[Illustration: GILBERT WHITE'S HOUSE.]
Crossing from Midhurst over the border into Hampshire, the village of
Selborne is reached, one of the smallest but best known places in
England from the care and minuteness with which Rev. Gilbert White has
described it in his _Natural History of Selborne_. It is a short
distance south-east of Alton and about fifty miles south-west of London,
while beyond the village the chalk-hills rise to a height of three
hundred feet, having a long hanging wood on the brow, known as the
Hanger, made up mainly of beech trees. The village is a single
straggling street three-quarters of a mile in length, in a sheltered
valley and running parallel with the Hanger. At each end of Selborne
there rises a small rivulet, the one to the south becoming a branch of
the Arun and flowing into the Channel, while the other is a branch of
the Wey, which falls into the Thames. This is the pleasant little place,
located in a broad parish, that Gilbert White has made famous, writing
of everything concerning it, but more especially of its natural history
and peculiarities of soil, its trees, fruits, and animal life. He was
born at Selborne in 1720, and died there in 1793, in his seventy-third
year. He was the father of English natural history, for much of what he
wrote was equally applicable to other parts of the kingdom. His modest
house, now overgrown with ivy, is one of the most interesting buildings
in the village, and in it they still keep his study about as he left it,
with the close-fronted bookcase protected by brass wire-netting, to
which hangs his thermometer just where he originally placed it. The
house has been little if any altered since he was carried to his last
resting-place. He is described by those who knew him as "a little thin,
prim, upright man," a quiet, unassuming, but very observing country
parson, who occupied his time in watching and recording the habits of
his parishioners, quadruped as well as feathered. At the end of the
garden is still kept his sun-dial, the lawn around which is one of the
softest and most perfect grass carpets in England.
[Illustration: SUN-DIAL IN GILBERT WHITE'S GARDEN.]
[Illustration: SELBORNE CHURCH, FROM THE ALTON ROAD.]
The pleasant little church over which White presided is as modest and
almost as attractive as his house. It was dedicated to the Virgin Mary,
and measures fifty-four by forty-seven feet, being almost as broad as it
is long, consisting of three aisles, and making no pretensions, he says,
to antiquity. It was built in Henry VII.'s reign, is perfectly plain
and unadorned, and without painted glass, carved work, sculpture, or
tracery. Within it, however, are low, squat, thick pillars supporting
the roof, which he thinks are Saxon and upheld the roof of a former
church, which, falling into decay, was rebuilt on these massive props
because their strength had preserved them from the injuries of time.
They support blunt Gothic arches. He writes that he remembers when the
beams of the middle aisle were hung with garlands in honor of young
women of the parish who died virgins. Within the chancel is his memorial
on the wall, and he rests in an unassuming grave in the churchyard. The
belfry is a square embattled tower forty-five feet high, built at the
western end, and he tells pleasantly how the three old bells were cast
into four in 1735, and a parishioner added a fifth one at his own
expense, marking its arrival by a high festival in the village,
"rendered more joyous by an order from the donor that the treble bell
should be fixed bottom upward in the ground and filled with punch, of
which all present were permitted to partake." The porch of the church to
the southward is modern and shelters a fine Gothic doorway, whose
folding doors are evidently of ancient construction. The vicarage stands
alongside to the westward, an old Elizabethan house.
[Illustration: ROCKY LANE LEADING TO ALTON.]
[Illustration: THE WISHING STONE.]
Among the singular things in Selborne to which White calls attention are
two rocky hollow lanes, one of which leads to Alton. These roads have,
by the traffic of ages and the running of water, been worn down through
the first stratum of freestone and partly through the second, so that
they look more like water-courses than roads. In many places they have
thus been sunken as much as eighteen feet beneath the level of the
fields alongside, so that torrents rush along them in rainy weather,
with miniature cascades on either hand that are frozen into icicles in
winter. These lanes, thus rugged and gloomy, affright the timid, but,
gladly writes our author, they "delight the naturalist with their
various botany." The old mill at Selborne, with its dilapidated
windsails, presents a picturesque appearance, and up on the
chalk-hills, where there is a far-away view over the pleasant vale
beyond, is the Wishing Stone, erected on a little mound among the trees.
All these things attracted our author's close attention, and as his
parish was over thirty miles in circumference, as may be supposed his
investigations covered a good deal of ground. His work is chiefly
written in the form of a series of letters to friends, and he
occasionally digresses over the border into the neighboring parishes to
speak of their peculiarities or attractions. They all had in his day
little churches, and the parish church of Greatham, not far from
Selborne, is a specimen of the antique construction of the diminutive
chapels that his ancestors handed down to their children for places of
worship, each surrounded by its setting of ancient gravestones. The
_History of Selborne_ shows how the country parson in the olden time,
whose flock was small, parish isolated, and visitors few, amused
himself; but he has left an enduring monument that grows the more
valuable as the years advance. In fact, it is a text-book of natural
history; and so complete have been his observations that he not only
describes all the plants and animals, birds, rocks, soils, and
buildings, but he also has space to devote to the cats of Selborne, and
to tell how they prowl in the roadway and mount the tiled roofs to
capture the chimney swallows. How he loved his home is shown in the poem
with which his work begins. We quote the opening stanza, and also some
other characteristic portions of this ode, which describes the
attractions of Selborne in the last century:
"See Selborne spreads her boldest beauties round,
The varied valley, and the mountain ground
Wildly majestic: what is all the pride
Of flats with loads of ornament supplied?
Unpleasing, tasteless, impotent expense,
Compared with Nature's rude magnificence.
Oft on some evening, sunny, soft, and still,
The Muse shall hand thee to the beech-grown hill,
To spend in tea the cool, refreshful hour,
Where nods in air the pensile, nest-like bower;
Or where the Hermit hangs his straw-clad cell,
Emerging gently from the leafy dell:
Romantic spot! from whence in prospect lies
Whate'er of landscape charms our feasting eyes;
The pointed spire, the hall, the pasture-plain,
The russet fallow, and the golden grain;
The breezy lake that sheds a gleaming light,
Till all the fading picture fails the sight....
Now climb the steep, drop now your eye below,
Where round the verdurous village orchards blow;
There, like a picture, lies my lowly seat,
A rural, sheltered, unobserved retreat.
Me far above the rest, Selbornian scenes.
The pendant forest and the mountain-greens,
Strike with delight: ... There spreads the distant view
That gradual fades, till sunk in misty blue."
[Illustration: GREATHAM CHURCH.]