planting, the burning of fallows. He "loved nature in
those material examples and subtle expressions, with a love passing all
the books in the world." But he also loved and knew books, and this
other love gives to his works their literary charm.

His account of a bird, a flower, or an open-air incident, however
painstaking and minute the record, teems with literary memories. The
sight of the Scotch hills recalls Shakespeare's line,

"The tufty mountains where lie the nibbling sheep."

The plane-tree vocal with birds' voices recalls Tennyson,--"The pillared
dusk of sounding sycamores"; he hears the English chaffinch, and
remembers with keen delight that Drayton calls it "the throstle with
sharp thrills," and Ben Jonson "the lusty throstle." After much
wondering, he finds out why Shakespeare wrote

"The murmuring surge
That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes,"

his own experience being that sea-shores are sandy; but the pebbled
cliffs of Folkestone, with not a grain of sand on the chalk foundation,
justified the poet.

This lover of nature loves not only the beautiful things he sees, but he
loves what they suggest, what they remind him of, what they bid him
aspire to. Like Wordsworth, he "looks on the hills with tenderness, and
makes deep friendship with the streams and groves." He notes what he
divines by observation. And what an observer he is! He discovers that
the bobolink goes south in the night. He scraped an acquaintance with a
yellow rumpled warbler who, taking the reflection of the clouds and blue
sky in a pond for a short cut to the tropics, tried to cross it; with
the result of his clinging for a day and night to a twig that hung down
in the water.

Burroughs has found that whatever bait you use in a trout
stream,--grasshopper, grub, or fly,--there is one thing you must always
put on your hook; namely, your heart. It is a morsel they love above
everything else. He tells us that man has sharper eyes than a dog, a
fox, or any of the wild creatures except the birds, but not so sharp an
ear or a nose; he says that a certain quality of youth is indispensable
in the angler, a certain unworldliness and readiness to invest in an
enterprise that does not pay in current coin. He says that nature loves
to enter a door another hand has opened: a mountain view never looks
better than when one has been warmed up by the capture of a big trout.
Like certain wary game, she is best ta