THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE.* Ms. Coinwrr adds to a deep knowledge
of the English country. side the graces of an accomplished pen. In this book he devotes a series of essays to the sights and sounds of the turning year ; he begins with the change of added light in January and takes us through the growing chorus of spring song and the radiant quiet of summer to the tumult of autumn followed by winter sleep and dark. Other writers have done something of the kind before, but Mr. Collett's work is distinct and his own. He has a poet's eye and ear, you feel in reading these glowing pages, but behind lies the exact knowledge of the man of science. He writes of flowers, of fruit, of birds, but with the phrase he The Changing Year. By Anthony Collett. London : Hodder and Stoughton. fie. net.] picks for the flower there is the geologist's recognition of strata- and soils ; or between the lines describing seeds and sowing w,:e find ourselves guessing at the botanist and the good farmer.
But Mr. Collett's individual talent is his power of suiting fresh and vigorous English to familiar sights and sounds. He can- turn a trite word to his own new uses. We look out on a late June night and realize that the stars are faint ; but we sea with new eyes when he shows us the Plough " sponged out by morning," and its place as the light of night taken by the white midsummer blossoms, so that " earth stands lit till morning by their drowsier stars and moons." His sentences burn with the sun and swing with the wind ; we can smell the honey in the heather with its " vehement richness of colour which seems as if poured from the heated veins of the August earth," and we feel the searing wind of a spring which " comes late, with the glittering sharpness of the polar bergs." He feels and there- fore gives life in colour, rather than merely paints with a word. " Even the smallest trout of the hill-streams has the spirit of a fighting-cock under its scarlet spots that mimic the hanging rowan-berries "—that is a sentence instinct of the vigour and the landscape of a mile of Scottish glen. Or take this : " Snails creep into the crannies of the garden-wall behind the apricot branches, and seal themselves with a tissue of slime until the spring sun strikes through the stone." Is it not the warmth of that word " apricot " which wakes the sluggish snail blood ?
But there is plenty of tough fact behind these fancies or phrases. He is a man not only of imagination but of learning who points out that the cabbage butterfly, against which country children are asked to wage war for the sake of the= kitchen, would be an uncommon insect to-day if it were not for man, who has cultivated in every garden and allotment the oruciferous plants on which it feeds. In former days, dependent for its living on the wild sea-cabbage, it must have been a, scarce butterfly, though not, perhaps, so scarce as the swallowtail of the Cambridge fenlands of to-day, which years- ago, when England was a country of fens, must have been correspondingly common. This early aspect of England, indeed, seems to have a special attraction for Mr. Collett, and suggests to him one of the most characteristic- chapters in the book—" The Face of the Wilderness." He looks at the country when there are floods out over the farm fields, and sees " the ancient face of the land made plain once more through the veil of centuries of civilization." The elope at our feet, where the firm earth joins the line of flood water, shows itself to us as not the mere chance bank of last night's storm, but the ancient boundary of the fen before it was drained for cultivation. " The hedges and fences, that at other times form the cardinal features of the landscape, are now conspicuously new, and feebly superimposed on some- thing enduring and more reaL" We may note again the curious fact that where we find traces remaining of ancient fenland the level of the waste is sometimes higher- than that of the sur- rounding meadows. " This is due to the shrinking of the spongy soil of the meadows in course of time, under the constant system of drainage, while the fen is still untapped." We read this chapter. and such a sentence as this, of an impulse of mi- gration—" In the autumn storm there is a stirring even of the slime to its mother ; and from their lairs in the slough the eels return to the sea "—and we realize that here is a writer who, apart from his genius for phrases, enters deep into the quick of the English countryside whose story and seasons he follows.
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