Birds in the Bush

E-text prepared by Robin Monks, Joseph Cooper, Leonard Johnson, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
BY BRADFORD TORREY
SIXTH EDITION
BOSTON HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1893
Copyright, 1885, By BRADFORD TORREY
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
Wherefore, let me intreat you to read it with favour and attention, and to pardon us, wherein we may seem to come short of some words, which we have laboured to interpret. The Prologue of the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach.

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room; And hermits are contented with their cells; And students with their pensive citadels: Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom, High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells, Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells: In truth, the prison unto which we doom Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me, In sundry moods 't was pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground; Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be) Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace there, as I have found. Wordsworth.