INTRODUCTORY NOTE, N selecting passages of prose and verse to escort IN 6 Mr. Birket Foster's Pictures of Rustic Landscape,' two considerations among others were constantly present:-the importance of variety, and the necessity of a lax correspondence between the letterpress and the engravings. The latter consideration suggests the remark, that, unless the one is engaged in what is justly regarded as the inferior employment of illustrating the other, the artist in black and white seldom depicts landscape with an eye to the same effects and with appreciation of the same details as commend themselves to the artist in words. Nevertheless the reader and spectator will find remarkable instances of close agreement even in minor points between several of the pictures and the descriptions in their attendant passages, and always, of course, a definite connection of some kind. 849326 The general purpose in making these selections was not to provide a descriptive catalogue, but to present in an anthology the thoughts and feelings of some lovers of the country and of country life. June, 1895. JOHN DAVIDSON. For their permission to include certain passages which are copyright, thanks are due to the following authors and publishers :-to Messrs. Macmillan for the extracts from Matthew Arnold's ScholarGipsy and from Tennyson's 'Miller's Daughter'; to Messrs. Longman for the extract from Richard Jefferies' 'Field and Hedgerow '; to Messrs. W. Blackwood & Sons for the extract from George Eliot's Felix Holt'; to Messrs. Seeley & Co. for the extract from P. G. Hamerton's Unknown River'; to Mr. Joseph Pennell and Mr. Fisher Unwin for the extract from "The Stream of Pleasure'; to Mr. W. Fraser Rae for the extract from M. Taine's 'Notes on England'; to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for the extracts from John Burroughs, R. Grant White, and Emerson; and to Messrs. Chatto & Windus and Mr. C. Baxter for the extract from R. L. Stevenson's 'Virginibus Puerisque.' CONTENTS. 'A water-ousel with white breast rises and flies on; again disturbed, he makes a circle, and returns to the stream behind. On the moist earth there is the print of a hare's pad; here is 'VENATOR: ... and let the blessing of St. Peter's PISCATOR: And upon all that are lovers of virtue, and 'It occurred to me clearly for the first time that the river came from far and went yet farther, that it was not confined to the fields about my house, and that this little scene was not a solitary gem, but one only of a thousand links in a long 37 |