ed, by going
there.

He is of course a distinguished naturalist, probably the most acute,
broad-minded, and understanding observer of Nature living. And this, in
an age of specialism, which loves to put men into pigeonholes and label
them, has been a misfortune to the reading public, who seeing the label
Naturalist, pass on, and take down the nearest novel. Hudson has indeed
the gifts and knowledge of a Naturalist, but that is a mere fraction of
his value and interest. A really great writer such as this is no more to
be circumscribed by a single word than America by the part of it called
New York. The expert knowledge which Hudson has of Nature gives to all
his work backbone and surety of fibre, and to his sense of beauty an
intimate actuality. But his real eminence and extraordinary attraction
lie in his spirit and philosophy. We feel from his writings that he
is nearer to Nature than other men, and yet more truly civilized. The
competitive, towny culture, the queer up-to-date commercial knowingness
with which we are so busy coating ourselves simply will not stick to
him. A passage in his Hampshire Days describes him better than I
can: "The blue sky, the brown soil beneath, the grass, the trees, the
animals, the wind, and rain, and stars are never strange to me; for I am
in and of and am one with them; and my flesh and the soil are one, and
the heat in my blood and in the sunshine are one, and the winds and the
tempests and my passions are one. I feel the 'strangeness' only with
regard to my fellow men, especially in towns, where they exist in
conditions unnatural to me, but congenial to them.... In such moments we
sometimes feel a kinship with, and are strangely drawn to, the dead,
who were not as these; the long, long dead, the men who knew not life in
towns, and felt no strangeness in sun and wind and rain." This unspoiled
unity with Nature pervades all his writings; they are remote from the
fret and dust and pettiness of town life; they are large, direct, free.
It is not quite simplicity, for the mind of this writer is subtle and
fastidious, sensitive to each motion of natural and human life; but his
sensitiveness is somehow different from, almost inimical to, that of us
others, who sit indoors and dip our pens in shades of feeling. Hudson's
fancy is akin to the flight of the birds that are his special loves--it
never seems to have entered a house, but since birth to have been
roaming the air, in rain and sun, or v