Excerpt from My Favourite Books To read a book in bed is the next best thing to reading it aloud. In the hush of the night one can almost hear the melody of Sir Thomas Browne's sonorous prose, or the chime and music of the Faerie Queene. I do not call Thoreau a puny soul positively, but only comparatively. What I object to is his habit of thrusting his ego between us and the landscape. In the presence of the solemn woods and awful heavens any human soul is puny, and Thoreau shows a greedy eagerness to use the immensities as a background for his own self-portraiture. Gilbert White gave us the flowers and the birds, and kept himself to himself. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.