harvest of twenty-five years of close observation, not inter- rupted
even by his life in the trenches during the War. He has made his little discoveries. The marital fidelity of Mon- tagu's Harriers over a series of years is one; and perhaps nothing in the life of birds is more interesting, as problem and as fact, than this meeting of established pairs often after "a winter of separation and an inordinate journey. I do not know any writer who has described with so lyrical, but always so precise a charm, the ecstasy of this redintogratio antoris. One cannot class his book with that most wonderful of all bird books of our time, Mr. Eliot Howard's Territory in Bird Life, which indeed for closeness of particular observation has no equal in the literature of the subject. He watched his birds as closely, in spite of the intense difficulty of the job, as M. Fabre watched his wasps. M. Delamain's gift is pleasure. All the birds, not only the lark, sing hymns at heaven's gate." He does not tell us really why birds sing or migrate ; but even the least sympathetic will henceforth want to know. The beauty of the language, even in English, is correlated, as Keats and the French critic would desire, with its truth. Le vrai est beau.
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