“The little bird sits at his door in the sun,
Atilt like a blossom among the leaves,
And lets his illumined being o’errun
With the deluge of summer it receives;
His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings,
And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings;
He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,—
In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best?”
The last two lines, by the way, are in perfect keeping with Mr. Lowell’s generous instincts, which were always on the side of the lowly and unappreciated. Seductive as the figure is, there seems to be something slightly forced in the poet’s conceit that the thrushes sing because they have been “pierced through with June’s delicious sting,” unless it might be justified on the principle that pain and trial often enhance moral values.
There is a beautiful stanza in the poem, “On Planting a Tree at Inverara,”—