Et quand ie pense auoir plus de douleur,
Sans y penser ie me treuue hors de peine.
Puis quand ie croy ma ioye estre certeine,
Et estre au haut de mon desiré heur,
Il me remet en mon premier malheur.
Œuures de Louize Labé Lionnoize. A Lion par Ian de Tournes, M.D.LVI. Auec Priuilege du Roy.
The first of the migratory flocks have come. Is it the robins or the bluebirds first, or the omnipresent song-sparrow scattering his notes like a shower? Warm as the scarlet of his wings is the greeting of the starling from his haven in the reeds; and ah! how sweet the carol of the meadow-lark from the distant fields. Again I hear the warble which the blackbird dropped when flying over the autumnal stubbles, only it has a cheeriness that is alone brought forth by sunshine and the lengthening days. Little flutings and grace notes rise from sheltered thickets and sunny hollows—assemblages of snow-birds, Canada sparrows, and red-polls practicing their Fruehlingslied. The white-throated sparrow’s silver strain I hear on every side, the very beat of the spring-tide and song of the sunshine. Even the voice of the crow has a softer tone. From my study windows I watch the sable hosts returning to their roost in the distant wood. I see them slowly filing by during the winter, at the appointed hour, but less numerously, and seldom audibly. Now they voice their passage; their shadows cast a sound. From time immemorial they have occupied a roost in the same wood, their numbers apparently neither increasing nor diminishing. The first squads fly over early in the evening, re-enforcements arriving continually until dusk. They come from all directions, the total assemblage numbering perhaps a thousand. Above the tree-tops, for half an hour before dark, there ascends a weird chorus of evening, composed of every shade of corvine basso, and basso profondo. Borne from afar on the still evening air, the hoarse notes come to me mellowed and subdued—a fitting ave of the darkening day.
Later, the first swallow races by, with the first moth in his bill, urged on the wider wings of the south wind—the first swallows, rather; for there is not only one but a score coursing through the ether, exultant in the freedom of existence. Do they, indeed, drop from the sky some bland spring morning—spirits of dead children revisiting their homes—as the fanciful Roman legend has it? How swiftly they cleave the air with their forked tail and sickle-shaped wings! We marvel at the soaring of the hawk, balancing himself in an ever-widening and ascending circle, ever tracing the curve of beauty. We wonder at the agility of the humming-bird, and his power of suspension in mid-air over a flower. But the hawk barely flaps a pinion, sustained through some inexplicable agency in overcoming the natural force of gravity; and the humming-bird every little while rests from the friction of the air. Is not the perpetual flight of the swallow, his unceasing motion and incessant turning upon himself a greater wonder?
I stand on the margin of the stream just before an impending shower, when a concourse of hirundines is intent upon the capture of its prey. The surface is dimpled by the constant rising of feeding trout, and brushed every now and then by a bird drinking on the wing. It is a favorite haunt of both fly-catchers and swallows, lured by the rich insect fauna that congregate above the still expanse of water, the ephemerina dancing their joyous dance of an hour. The stream is scarcely a rod and a half wide. It is almost overarched with bushes and trees, and abounds with curves. There are at least forty swallows hawking over it, all chasing above the glassy surface, ceaselessly coming and going, swift as missiles sprung from a sling. Yet not a catkin of the alder tangle or blade of the rushes is so much as grazed by a wing; not a barbule of one bird ruffled by the feather of another, amid all their lightning turns and curvatures. It is the same in their chase over a field when attracted close to the earth by insects. It is the same in their coursing through the air which I see through my windows, only they have but their fellows, and no other objects to avoid. Yet even then their flight is a perpetual wonder.
Sacred to the penates the swallow was rightly held; it were a Vandal who would harm them. Beloved wherever they roam the sky, Procne has, nevertheless, been comparatively neglected by the Muse, while Philomela has received the greater homage. Is not the swallow’s warble sweet, associated as it is not only with the swallow’s beauty, but with our very houses and barns and the blue sky that bends above them? Best known of all individual “pursuers of the sun” is the bird mentioned in the fifth stanza of the Elegy: