First impressions of faces are very much to us; vivid and persistent, even long after they have been judged false they will from time to time return to console or mock us. It is much the same with places, for these, too, an ineradicable instinct will have it, are persons. Few in number are the towns and villages which are dear to us, whose memory is always sweet, like that of one we love. Those that wake no emotion, that are remembered much as we remember the faces of a crowd of shop assistants in some emporium we are accustomed to visit, are many. Still more numerous, perhaps, are the places that actually leave a disagreeable impression on the mind. Probably the reason of this is because most places are approached by railroad. The station, which is seen first, and cannot thereafter be dissociated from the town, is invariably the centre of a chaotic collection of ugly objects and [Pg_284] discordant noises, all the more hateful because so familiar. For in coming to a new place we look instinctively for that which is new, and the old, and in themselves unpleasant sights and sounds, at such a moment produce a disheartening, deadening effect on the stranger:—the same clanging, puffing, grinding, gravel-crushing, banging, shrieking noises; the same big unlovely brick and metal structure, the long platform, the confusion of objects and people, the waiting vehicles, and the glittering steel rails stretching away into infinitude, like unburied petrified webs of some gigantic spider of a remote past—webs in which mastodons were caught like flies. Approaching a town from some other direction—riding, driving, or walking—we see it with a clearer truer vision, and take away a better and more lasting image.
Selborne is one of the noted places where pilgrims go that is happily without a station. From whichever side you approach it the place itself, features and expression, is clearly discerned: in other words you see Selborne, and not a brick and metal outwork or mask; not an excrescence, a goitre, which can make even a beautiful countenance appear repulsive. There is a station within a few miles of the village. I approached by a different route, and saw it at the end of a fifteen miles' walk. Rain had [Pg_285] begun to fall on the previous evening; and when in the morning I looked from my bedroom window in the wayside inn, where I had passed the night, it was raining still, and everywhere, as far as I could see, broad pools of water were gleaming on the level earth. All day the rain fell steadily from a leaden sky, so low that where there were trees it seemed almost to touch their tops, while the hills, away on my left, appeared like vague masses of cloud that rest on the earth. The road stretched across a level moorland country; it was straight and narrow, but I was compelled to keep to it, since to step aside was to put my feet into water. Mile after mile I trudged on without meeting a soul, where not a house was visible—a still, wet, desolate country with trees and bushes standing in water, unstirred by a breath of wind. Only at long intervals a yellow hammer was heard uttering his thin note; for just as this bird sings in the sultriest weather which silences other voices, so he will utter his monotonous chant on the gloomiest day.
It may be because he sung
The yellow hammer in the rain
that I have long placed Faber among my best-loved minor poets of the past century. He alone among [Pg_286] our poets has properly appreciated that the singer who never stops, but, "pleased with his own monotony," shakes off the rain and sings on in a mood of cheerfulness dashed with melancholy:
And there he is within the rain,
And beats and beats his tune again,
Quite happy in himself.
Within the heart of this great shower
He sits, as in a secret bower,
With curtains drawn about him:
And, part in duty, part in mirth,
He beats, as if upon the earth
Rain could not fall without him.
I remember that W. E. Henley once took me severely to task on account of some jeering remarks made about our poet's way of treating the birds and their neglect of so many of our charming singers. In the course of our correspondence he questioned me about the cirl bunting, that lively singer and pretty first cousin of the yellow hammer; and after I had supplied him with full information, he informed me that it was his intention to write a poem on that bird, and that he would be the first English poet to sing the cirl bunting.
He never wrote that lyric, "part in duty, part in mirth"; he was then near his end.
[Pg_287] To return to my walk. At last the aspect of the country changed: in place of brown heath, with gloomy fir and furze, there was cheerful verdure of grass and deciduous trees, and the straight road grew deep and winding, running now between hills, now beside woods, and hop-fields, and pasture lands. And at length, wet and tired, I reached Selborne—the remote Hampshire village that has so great a fame.
To very many readers a description of the place would seem superfluous. They know it so well, even without having seen it; the little, old-world village at the foot of the long, steep, bank-like hill, or Hanger, clothed to its summit with beech-wood as with a green cloud; the straggling street, the Plestor, or village green, an old tree in the centre, with a bench surrounding its trunk for the elders to rest on of a summer evening. And, close by, the grey immemorial church, with its churchyard, its grand old yew-tree, and, overhead, the bunch of swifts, rushing with jubilant screams round the square tower.
I had not got the book in my knapsack, nor did I need it. Seeing the Selborne swifts, I thought how a century and a quarter ago Gilbert White wrote that the number of birds inhabiting and nesting in the village, summer after summer, was nearly always [Pg_288] the same, consisting of about eight pairs. The birds now rushing about over the church were twelve, and I saw no others.
If Gilbert White had never lived, or had never corresponded with Pennant and Daines Barrington, Selborne would have impressed me as a very pleasant village set amidst diversified and beautiful scenery, and I should have long remembered it as one of the most charming spots which I had found in my rambles in southern England. But I thought of White continually. The village itself, every feature in the surrounding landscape, and every object, living or inanimate, and every sound, became associated in my mind with the thought of the obscure country curate, who was without ambition, and was "a still, quiet man, with no harm in him—no, not a bit," as was once said by one of his parishioners. There, at Selborne—to give an altered meaning to a verse of quaint old Nicholas Culpepper—
His image stampéd is on every grass.
With a new intense interest I watched the swifts careering through the air, and listened to their shrill screams. It was the same with all the birds, even the commonest—the robin, blue tit, martin, and sparrow. In the evening I stood motionless a long [Pg_289] time intently watching a small flock of greenfinches settling to roost in a hazel-hedge. From time to time they became disturbed at my presence, and fluttering up to the topmost twigs, where their forms looked almost black against the pale amber sky, they uttered their long-drawn canary-like note of alarm. At all times a delicate, tender note, now it had something more in it—something from the far past—the thought of one whose memory was interwoven with living forms and sounds.
The strength and persistence of this feeling had a curious effect. It began to seem to me that he who had ceased to five over a century ago, whose Letters had been the favourite book of several generations of naturalists, was, albeit dead and gone, in some mysterious way still living. I spent a long time groping about in the long rank grass of the churchyard in search of a memorial; and this, when found, turned out to be a modest-sized headstone, and I had to go down on my knees, and put aside the rank grass that half covered it, just as when we look into a child's face we push back the unkempt hair from its forehead; and on the stone were graved the name, and beneath, "1793," the year of his death.
[Pg_290] Happy the nature-lover who, in spite of fame, is allowed to rest, as White rests, pressed upon by no ponderous stone; the sweet influences of sun and rain are not kept from him; even the sound of the wild bird's cry may penetrate to his narrow apartment to gladden his dust!
Perhaps there is some truth in the notion that when a man dies he does not wholly die; that is to say, the earthly yet intelligent part of him, which, being of the earth, cannot ascend; that a residuum of life remains, like a perfume left by some long-vanished, fragrant object; or it may be an emanation from the body at death, which exists thereafter diffused and mixed with the elements, perhaps unconscious and yet responsive, or capable of being vivified into consciousness and emotions of pleasure by a keenly sympathetic presence. At Selborne this did not seem mere fantasy. Strolling about the village, loitering in the park-like garden of the Wakes, or exploring the Hanger; or when I sat on the bench under the churchyard yew, or went softly through the grass to look again at those two letters graved on the headstone, there was a continual sense of an unseen presence near me. It was like the sensation a man sometimes has when lying still with closed eyes of some one moving softly to his [Pg_291] side. I began to think that if that feeling and sensation lasted long enough without diminishing its strength, it would in the end produce something like conviction. And the conviction would imply communion. Furthermore, between the thought that we may come to believe in a thing and belief itself there is practically no difference. I began to speculate as to the subjects about to be discussed by us. The chief one would doubtless relate to the bird life of the district. There are fresh things to be related of the cuckoo; how "wonder has been added to wonder" by observers of that bird since the end of the eighteenth century. And here is a delicate subject to follow—to wit, the hibernation of swallows—yet one by no possibility to be avoided. It would be something of a disappointment to him to hear it stated, as an established fact, that none of our hirundines do winter, fast asleep like dormice, in these islands. But there would be comfort in the succeeding declaration that the old controversy is not quite dead yet—that at least two popular writers on British birds have boldly expressed the belief that some of our supposed migrants do actually "lay up" in the dead season. The deep interest manifested in the subject would be a temptation to dwell on it. I should touch on the discovery [Pg_292] made recently by a young English naturalist abroad, that a small species of swallow in a temperate country in the Southern Hemisphere shelters itself under the thick matted grass, and remains torpid during spells of cold weather. We have now a magnificent monograph of the swallows, and it is there stated of the purple martin, an American species, that in some years bitter cold weather succeeds its arrival in early spring in Canada; that at such times the birds take refuge in their nesting holes and l............