V GILBERT WHITE'S SELBORNE "Open the book where you will, it takes you out of doors. In our broiling July weather one can walk out with this genially garrulous Fellow of Oriel, and find refreshment instead of fatigue." JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. SUCH a village as Selborne opens wide the gates of that world of imagination in which poets dwell. True, there are some signs that the march of humanity has not paused these two hundred years, but they are so few and so tentative that they are unable to strike any effective discord. For the rest, the golden stain of time is over all. A beech-clad hill rises abruptly some three hundred feet on the south side of the village, and a narrow cleft in the trees gives a peep of the little rural world below. It is a picture of red and brown roofs in a frame of green. From the grey tower of the church comes hour by hour the monition of passing time; and in the pauses of the warning bell there float upwards now and then such sounds of Nature life as were familiar in the far-off days of Chaucer. Nature has no chronology, no revolutions. Some of her children have fallen in the battle of life, and left no successors, but those who survive show few visible traces of the flight of time. The song of the nightingale heard among these trees in the twilight to-day is "the same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." In the one long straggling street of the village we draw nearer the present age; but not much. Away towards the east a few monstrosities of brick and slate blot the old-time landscape with their hideous straight lines and discordant roofs. "How nice it would be," exclaimed an admirer, "if we had a long row of houses like that!" Ruskin's life-work has borne no harvest in that stony soil. But to the west, there, where the road bends towards the old church, stand cottages out of which Anne Hathaway or Master William Shakespeare might step at any moment. Lovingly the weather-stained thatch has grown into harmony with the old walls over which it spreads its mantle, and the roses climb up from beneath to kiss the ancient roof-tree with their blushing petals. petals. "But thatch is so unhealthy, you know," suggests a Girtonian Girtonian hygienist. |