W. H. Hudson

Argentine-born naturalist and author born in 1841. His other books included The Purple Land, Argentine Ornithology, Little Boy Lost, and A Shepherd's Life. He died in 1922.

Here Nature is unapproachable with her green, airy canopy, a sun-impregnated cloud - cloud above cloud - and though the highest may be unreached by the eye, the beams yet filter through, illuming the wide spaces beneath - chamber succeeded by chamber, each with its own special lights and shadows. Green Mansions

Listen again to a band of small shorebirds - stints, dotterels, knots, and dunlins - conversing together as they run about on the level sands, or dropping bright twittering notes as they fly swiftly past: it is like the vibrating crystal chiming sounds of a handful of pebbles thrown upon and bounding and glissading musically over a wide sheet of ice. Nature in Downland; Far Away and Long Ago, 1900.

. . . the feeling of delight in Nature was an enduring one, that others had known it, and that it had been a secret source of happiness throughout their lives. Far Away and Long Ago, 1924.

That enchanting part of the marsh, with its forest of graceful miniature trees, where the social trupials sang and wove their nests and reared their young in company&endash;that very spot is now, I dare say, one immense field of corn, lucerne, or flax, and the people who now live and labour there know nothing of its former beautiful inhabitants, nor have they ever seen or even heard of the purple-plumaged trupial, with its chestnut cap and its delicate trilling song. Ibid.

I rejoiced in colours, scents, sounds, in taste and touch; the blue of the sky, the verdure of earth, the sparkle of sunlight on water, the taste of milk, of fruit, of honey, of wind and rain, of herbs and flowers . . . and above all certain colours in flowers, and in the plumage and eggs of birds, such as the purple polished shell of the tinamou's egg, which intoxicated me with delight. Ibid.