Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/326

 290 of the sort initially intended to "float cuts," it is very well done, done most often with distinction. At times, of course, it suffers from over-emphasis, as do the descriptive portions of his long stories, but generally he attunes his writing to the genius of the place. This is as true of his letters as of what he wrote for the public, especially true of that series on Algiers from which Mrs. Sharp quotes in her "Memoir." Papers of this sort, papers giving the genius of place, Sharp was happier in, I think, than in those which are more definitely the out-of-door essay. Sharp knew much of birds and small mammals, of trees and plants, with a knowledge that evidently began in childhood, but, as with so much else in his life, this knowledge he never had time to fill out and deepen through patient observation. You must not, then, turn to "Where the Forest Murmurs" to find writing of a kind with that in which Thoreau and Jefferies so finely attained, much less that loving intimacy with the personal side of birds and animals that so humanly tempers the scientific spirit in White of Selborne. Nor is there in them the racy earthiness of Mr. Burroughs. Their greatest asset is their enthusiasm over the beauty of the world they are written to praise; the next greatest their power of catching in words the mood of a landscape; their next greatest their distinction of style, though there are several in which the style is wholly without distinction. Now and then, too, they are valuable for their guesses at the whys and wherefores of things. There are to-day many explanations of what is commonly called "The Lure of the Wild." Is not this as revelatory as any?—