“Hither the busy birds shall flutter,
With the light timber for their nests,
And, pausing from their labor, utter
The morning sunshine in their breasts.”
With all his poet’s soul Lowell loved the serene, as when he congratulates himself on having left the grating noise and stifling smoke of London, and found in some sequestered haunt
“Air and quiet too;
Air filtered through the beech and oak;
Quiet by nothing harsher broke
Than wood-dove’s meditative coo.”
The word “meditative” is extremely felicitous, but no more so than the hop-skip-and-spring of the following lines from a Commencement dinner poem:—