The first lady-bugs, called forth by the grateful warmth, have left their hibernacle. The first wasps and blue-bottle flies are buzzing and bumping against the south window panes. I catch the first tremolo of the toads and piercing treble of the hylodes.
My first green bullfrog, too, “whom the Muses have ordained to sing for aye.” Again I hear his grand diapason, just as I heard it last year and every year before as long as I can remember. Apparently from the same place in the marsh, amid the pond-weeds and water-plantains, where he suns himself and dozes by day, and launches his maestoso at night. I wonder if it is really the same frog, with his great yellow ears and blinking eyes, and if ever he grows old? It is the old voice from the old place, more powerful and sonorous than the voices of his fellows. What a fine time he has of it—slumbering in the ooze throughout the winter, while I am shaking with the cold; cool and comfortable throughout the summer, when I am sweltering with the heat; with nothing to do but bask and bathe, or thrust out his long tongue for the flies that are foolish enough to think him asleep. I heard him just two days earlier this year than last, May 14, ten days later than the first swallow to make his presence known. It is said he must thrice put on his spectacles ere he permanently deserts his couch in the mire—i.e., look through the ice three times before he rises with triumphant song. He is invariably the latest of the spring choristers, and at once his magnificent basso completes the vernal pastoral.
I wish I might obtain the recipe of his spring bitters. Is it water-cresses or water-plantain? It is evident he grows younger with advancing years. “The croaking of frogs,” said Martin Luther, “edifies nothing at all; it is mere sophistry and fruitless.” But, unlike the frog, Luther did not relish a Diet of Worms; and I am not sure that the woodcuts of the old reformer do not resemble the head of my friend of the swamp, whose melody floats so serenely through the summer dusks. Horace, generally correct, was wrong with respect to the frog:
... Ranæque palustres
Avertunt somnos.
The frog’s is a somnolent voice if heard at a proper distance. One should not expect harmony from wind instruments in the first row of the orchestra chairs. If one’s frogs annoy one, he should remove his swamp or his house. The orchestra of Nature calls for its bassoon and its cymbals—the bullfrog and the cicada.
A new poet has recently appeared in the Dominion. Among his many poems of pronounced freshness and beauty is one on the frog—more strictly speaking, five poems, for the panegyric consists of five connected sonnets. Not alone does this graceful lyrist and keen interpreter of Nature place the frog as the grand diurnal musician of spring, but he accords him a no less exalted place as a soothing minstrel of the estival night. I should be guilty of ingratitude to my resonant friend of the swamp did I not append the fourth sonnet of the musical quintet:
And when day passed and over heaven’s height,
Thin with the many stars and cool with dew,
The fingers of the deep hours slowly drew