Sheds its last leaves!”
A flashlight view that, of one of the rarest scenes in Nature. The poet must have bent over more than one callow brood of nestlings, or he never could have written so knowingly about them,—
“Blind nestlings, unafraid,
Stretch up wide-mouthed to every shade
By which their downy dream is stirred,
Taking it for the mother bird;”
for such is the unsuspicious habit of most bantlings in the nest. It would be difficult to find a defter touch than that with which Lowell describes a resplendent morning, “omnipotent with sunshine,” whose “quick charm ... wiled the bluebird to his whiff of song,”
“While aloof
An oriole clattered and a robin shrilled,
Denouncing me an alien and a thief;”