient features, and her "pigeon-hole " method of grouping the birds according to first one and then another trait, habit, or haunt ought to prove useful both for identification and characterization.

All sorts of rose-jar fragrances and antique posies of thought come to mind as we open The Garden's Story,3 a dainty little volume, which, not alone by its dress of vignette, tail-piece, and fine but rather pale print, or its abundant ornaments of quotation, but by various prettinesses of style, beguiles us a trifle backward from the "outdoor" of to-day to the essay in its more imitative period, what we may call the essay-loving essay. It is a year-round book, giving bits of Young People. No. 3.] Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1889.

3 The Garden's Story; or, Pleasures and Trials of an Amateur Gardener. By GEORGE H. ELLWANGER. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1889.

garden and wild-flower ore, outdoor and indoor, for every month; a medley in which the names of flowers make bouquets on every page. But familiar allusions to Dr. Talmage jar a little upon this pleasant antiquity. If Cowley and Marvell had a Dr. Talmage in their garden-world, they have not mentioned the fact or set their pages to that key.

We are so accustomed to locate Mr. Burroughs out-of-doors, and to associate him with discourse on fields and birds, that his excellence as an indoor writer is a trifle overlooked, and he has perhaps hardly received his due as a critic. The bulk of his work in this line is not large, nor is his range of subjects a wide one, but he has some admirable qualifications for a critic, and we recall no writer of criticism in this country who brings to Mr. Burroughs's chosen themes an equal freshness and precision of touch. A perspective of reading is as essential to the critic as a perspective of life to the novelist; and in either case the background is apt to be furnished more or less extensively by early associations. How far these will be actually incorporated into a writer's work, or serve merely for comparison or suggestion, will depend upon temperament and upon the depth or variety of experience.

Mr. Burroughs devotes a brief chapter of the present volume to a record of his literary birth and training, but his antecedents as a writer were never obscure; they are to be read from any page. He has clung to, not forsaken, his traditions; has kept alive not alone his convictions, but the spirit of discipleship in which they were formed. He stands for an idea, like Mr. Howells; a circumstance which may tend to limit the scope of a critic, but within that range is tolerably sure to enhance the depth and value of his work. Mr. Bur

1 Indoor Studies. By JOHN BURROUGHS. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1889.

VOL. LXIV. NO. 385.

45

roughs's idea is the Emersonian one. He has lived his Emerson, we may add his Carlyle, and in dealing with books, as with life (if the distinction be needed), men write best what they have lived. One rather amusing result of this intimacy is to be seen in the turn of his sentences; a fact which he himself frankly notices, but which is really of small moment. Imitation simply as imitation will not last a lifetime, nor alone carry a writer through such careful studies as those of Mr. Burroughs, and the Emersonian sentence is not a mannerism any more than Emersonian thought is a dogma. The inadequacy of Matthew Arnold's criticism of Emerson was generally felt, and we could not have found a writer better qualified to express the grounds of this dissatisfaction, or to discuss in detail the points of view of the American thinker and his English critics, than Mr. Burroughs. And yet he has himself perhaps not quite succeeded in centralizing his Emerson. In dwelling as he does with fine perception upon the incidental and piecemeal character of Emerson's writings, he turns to find the idea which holds together all these perfected yet shuffled units, and finds it in his personality. "The design that gives unity and relevancy to these isolated paragraphs is the personality of Emerson, his peculiar type and idiosyncrasy. This is the plan, the theme, which these musical periods illustrate." True, it is there, but may it not be found also in his thought, which, apart from its moral stimulus, has a wholeness and pervading value in its constant perception of the relationships of things, its insistence upon a unity immanent throughout the entire physical and spiritual universe? This, it may be said, was part of his personality, but it was more it was an intellectual framework,

one which may be easily overlooked in a fragmentary reading, but which remains, after all siftings are made, as a result of familiarity with his writings.

It is not a matter of syllogisms; but if Emerson had drawn up a system of metaphysics (as it is curious to find from his Life that he thought of doing), he could have added nothing to the coherency and innate gravitation of his thought.

Mr. Burroughs's essay on Matthew Arnold's criticism is an admirable paper, closely written, and showing both sympathy and perception; separating with a delicate touch Arnold's teaching and its effects, his history as a force, from the other prevailing influences in the English thought of his time. The general characterization of his genius as "standing for pure Hellenism (the choice as well as the word is Mr. Arnold's own) is qualified by a number of more distinctive touches bringing out his "spirit of institutionalism," his "marked catholic bias," which Mr. Burroughs connects with the Hellenism by the institutional links, his "genius for definition and analysis," his "nettle-like irony" and "kind of finer common sense. Mr. Burroughs points to a curious and. marked trait in Matthew Arnold when he says that "he seems to have no isolated thoughts, nothing that begins and ends in a mere intellectual concretion; his thoughts are all in the piece, and have reference to his work as a whole; they are entirely subordinated to plan, to structure, to total results." And there is a felicity of expression as well as a slant of humor in this summing up on Friendship's Garland :

"It fulfills its purpose with a grace and a completeness that awaken in one the feeling of the delicious; it is the only one of his books one can call delicious."

The relation of Arnold's thoughts to Carlyle's, and his attitude as a critic towards the great representative of the Hebraic side, is appreciatively indicated by Mr. Burroughs. They were a curious pair to be working in the same hour upon the same material; and it is not

to be wondered at that Arnold, with his own mission of "sweet reasonableness," should have had little sympathy with Carlyle's vehement cry for earnestness and work. The chief mistake in his position was his attempt to ignore Carlyle, which was not unlike undertaking to proceed from one Alpine valley to another without being aware of any mountain. At the present day, when Carlyle's ideas have become incorporated into all manner of writings, and have been naively given forth, from time to time, in articles by the most strenuous opponents of his doctrines, including Mr. Arnold himself, it is not so difficult to do this; but it showed a certain failure in proportion and the historical sense on the part of one so nearly a contemporary of Carlyle and the foremost of English critics. When, in his lecture on Numbers, Mr. Arnold sketched the state of things against which Plato protested in his day, and that which brought the protest of Isaiah upon his contemporaries, then pictured the England of Past and Present, many a listener must have mentally added to his impressive "Plato was right, and Isaiah was right," "and Thomas Carlyle." The conclusion drawn, in the first person, was somehow hardly so convincing.

In his essay on Thoreau, Mr. Burroughs defends him from Mr. Stevenson's charge of being a "skulker" in a very happy manner; whether with a final success or not is a fine point of ethics to decide. The paper is written "to make the most of him, - defining and discriminating him as I would a flower, or a bird, or any other product of nature," - and shows considerable delicacy of handling and a keen relish for his subject.

A Malformed Giant is a half criticism on Victor Hugo, bringing out humorously the Hugoesque conception, or rather personification, of nature, but requiring, to make it in any sense complete, an