“I’ve a notion, I think, of a good dinner speech,
Tripping light as a sandpiper over the beach,
Swerving this way and that, as the wave of the moment
Washes out its slight trace with a dash of whim’s foam on’t,
And leaving on memory’s rim just a sense
Something graceful had gone by, a live present tense;
Not poetry,—no, not quite that, but as good,
A kind of winged prose that could fly if it would.”
Like all discriminating lovers of “Nature’s blithe commoners,” Lowell had his favorites, whose praises he frequently rung with a sincerity that cannot be doubted for a moment. He was especially partial to the bobolink. He must have often peeped into the
“Tussocks that house blithe Bob o’ Lincoln,”