"With love exceeding a simple love of the things
That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck;
Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings
From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck;
Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball;
Or, cast their web between bramble and thorny hook;
The good physician Melampus, loving them all,
Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book."
While that ripe oddity, "Juggling Jerry," would have delighted the
"Romany"-loving Borrow.
Indeed the Nature philosophy of Mr. Meredith, with its virile joy in the
rich plenitude of Nature and its touch of wildness has more in common
with Thoreau, with Jefferies, with Borrow, and with Whitman than with
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, or even with Tennyson--the first of our
poets to look upon the Earth with the eyes of the scientist.