The Rice Bunting is seven inches and a half long, and eleven and a half in extent. His spring dress is as follows: upper part of the head, wings, tail, and sides of the neck, and whole lower parts, black; the feathers frequently skirted with brownish-yellow, as he passes into the color of the female; back of the head, a cream color; back, black, seamed with brownish-yellow; scapulars, pure white; rump and tail coverts the same; lower part of the back, bluish-white; tail, formed like those of the Woodpecker genus, and often used in the same manner, being thrown in to support it while ascending the stalks of the reed; this habit of throwing in the tail it retains even in the cage; legs, a brownish flesh color; hind heel, very long; bill, a bluish-horn color; eye, hazel. In the month of June this plumage gradually changes to a brownish-yellow, like that of the female, which has the back streaked with brownish-black; whole lower parts, dull-yellow; bill, reddish-flesh color; legs and eyes as in the male. The young birds retain the dress of the female until early in the succeeding spring. The plumage of the female undergoes no material change of color.
CEDAR BIRD. (Ampelis Americana.)
The Cedar-Bird, (Ampelis Americana,) is very frequently shot at the same time with the Robin. The plumage of this bird is of an exquisitely fine and silky texture, lying extremely smooth and glossy. The name Chatterers has been given to them, but they make only a feeble, lisping sound, chiefly as they rise or alight. On the Blue Mountains, and other ridges of the Alleghanies, they spend the months of August and September, feeding on the abundant whortleberries; then they descend to the lower cultivated parts of the country to feed on the berries of the sour gum and red cedar. In the fall and beginning of summer, when fat, they are in high esteem for the table, and great numbers find purchasers in the market of Philadelphia. They have derived their name from one kind of their favorite food; from other sorts they have also been called Cherry Birds, and to some they are known by the name of Crown Birds.
REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.
The Poetical Works of Fitz-Greene Halleck. Now first collected. Illustrated with Steel Engravings, from drawings by American Artists. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 8vo.
This volume is a perfect luxury to the eye, in its typography and embellishments. The fact of an author's appearance in so rich a dress, is itself an evidence of his popularity. We have here, for the first time, a complete edition of the author's poems, tender and humorous, serious and satirical, in a beautiful form. It contains Alnwick Castle, Burns, Marco Bozzarris, Red Jacket, A Poet's Daughter, Connecticut, Wyoming, and other pieces which have passed into the memory of the nation, together with the delicious poem of Fanny, and the celebrated Croaker Epistles. The illustrations are all by American artists, and really embellish the volume. The portrait of Halleck is exceedingly characteristic of the man, expressing that union of intellect and fancy, sound sense, and poetic power, which his productions are so calculated to suggest. His great popularity—a popularity which has always made the supply of his poems inferior to the demand—will doubtless send the present magnificent volume through many editions.
The poems of Halleck are not only good in themselves, but they give an impression of greater powers than they embody. They seem to indicate a large, broad, vigorous mind, of which poetry has been the recreation rather than the vocation. A brilliant mischievousness, in which the serious and the ludicrous, the tender and the comic, the practical and the ideal, are brought rapidly together, is the leading characteristic of his muse. In almost every poem in his volume, serious, or semi-serious, the object appears to be the production of striking effects by violent contrasts. The poet himself rarely seems thoroughly in earnest, though at the same time he never lacks heartiness. There are two splendid exceptions to this remark—Burns, and Marco Bozzarris—poems in which the delicacy and energy of the author's mind find free expression. They show that if the poet commonly plays with his subject, it is not from an incapacity to feel and conceive it vividly, but from a beautiful willfulness of nature, which is impatient of the control of one idea or emotion. Halleck's perceptions of the ideal and practical appears equally clear and vivid. His fancy cannot suggest a poetical view of life, without his wit at the same time suggesting its prosaic counterpart in society. A mind thus exquisitely sensitive both to the beautiful and laughable sides of a subject—looking at life at once with the eye of the poet and the man of the world—naturally finds delight in a fine mockery of its own idealisms, and loves to sport with its own high-raised feelings. His poetry is not, therefore, so much an exhibition of the real nature and capacity of the man, as of the play and inter-penetration of his various mental powers, in periods of pleasant relaxation from the business of life. In a few instances, we think, his humorous insight has been deceived from the unconscious influence upon his mind of the sentiment of Byron and Moore. Thus he occasionally falls into the exaggerations of misanthropy and sentimentality. In his poem entitled Woman, we are informed that man has no constancy of affection,—