Others of our birds have been game for the poetic muse, but in most cases the poets have had some moral or pretty conceit to convey, and have not loved the bird first. Mr. Lathrop preaches a little in his pleasant poem, "The Sparrow," but he must some time have looked upon the bird with genuine emotion to have written the first two stanzas:—
"Glimmers gay the leafless thicket
Close beside my garden gate,
Where, so light, from post to wicket,
Hops the sparrow, blithe, sedate:
Who, with meekly folded wing,
Comes to sun himself and sing.
"It was there, perhaps, last year,
That his little house he built;
For he seems to perk and peer,
And to twitter, too, and tilt
The bare branches in between,
With a fond, familiar mien."
The bluebird has not been overlooked, and Halleek, Longfellow, and Mrs. Sigourney have written poems upon him, but from none of them does there fall that first note of his in early spring,—a note that may be called the violet of sound, and as welcome to the ear, heard above the cold, damp earth; as is its floral type to the eye a few weeks later Lowell's two lines come nearer the mark:—
"The bluebird, shifting his light load of song
From post to post along the cheerless fence."
Or the first swallow that comes twittering up the southern valley, laughing a gleeful, childish laugh, and awakening such memories in the heart, who has put him in a poem? So the hummingbird, too, escapes through the finest meshes of rhyme.
The most melodious of our songsters, the wood thrush and the hermit
thrush,—birds whose strains, more than any others, express harmony
and serenity,—have not yet, that I am aware, had reared to them their
merited poetic monument, unless, indeed, Whitman has done this service
for the hermit thrush in his "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn." Here
the threnody is blent of three chords, the blossoming lilac, the evening
star, and the hermit thrush, the latter playing the most prominent part
throughout the composition. It is the exalting and spiritual utterance
of the "solitary singer" that calms and consoles the poet when the
powerful shock of the President's assassination comes upon him, and he
flees from the stifling atmosphere and offensive lights and conversation
of the house,—
"Forth to hiding, receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still."
Numerous others of our birds would seem to challenge attention by their calls and notes. There is the Maryland yellowthroat, for instance, standing in the door of his bushy tent, and calling out as you approach, "which way, sir! which way, sir!" If he says this to the ear of common folk, what would he not say to the poet? One of the peewees says "stay there!" with great emphasis. The cardinal grosbeak calls out "what cheer" "what cheer;" " the bluebird says "purity," "purity," "purity;" the brown thrasher, or ferruginous thrush, according to Thoreau, calls out to the farmer planting his corn, "drop it," "drop it," "cover it up," "cover it up" The yellow-breasted chat says "who," "who" and "tea-boy" What the robin says, caroling that simple strain from the top of the tall maple, or the crow with his hardy haw-haw, or the pedestrain meadowlark sounding his piercing and long-drawn note in the spring meadows, the poets ought to be able to tell us. I only know the birds all have a language which is very expressive, and which is easily translatable into the human tongue.
II TOUCHES OF NATURE
I