With what a plaintive melody the last line lingers in one’s mind, like some far-off melancholy strain, singing itself over again and again with a persistency that will not be hushed,—“I only know she came and went.” There are times, too, when our bard falls into a slightly despondent mood, and even then the birds serve to give a turn to his pensive reflections,—
“But each day brings less summer cheer,
Crimps more our ineffectual spring,
And something earlier every year
Our singing birds take wing.”
To my mind, he is less attractive when his verse takes on this cheerless hue, and I therefore turn gladly to his more jubilant lays, in which he seems to have caught the joy of the full-toned bird orchestra, as he does at more than one place in “The Vision of Sir Launfal,”—
“The little birds sang as if it were
The one day of summer in all the year,
And the very leaves seemed to sing on the trees.”
What bird lover has not often been caught in such a mesh of bird song, on a bright day of the early springtime? Even good-natured Hosea Biglow cannot always repress his enthusiasm for the birds, although he is quite too chary of his allusions to them,—that is, too chary for the man who has birds on the brain. His unsophisticated sincerity cannot brook a perfunctory treatment of Nature’s blithe minstrels, for he breaks out scornfully in denouncing those book-read poets who get “wut they’ve airly read” so “worked into their heart an’ head” that they