The Notary's Manual, Containing Instructions for the Notaries at the Cape of Good Hope, with... Book

Gilbert White's classic, best in an illustrated edition like Century (1988), can be read like the Bible, a few paragraphs a day to muse on. Or one sentence: "The language of birds is very ancient and like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical; little is said, but much is meant and understood."
I read White's Selbourne, and mused on it so, while traveling in Dorset and writing my Birdtalk (2003). GW takes you into another world, the world where quotidian life--the appearance of migratory birds, the Tortoise Timothy in the root garden--was prized, not avoided by iphones and fast transport and vague urgencies.
White is the Thoreau of England, a solitary observer of the first rank. But unlike Thoreau the cantankerous Romantic recluse and tax-refuser, White was a sociable minister, an Eighteenth-Century man. Both Thoreau and White write with inimitable precision and joy at discovery. Both were transcendental, White in the traditionsl Christian manner. The Solomon of Canticles revived in Selbourne and at Walden.