Soon’z he officially declares it’s spring,
Their light hearts lift ’em on a north’ard wing,
An’ th’ ain’t an acre, fur ez you can hear,
Can’t by the music tell the time o’ year.”
Sometimes a single line or phrase proclaims our poet’s loving familiarity with the feathered world, and gives his verse an outdoor flavor that positively puts a tonic into the appreciative reader’s veins, almost driving him out beneath the shining vault of the sky; as when the poet refers to “the cock’s shrill trump that tells of scattered corn;” or to “the thin-winged swallow skating on the air;” or laments because “snowflakes fledge the summer’s nest;” or remarks incidentally that the “cat-bird croons in the lilac-bush;” or that “the robin sings, as of old, from the limb;” or that “the single crow a single caw lets fall;” or asks, “Is a thrush gurgling from the brake?” How vivid and full of woodsy suggestion are the following lines from that captivating poem, “Al Fresco”:—
“The only hammer that I hear
Is wielded by the woodpecker,
The single noisy calling his
In all our leaf-hid Sybaris.”
Nothing could be more characteristic of woodpeckerdom than that quatrain. Still more rhythmical are the first six lines—a metrical sextette that sing themselves—of the poem entitled “The Fountain of Youth,”—