The laughing hours of the blithesome spring—
The youth of the year and its sunshine bright—
With her back all dark and her breast all white.
From the Fables of Lessing I learn that the swallow was originally as harmonious and melodious a songster as the nightingale, until, becoming wearied of dwelling in lonely thickets to be heard and admired only by peasants and shepherds, she forsook her humble friends and took flight to the town. But, in the mad rush of the city, men found no time to listen to her heavenly lay, forgetting which, by and by, instead of singing she learned to build.
I recall no reference to the swallow, however, comparable to Charles Tennyson Turner’s, in one of his many lovely sonnets, Wind on the Corn. Not only the swallow himself is there, wheeling and curveting in all his buoyant grace, but the wind which accelerates his speed, and the rippling wheat field he loves to woo. The sonnet must be read in its entirety, and to recall it calls for no apology; it becomes the more beautiful the more frequently it is read:
Full often as I rove by path or stile
To watch the harvest ripening in the vale,
Slowly and sweetly, like a growing smile—
A smile that ends in laughter—the quick gale
Upon the breadths of gold-green wheat descends;