Rural Hours

Nature and the mid nineteenth-century American landscape is beautifully revealed in this journal of the seasons. Susan Fennimore Cooper, daughter of the great American novelist, wrote this book in 1850, four years before Walden was published. She described it as her "simple record of those little events which make up the course of the seasons in rural life."

As with the works of Thoreau and others in this contemplative genre, including that of Joseph Wood Krutch and Henry Besten, Cooper's w...