{"product_id":"2940014046107","title":"Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest","description":"By author, naturalist, and ornithologist, W.H. (William Henry) Hudson. A poignant meditation on the loss of wilderness, the dream of a return to nature, and the bitter reality of the encounter between savage and civilized man. Read it today!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI take up pen for this foreword with the fear of one who knows that he cannot do\u003cbr\u003ejustice to his subject, and the trembling of one who would not, for a good deal,\u003cbr\u003eset down words unpleasing to the eye of him who wrote Green Mansions, The\u003cbr\u003ePurple Land, and all those other books which have meant so much to me. For of\u003cbr\u003eall living authors--now that Tolstoi has gone I could least dispense with W. H.\u003cbr\u003eHudson. Why do I love his writing so? I think because he is, of living writers that I\u003cbr\u003eread, the rarest spirit, and has the clearest gift of conveying to me the nature of\u003cbr\u003ethat spirit. Writers are to their readers little new worlds to be explored; and each\u003cbr\u003etraveller in the realms of literature must needs have a favourite hunting-ground,\u003cbr\u003ewhich, in his good will--or perhaps merely in his egoism--he would wish others to\u003cbr\u003eshare with him.\u003cbr\u003eThe great and abiding misfortunes of most of us writers are twofold: We are, as\u003cbr\u003eworlds, rather common tramping-ground for our readers, rather tame territory;\u003cbr\u003eand as guides and dragomans thereto we are too superficial, lacking clear\u003cbr\u003eintimacy of expression; in fact--like guide or dragoman--we cannot let folk into the\u003cbr\u003ereal secrets, or show them the spirit, of the land.\u003cbr\u003eNow, Hudson, whether in a pure romance like this Green Mansions, or in that\u003cbr\u003eromantic piece of realism The Purple Land, or in books like Idle Days in\u003cbr\u003ePatagonia, Afoot in England, The Land's End, Adventures among Birds, A\u003cbr\u003eShepherd's Life, and all his other nomadic records of communings with men,\u003cbr\u003ebirds, beasts, and Nature, has a supreme gift of disclosing not only the thing he\u003cbr\u003esees but the spirit of his vision. Without apparent effort he takes you with him into\u003cbr\u003ea rare, free, natural world, and always you are refreshed, stimulated, enlarged,\u003cbr\u003eby going there.\u003cbr\u003eHe is of course a distinguished naturalist, probably the most acute, broadminded,\u003cbr\u003eand understanding observer of Nature living. And this, in an age of\u003cbr\u003especialism, which loves to put men into pigeonholes and label them, has been a\u003cbr\u003emisfortune to the reading public, who seeing the label Naturalist, pass on, and\u003cbr\u003etake down the nearest novel. Hudson has indeed the gifts and knowledge of a\u003cbr\u003eNaturalist, but that is a mere fraction of his value and interest. A really great\u003cbr\u003ewriter such as this is no more to be circumscribed by a single word than America\u003cbr\u003eby the part of it called New York. The expert knowledge which Hudson has of\u003cbr\u003eNature gives to all his work backbone and surety of fibre, and to his sense of\u003cbr\u003ebeauty an intimate actuality. But his real eminence and extraordinary attraction\u003cbr\u003elie in his spirit and philosophy. We feel from his writings that he is nearer to\u003cbr\u003eNature than other men, and yet more truly civilized. The competitive, towny\u003cbr\u003eculture, the queer up-to-date commercial knowingness with which we are so busy\u003cbr\u003ecoating ourselves simply will not stick to him. A passage in his Hampshire Days\u003cbr\u003edescribes him better than I can: \"The blue sky, the brown soil beneath, the grass,\u003cbr\u003ethe trees, the animals, the wind, and rain, and stars are never strange to me; for I\u003cbr\u003eam in and of and am one with them; and my flesh and the soil are one, and the\u003cbr\u003eheat in my blood and in the sunshine are one, and the winds and the tempests\u003cbr\u003eand my passions are one. I feel the 'strangeness' only with regard to my fellow\u003cbr\u003emen, especially in towns, where they exist in conditions unnatural to me, but\u003cbr\u003econgenial to them.... In such moments we sometimes feel a kinship with, and are\u003cbr\u003estrangely drawn to, the dead, who were not as these; the long, long dead, the\u003cbr\u003emen who knew not life in towns, and felt no strangeness in sun and wind and\u003cbr\u003erain.\" This unspoiled unity with Nature pervades all his writings; they are remote\u003cbr\u003efrom the fret and dust and pettiness of town life; they are large, direct, free. It is\u003cbr\u003enot quite simplicity, for the mind of this writer is subtle and fastidious, sensitive to\u003cbr\u003eeach motion of natural and human life; but his sensitiveness is somehow different\u003cbr\u003efrom, almost inimical to, that of us others, who sit indoors and dip our pens in\u003cbr\u003eshades of feeling. Hudson's fancy is akin to the flight of the birds that are his\u003cbr\u003especial loves--it never seems to have entered a house, but since birth to have\u003cbr\u003ebeen roaming the air, in rain and sun, or visiting the trees and the grass. I not\u003cbr\u003eonly disbelieve utterly, but intensely dislike, the doctrine of metempsychosis,\u003cbr\u003ewhich, if I understand it aright, seems the negation of the creative impulse, an\u003cbr\u003eapotheosis of staleness--nothing quite new in the world!","brand":"7th floor 2012","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47069038117104,"sku":"2940014046107","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940014046107_p0.jpg?v=1763599616","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940014046107","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}