The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram. [volume] (Richmond, Ind.) 1907-1939, 1913-03-06

lie before us In his pages charm and
soothe and please.
Selborne will put one in the very
best mood for reading Richard JEFF
fries. This Englishman is also among
the immortals, man who literally
gave all, and suffered all. that he
might be the faithful minister and in
terpreter of his loved moors and cliffs.
While tortured by the most abject
poverty and caught in the rack of
slow death he penned essays that will
never die. His Pageant of Summer"
is itself a pageant of almost every
splendor Of the English language. The
essays collected in Wild Life Near
London" THE Open Aair," and the
Life of the Fields" are delightful to
every one. And The Story of My
Heart" what a marvellous book that
is, every page palpitates with the hui
man spirit; on it might be inscribed
Old Waits words, Who touches this
book touches a man"
OF quite a different character is our
own Thoreau. / can think of no book
/ which has given me more pleasure
than Walden; believe l have read
! it near dozen times. To read it is
to climb a rugged mountain straight
into the highest, purest ozone of the
human soul. Underneath one is the
| solid granite of a genuinely original
philosophy and about one is the fresh
| ly revealed beauty of open air
| America. Walden is Thoreau. In it
! he celebrates himself" He needed
the vast background of nature to set
himself forth. In his pages his own
subjective life so blends into Nature
that one can scarcely distinguish each
from other. And this doubtless is
the secret of the books undying
charm. AS Burroughs has observed,
he has given US no new Nature facts
but he has impaired to his readers the
priceless gift of seeing Nature as he
saw her. Walden Pond and the Con
cord woods may change and pass but
they cannot die; they have immortal
ity in the soul of this man. Not to
know walden" is not to know one of
the very greatest books in any Ian.
guage.
| And then, of course. comes Bur.
roughs; he is Indispensable. His es
says are redolent with healthy scents
and always smell of the sod, or tingle
with ruggedness. They have the pre-
serving salt in them. Always genuine
ly original in expression, he is at the
same time scientifically accurate in
his observations. He studies the
crumbling of rock or the Matching OF
an egg with the same devoted and
minute patience that an astronomer
studies the stars. And yet he is in
tensely spiritual, in the sense that he
expresses the spirit of things. How
like the open world his pages are!
They are granite, scanned, geologic
old ages wait in them, volcanic forces
stir in them, keen winds blow in them
His sentences fall in the same con
fusion and with the same insousianc<
that marks the falling from some elf
of huge rock fragments. They seen
to have lain in his pages for ages
And yet all his essays are very human
and all attractive; "Pepa cton," River
by" "Wake-robin," Time anC
Change how good they all are. Strike
him where you will, he is clear ant
sound as a bell.
| always think of Burroughs as tn,
link between the more subjective in
terpreters of Nature and the scientific
students and essayists. One who find
Time and Change" an interest will
surely read more erudite and tech
nical studies with keen relish. Their
, is Grant Allen, delightful though dan
gerous" as a friends recently express
ed it, who was unable to write a dull
line; sciene fuses into poetry unde
his wizardry. Then there is Lubbock
known more popularity by his pleas
| ures of Life; every reader will fin
: his Ants, Bees and Wasps," veritabl
, mines of suggestion, while Fruits
? Flowers and Bees" will give one
peep into botanic evolution. And Dal
win cannot be missed. Who can rea
his volume on the earth-worm withou
loving the dirt? And who can rea
, Fabre without loving spiders? OF tina
heroic Frenchman Maeterlinck saiC
He is the insects Homer" prais
enough We would suppose, for an
man.
At the other side of Burrough
stands the more popular writer's. "
J. Long will surely survive Roosevelt
, sarcasm, for, while he romances nov
= and then, he knows the trick of int
l mate and personal description, an
; writes a style of rare literary charm