My Garden Acquaintance | Page 3

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Prepared by: Anthony J. Adam email [email protected]

My Garden Acquaintance James Russell Lowell

ONE of the most delightful books in my father's library was White's
"Natural History of Selborne." For me it has rather gained in charm
with years. I used to read it without knowing the secret of the pleasure I
found in it, but as I grow older I begin to detect some of the simple
expedients of this natural magic. 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. You have no trouble in keeping abreast of him as he ambles
along on his hobby-horse, now pointing to a pretty view, now stopping
to watch the motions of a bird or an insect, or to bag a specimen for the
Honorable Daines Barrington or Mr. Pennant. In simplicity of taste and
natural refinement he reminds one of Walton; in tenderness toward

what he would have called the brute creation, of Cowper. I do not know
whether his descriptions of scenery are good or not, but they have made
me familiar with his neighborhood. Since I first read him, I have
walked over some of his favorite haunts, but I still see them through his
eyes rather than by any recollection of actual and personal vision. The
book has also the delightfulness of absolute leisure. Mr. White seems
never to have had any harder work to do than to study the habits of his
feathered fellow-townsfolk, or to watch the ripening of his peaches on
the wall. His volumes are the journal of Adam in Paradise,
"Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade."
It is positive rest only to look into that garden of his. It is vastly better
than to
"See great Diocletian walk In the Salonian garden's noble shade,"
for thither ambassadors intrude to bring with them the noises of Rome,
while here the world has no entrance. No rumor of the revolt of the
American Colonies seems to have reached him. "The natural term of an
hog's life" has more interest for him than that of an empire. Burgoyne
may surrender and welcome; of what consequence is *that* compared
with the fact that we can explain the odd tumbling of rooks in the air by
their turning over "to scratch themselves with one claw"? All the
couriers in Europe spurring rowel-deep make no stir in Mr. White's
little Chartreuse;(1) but the arrival of the house-martin a day earlier or
later than last year is a piece of news worth sending express to all his
correspondents.
(1) *La Grande Chartreuse* was the original Carthusian monastery in
France, where the most austere privacy was maintained. Another secret
charm of this book is its inadvertent humor, so much the more delicious
because unsuspected by the author. How pleasant is his innocent vanity
in adding to the list of the British, and still more of the Selbornian,
*fauna!* I believe he would gladly have consented to be eaten by a
tiger or a crocodile, if by that means the occasional presence within the
parish limits of either of these anthropophagous brutes could have been
established. He brags of no fine society, but is plainly a little elated by

"having considerable acquaintance with a tame brown owl." Most of us
have known our share of owls, but few can boast of intimacy with a
feathered one. The great events of Mr. White's life, too, have that
disproportionate importance which is always humorous. To think of his
hands having actually been though worthy (as neither Willoughby's nor
Ray's were) to hold a stilted plover, the *Charadrius himaniopus,* with
no back toe, and therefore "liable, in speculation, to perpetual
vacillations"! I wonder, by the way, if metaphysicians have no hind
toes. In 1770 he makes the acquaintance in Sussex of "an old family
tortoise," which had then been