I feel the year’s slow-beating heart,
The sky’s chill prophecy I know;
And welcome the consummate art
Which weaves this spotless shroud of snow!
—Joel Benton, in “Songs of Nature.”
THE HOODED ORIOLE.
(Icterus cucullatus.)
Only a very limited portion of the United States is beautified by the presence of the bright colored Hooded Oriole. The North has the richly plumaged Baltimore oriole for a short time each year, but only the far southeastern part of Texas is enlivened by this graceful, active bird of our illustration, which is “so full of song that the woods are filled with music all the day.” Both of these birds seem hardly to belong to the North, where somber colors seem more in harmony with a severer climate. The Hooded Oriole does not attempt the journey and when we see the Baltimore,
“A winged flame that darts and burns,
Dazzling where’er his bright wing turns,”
in our northern woods we cannot but ask, with the poet,