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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Birds and Poets, by John Burroughs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Birds and Poets
+
+Author: John Burroughs
+
+Posting Date: March 19, 2009 [EBook #5177]
+Release Date: February, 2004
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BIRDS AND POETS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jack Eden
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BIRDS AND POETS
+
+WITH OTHER PAPERS
+
+THE WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS, VOLUME III WITH PORTRAITS AND MANY
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+By John Burroughs
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+I have deliberated a long time about coupling some of my sketches of
+outdoor nature with a few chapters of a more purely literary character,
+and thus confiding to my reader what absorbs and delights me inside my
+four walls, as well as what pleases and engages me outside those walls;
+especially since I have aimed to bring my outdoor spirit and method
+within, and still to look upon my subject with the best naturalist's eye
+I could command.
+
+I hope, therefore, he will not be scared away when I boldly confront
+him in the latter portions of my book with this name of strange portent,
+Walt Whitman, for I assure him that in this misjudged man he may press
+the strongest poetic pulse that has yet beaten in America, or perhaps
+in modern times. Then, these chapters are a proper supplement or
+continuation of my themes and their analogy in literature, because
+in them we shall "follow out these lessons of the earth and air," and
+behold their application to higher matters.
+
+It is not an artificially graded path strewn with roses that invites us
+in this part, but, let me hope, something better, a rugged trail through
+the woods or along the beach where we shall now and then get a whiff of
+natural air, or a glimpse of something to
+
+         "Make the wild blood start
+      In its mystic springs."
+
+ESOPUS-ON-HUDSON, March, 1877.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+   I.  BIRDS AND POETS
+  II.  TOUCHES OF NATURE
+ III.  A BIRD MEDLEY
+  IV.  APRIL
+   V.  SPRING POEMS
+  VI.  OUR RURAL DIVINITY
+ VII.  BEFORE GENIUS
+VIII. BEFORE BEAUTY  IX.  EMERSON
+   X.  THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE
+       INDEX
+
+
+
+
+
+BIRDS AND POETS
+
+
+
+
+I BIRDS AND POETS
+
+       "In summer, when the shawes be shene,
+           And leaves be large and long,
+        It is full merry in fair forest
+           To hear the fowles' song.
+        The wood-wele sang, and wolde not cease,
+           Sitting upon the spray;
+        So loud, it wakened Robin Hood
+           In the greenwood where he lay."
+
+It might almost be said that the birds are all birds of the poets and
+of no one else, because it is only the poetical temperament that
+fully responds to them. So true is this, that all the great
+ornithologists--original namers and biographers of the birds--have been
+poets in deed if not in word. Audubon is a notable case in point, who,
+if he had not the tongue or the pen of the poet, certainly had the
+eye and ear and heart--"the fluid and attaching character"--and the
+singleness of purpose, the enthusiasm, the unworldliness, the love, that
+characterize the true and divine race of bards.
+
+So had Wilson, though perhaps not in as large a measure; yet he took
+fire as only a poet can. While making a journey on foot to Philadelphia,
+shortly after landing in this country, he caught sight of the red-headed
+woodpecker flitting among the trees,--a bird that shows like a
+tricolored scarf among the foliage,--and it so kindled his enthusiasm
+that his life was devoted to the pursuit of the birds from that day. It
+was a lucky hit. Wilson had already set up as a poet in Scotland, and
+was still fermenting when the bird met his eye and suggested to his soul
+a new outlet for its enthusiasm.
+
+The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A
+bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is
+his life,--large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged
+with buoyancy and his heart with song. The beautiful vagabonds, endowed
+with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds,--how
+many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday lives, and
+how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!
+
+Indeed, is not the bird the original type and teacher of the poet, and
+do we not demand of the human lark or thrush that he "shake out his
+carols" in the same free and spontaneous manner as his winged
+prototype? Kingsley has shown how surely the old minnesingers and early
+ballad-writers have learned of the birds, taking their key-note from the
+blackbird, or the wood-lark, or the throstle, and giving utterance to a
+melody as simple and unstudied. Such things as the following were surely
+caught from the fields or the woods:--
+
+       "She sat down below a thorn,
+        Fine flowers in the valley,
+        And there has she her sweet babe borne,
+        And the green leaves they grow rarely."
+
+Or the best lyric pieces, how like they are to certain
+bird-songs!--clear, ringing, ecstatic, and suggesting that challenge
+and triumph which the outpouring of the male bird contains. (Is not
+the genuine singing, lyrical quality essentially masculine?) Keats and
+Shelley, perhaps more notably than any other English poets, have the
+bird organization and the piercing wild-bird cry. This, of course,
+is not saying that they are the greatest poets, but that they have
+preeminently the sharp semi-tones of the sparrows and the larks.
+
+But when the general reader thinks of the birds of the poets, he
+very naturally calls to mind the renowned birds, the lark and the
+nightingale, Old World melodists, embalmed in Old World poetry, but
+occasionally appearing on these shores, transported in the verse of some
+callow singer.
+
+The very oldest poets, the towering antique bards, seem to make little
+mention of the song-birds. They loved better the soaring, swooping birds
+of prey, the eagle, the ominous birds, the vultures, the storks and
+cranes, or the clamorous sea-birds and the screaming hawks. These
+suited better the rugged, warlike character of the times and the simple,
+powerful souls of the singers themselves. Homer must have heard the
+twittering of the swallows, the cry of the plover, the voice of the
+turtle, and the warble of the nightingale; but they were not adequate
+symbols to express what he felt or to adorn his theme. Aeschylus saw in
+the eagle "the dog of Jove," and his verse cuts like a sword with such a
+conception.
+
+It is not because the old bards were less as poets, but that they were
+more as men. To strong, susceptible characters, the music of nature is
+not confined to sweet sounds. The defiant scream of the hawk circling
+aloft, the wild whinny of the loon, the whooping of the crane, the
+booming of the bittern, the vulpine bark of the eagle, the loud
+trumpeting of the migratory geese sounding down out of the midnight sky;
+or by the seashore, the coast of New Jersey or Long Island, the wild
+crooning of the flocks of gulls, repeated, continued by the hour,
+swirling sharp and shrill, rising and falling like the wind in a storm,
+as they circle above the beach or dip to the dash of the waves,--are
+much more welcome in certain moods than any and all mere bird-melodies,
+in keeping as they are with the shaggy and untamed features of ocean
+and woods, and suggesting something like the Richard Wagner music in the
+ornithological orchestra.
+
+                      "Nor these alone whose notes
+       Nice-fingered art must emulate in vain,
+       But cawing rooks, and kites that swim sublime
+       In still repeated circles, screaming loud,
+       The jay, the pie, and even the boding owl,
+       That hails the rising moon, have charms for me,"
+
+says Cowper. "I never hear," says Burns in one of his letters, "the
+loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild
+mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in an autumnal morning,
+without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or
+poetry."
+
+Even the Greek minor poets, the swarm of them that are represented in
+the Greek Anthology, rarely make affectionate mention of the birds,
+except perhaps Sappho, whom Ben Jonson makes speak of the nightingale
+as--
+
+       "The dear glad angel of the spring."
+
+The cicada, the locust, and the grasshopper are often referred to, but
+rarely by name any of the common birds. That Greek grasshopper must
+have been a wonderful creature. He was a sacred object in Greece, and
+is spoken of by the poets as a charming songster. What we would say of
+birds the Greek said of this favorite insect. When Socrates and Phaedrus
+came to the fountain shaded by the plane-tree, where they had their
+famous discourse, Socrates said: "Observe the freshness of the spot, how
+charming and very delightful it is, and how summer-like and shrill
+it sounds from the choir of grasshoppers." One of the poets in the
+Anthology finds a grasshopper struggling in a spider's web, which he
+releases with the words:--
+
+       "Go safe and free with your sweet voice of song."
+
+Another one makes the insect say to a rustic who had captured him:--
+
+       "Me, the Nymphs' wayside minstrel whose sweet note
+        O'er sultry hill is heard, and shady grove to float."
+
+Still another sings how a grasshopper took the place of a broken string
+on his lyre, and "filled the cadence due."
+
+       "For while six chords beneath my fingers cried,
+        He with his tuneful voice the seventh supplied;
+        The midday songster of the mountain set
+        His pastoral ditty to my canzonet;
+        And when he sang, his modulated throat
+        Accorded with the lifeless string I smote."
+
+While we are trying to introduce the lark in this country, why not try
+this Pindaric grasshopper also?
+
+It is to the literary poets and to the minstrels of a softer age that
+we must look for special mention of the song-birds and for poetical
+rhapsodies upon them. The nightingale is the most general favorite, and
+nearly all the more noted English poets have sung her praises. To the
+melancholy poet she is melancholy, and to the cheerful she is cheerful.
+Shakespeare in one of his sonnets speaks of her song as mournful, while
+Martial calls her the "most garrulous" of birds. Milton sang:--
+
+       "Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly,
+        Most musical, most melancholy,
+        Thee, chantress, oft the woods among
+        I woo, to hear thy evening song."
+
+To Wordsworth she told another story:--
+
+       "O nightingale! thou surely art
+        A creature of ebullient heart;
+        These notes of thine,--they pierce and pierce,--
+        Tumultuous harmony and fierce!
+        Thou sing'st as if the god of wine
+        Had helped thee to a valentine;
+        A song in mockery and despite
+        Of shades, and dews, and silent night,
+        And steady bliss, and all the loves
+        Now sleeping in these peaceful groves."
+
+In a like vein Coleridge sang:--
+
+       "'T is the merry nightingale
+        That crowds and hurries and precipitates
+        With fast, thick warble his delicious notes."
+
+Keats's poem on the nightingale is doubtless more in the spirit of the
+bird's strain than any other. It is less a description of the song and
+more the song itself. Hood called the nightingale
+
+       "The sweet and plaintive Sappho of the dell."
+
+I mention the nightingale only to point my remarks upon its American
+rival, the famous mockingbird of the Southern States, which is also a
+nightingale,--a night-singer,--and which no doubt excels the Old World
+bird in the variety and compass of its powers. The two birds belong to
+totally distinct families, there being no American species which answers
+to the European nightingale, as there are that answer to the robin,
+the cuckoo, the blackbird, and numerous others. Philomel has the color,
+manners, and habits of a thrush,--our hermit thrush,--but it is not a
+thrush at all, but a warbler. I gather from the books that its song is
+protracted and full rather than melodious,--a capricious, long-continued
+warble, doubling and redoubling, rising and falling, issuing from the
+groves and the great gardens, and associated in the minds of the poets
+with love and moonlight and the privacy of sequestered walks. All our
+sympathies and attractions are with the bird, and we do not forget that
+Arabia and Persia are there back of its song.
+
+_Our_ nightingale has mainly the reputation of the caged bird, and
+is famed mostly for its powers of mimicry, which are truly wonderful,
+enabling the bird to exactly reproduce and even improve upon the notes
+of almost any other songster. But in a state of freedom it has a song of
+its own which is infinitely rich and various. It is a garrulous polyglot
+when it chooses to be, and there is a dash of the clown and the buffoon
+in its nature which too often flavors its whole performance, especially
+in captivity; but in its native haunts, and when its love-passion is
+upon it, the serious and even grand side of its character comes out. In
+Alabama and Florida its song may be heard all through the sultry summer
+night, at times low and plaintive, then full and strong. A friend of
+Thoreau and a careful observer, who has resided in Florida, tells me
+that this bird is a much more marvelous singer than it has the credit of
+being. He describes a habit it has of singing on the wing on moonlight
+nights, that would be worth going South to hear. Starting from a low
+bush, it mounts in the air and continues its flight apparently to an
+altitude of several hundred feet, remaining on the wing a number
+of minutes, and pouring out its song with the utmost clearness and
+abandon,--a slowly rising musical rocket that fills the night air with
+harmonious sounds. Here are both the lark and nightingale in one; and if
+poets were as plentiful down South as they are in New England, we should
+have heard of this song long ago, and had it celebrated in appropriate
+verse. But so far only one Southern poet, Wilde, has accredited the bird
+this song. This he has done in the following admirable sonnet:--
+
+                    TO THE MOCKINGBIRD
+
+       Winged mimic of the woods! thou motley fool!
+          Who shall thy gay buffoonery describe?
+       Thine ever-ready notes of ridicule
+          Pursue thy fellows still with jest and gibe.
+       Wit--sophist--songster--Yorick of thy tribe,
+          Thou sportive satirist of Nature's school,
+       To thee the palm of scoffing we ascribe,
+          Arch scoffer, and mad Abbot of Misrule!
+       For such thou art by day--but all night long
+          Thou pour'st a soft, sweet, pensive, solemn strain,
+       As if thou didst in this, thy moonlight song,
+          Like to the melancholy Jaques, complain,
+       Musing on falsehood, violence, and wrong,
+          And sighing for thy motley coat again.
+
+Aside from this sonnet, the mockingbird has got into poetical
+literature, so far as I know, in only one notable instance, and that in
+the page of a poet where we would least expect to find him,--a bard who
+habitually bends his ear only to the musical surge and rhythmus of total
+nature, and is as little wont to turn aside for any special beauties
+or points as the most austere of the ancient masters. I refer to
+Walt Whitman's "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking," in which the
+mockingbird plays a part. The poet's treatment of the bird is entirely
+ideal and eminently characteristic. That is to say, it is altogether
+poetical and not at all ornithological; yet it contains a rendering
+or free translation of a bird-song--the nocturne of the mockingbird,
+singing and calling through the night for its lost mate--that I consider
+quite unmatched in our literature:--
+
+ Once, Paumanok,
+ When the snows had melted, and the Fifth-month grass was growing,
+ Up this seashore, in some briers,
+ Two guests from Alabama--two together,
+ And their nest, and four light green eggs, spotted with brown,
+ And every day the he-bird, to and fro, near at hand,
+ And every day the she-bird, crouched on her nest, silent, with bright
+    eyes,
+ And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them,
+ Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.
+
+ _Shine! Shine! Shine!
+ Pour down your warmth, great Sun!
+ While we bask--we two together._
+
+ _Two together!
+ Winds blow South, or winds blow North,
+ Day come white, or night come black,
+ Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
+ Singing all time, minding no time,
+ If we two but keep together._
+
+ Till of a sudden,
+ Maybe killed unknown to her mate,
+ One forenoon the she-bird crouched not on the nest,
+ Nor returned that afternoon, nor the next,
+ Nor ever appeared again.
+
+ And thenceforward all summer, in the sound of the sea,
+ And at night, under the full of the moon, in calmer weather,
+ Over the hoarse surging of the sea,
+ Or flitting from brier to brier by day,
+ I saw, I heard at intervals, the remaining one, the he-bird,
+ The solitary guest from Alabama.
+
+ _Blow! blow! blow!
+ Blow up, sea-winds, along Paumanok's shore!
+ I wait and I wait, till you blow my mate to me._
+
+ Yes, when the stars glistened,
+ All night long, on the prong of a moss-scalloped stake,
+ Down, almost amid the slapping waves,
+ Sat the lone singer, wonderful, causing tears.
+
+ He called on his mate:
+ He poured forth the meanings which I, of all men, know.
+
+. . . . . . . . . . .
+
+ _Soothe! soothe! soothe!
+ Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
+ And again another behind, embracing and lapping, every one close,
+ But my love soothes not me, not me._
+
+ _Low hangs the moon--it rose late.
+ Oh it is lagging--oh I think it is heavy with love, with love._
+
+ _Oh madly the sea pushes, pushes upon the land,
+ With love--with love._
+
+ _O night! do I not see my love fluttering out there among the breakers!
+ What is that little black thing I see there in the white?_
+
+ _Loud! loud! loud!
+ Loud I call to you, my love!
+ High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves:
+ Surely you must know who is here, is here;
+ You must know who I am, my love._
+
+ _Low-hanging moon!
+ What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?
+ Oh it is the shape, the shape of my mate!
+ O moon, do not keep her from me any longer._
+
+ _Land! land! O land!
+ Whichever way I turn, oh I think you could give my mate back again,
+    if you only would;
+ For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look._
+
+ _O rising stars!
+ Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you._
+
+ _O throat! O trembling throat!
+ Sound clearer through the atmosphere!
+ Pierce the woods, the earth;
+ Somewhere listening to catch you, must be the one I want._
+
+ _Shake out, carols!
+ Solitary here--the night's carols!
+ Carols of lonesome love! Death's carols!
+ Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!
+ Oh, under that moon, where she droops almost down into the sea!
+ O reckless, despairing carols._
+
+ _But soft! sink low! Soft! let me just murmur;
+ And do you wait a moment, you husky-noised sea;
+ For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,
+ So faint--I must be still, be still to listen!
+ But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately
+   to me._
+
+ _Hither, my love!
+ Here I am! Here!
+ With this just-sustained note I announce myself to you;
+ This gentle call is for you, my love, for you._
+
+ _Do not be decoyed elsewhere!
+ That is the whistle of the wind--it is not my voice;
+ That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray;
+ Those are the shadows of leaves._
+
+ _O darkness! Oh in vain!
+ Oh I am very sick and sorrowful._
+
+. . . . . . . . . . .
+
+The bird that occupies the second place to the nightingale in British
+poetical literature is the skylark, a pastoral bird as the Philomel is
+an arboreal,--a creature of light and air and motion, the companion of
+the plowman, the shepherd, the harvester,--whose nest is in the stubble
+and whose tryst is in the clouds. Its life affords that kind of contrast
+which the imagination loves,--one moment a plain pedestrian bird, hardly
+distinguishable from the ground, the next a soaring, untiring songster,
+reveling in the upper air, challenging the eye to follow him and the ear
+to separate his notes.
+
+The lark's song is not especially melodious, but is blithesome,
+sibilant, and unceasing. Its type is the grass, where the bird makes its
+home, abounding, multitudinous, the notes nearly all alike and all in
+the same key, but rapid, swarming, prodigal, showering down as thick and
+fast as drops of rain in a summer shower.
+
+Many noted poets have sung the praises of the lark, or been kindled
+by his example. Shelley's ode and Wordsworth's "To a Skylark" are well
+known to all readers of poetry, while every schoolboy will recall Hogg's
+poem, beginning:--
+
+       "Bird of the wilderness,
+        Blithesome and cumberless,
+    Sweet be thy matin o'er moorland and lea!
+        Emblem of happiness,
+        Blest is thy dwelling-place--
+    Oh to abide in the desert with thee!"
+
+I heard of an enthusiastic American who went about English fields
+hunting a lark with Shelley's poem in his hand, thinking no doubt to use
+it as a kind of guide-book to the intricacies and harmonies of the song.
+He reported not having heard any larks, though I have little doubt they
+were soaring and singing about him all the time, though of course they
+did not sing to his ear the song that Shelley heard. The poets are
+the best natural historians, only you must know how to read them. They
+translate the facts largely and freely. A celebrated lady once said to
+Turner, "I confess I cannot see in nature what you do." "Ah, madam,"
+said the complacent artist, "don't you wish you could!"
+
+Shelley's poem is perhaps better known, and has a higher reputation
+among literary folk, than Wordsworth's; it is more lyrical and
+lark-like; but it is needlessly long, though no longer than the lark's
+song itself, but the lark can't help it, and Shelley can. I quote only a
+few stanzas:--
+
+              "In the golden lightning
+                  Of the sunken sun,
+               O'er which clouds are bright'ning
+                  Thou dost float and run,
+       Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
+
+              "The pale purple even
+                  Melts around thy flight;
+               Like a star of heaven,
+                  In the broad daylight
+       Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,
+
+              "Keen as are the arrows
+                  Of that silver sphere,
+               Whose intense lamp narrows
+                  In the white dawn clear,
+       Until we hardly see--we feel that it is there;
+
+              "All the earth and air
+                  With thy voice is loud,
+               As, when Night is bare,
+                  From one lonely cloud
+       The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed."
+
+Wordsworth has written two poems upon the lark, in one of which he calls
+the bird "pilgrim of the sky." This is the one quoted by Emerson in
+"Parnassus." Here is the concluding stanza:--
+
+       "Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;
+        A privacy of glorious light is thine,
+        Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
+        Of harmony, with instinct more divine;
+        Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam,
+        True to the kindred points of heaven and home."
+
+The other poem I give entire:--
+
+       "Up with me! up with me into the clouds!
+           For thy song, Lark, is strong;
+        Up with me, up with me into the clouds!
+              Singing, singing,
+        With clouds and sky about thee ringing,
+           Lift me, guide me till I find
+        That spot which seems so to thy mind!
+
+       "I have walked through wilderness dreary,
+           And to-day my heart is weary;
+        Had I now the wings of a Faery
+           Up to thee would I fly.
+        There is madness about thee, and joy divine
+           In that song of thine;
+        Lift me, guide me high and high
+        To thy banqueting-place in the sky.
+
+             "Joyous as morning
+        Thou art laughing and scorning;
+        Thou hast a nest for thy love and thy rest,
+        And, though little troubled with sloth,
+        Drunken Lark! thou wouldst be loth
+        To be such a traveler as I.
+           Happy, happy Liver!
+        With a soul as strong as a mountain river,
+        Pouring out praise to the Almighty Giver,
+        Joy and jollity be with us both!
+
+       "Alas! my journey, rugged and uneven,
+        Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind;
+        But hearing thee, or others of thy kind,
+        As full of gladness and as free of heaven,
+        I, with my fate contented, will plod on,
+        And hope for higher raptures, when life's day is done."
+
+
+But better than either--better and more than a hundred pages--is
+Shakespeare's simple line,--
+
+       "Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings,"
+
+or John Lyly's, his contemporary,--
+
+             "Who is't now we hear?
+        None but the lark so shrill and clear;
+        Now at heaven's gate she claps her wings,
+        The morn not waking till she sings."
+
+We have no well-known pastoral bird in the Eastern States that answers
+to the skylark. The American pipit or titlark and the shore lark, both
+birds of the far north, and seen in the States only in fall and winter,
+are said to sing on the wing in a similar strain. Common enough in our
+woods are two birds that have many of the habits and manners of the
+lark--the water-thrush and the golden-crowned thrush, or oven-bird. They
+are both walkers, and the latter frequently sings on the wing up aloft
+after the manner of the lark. Starting from its low perch, it rises in
+a spiral flight far above the tallest trees, and breaks out in a clear,
+ringing, ecstatic song, sweeter and more richly modulated than the
+skylark's, but brief, ceasing almost before you have noticed it; whereas
+the skylark goes singing away after you have forgotten him and returned
+to him half a dozen times.
+
+But on the Great Plains, of the West there; is a bird whose song
+resembles the skylark's quite closely and is said to be not at all
+inferior. This is Sprague's pipit, sometimes called the Missouri
+skylark, an excelsior songster, which from far up in the transparent
+blue rains down its notes for many minutes together. It is, no doubt,
+destined to figure in the future poetical literature of the West.
+
+Throughout the northern and eastern parts of the Union the lark would
+find a dangerous rival in the bobolink, a bird that has no European
+prototype, and no near relatives anywhere, standing quite alone, unique,
+and, in the qualities of hilarity and musical tintinnabulation, with
+a song unequaled. He has already a secure place in general literature,
+having been laureated by no less a poet than Bryant, and invested with a
+lasting human charm in the sunny page of Irving, and is the only one of
+our songsters, I believe, that the mockingbird cannot parody or imitate.
+He affords the most marked example of exuberant pride, and a glad,
+rollicking, holiday spirit, that can be seen among our birds. Every note
+expresses complacency and glee. He is a beau of the first pattern, and,
+unlike any other bird of my acquaintance, pushes his gallantry to the
+point of wheeling gayly into the train of every female that comes along,
+even after the season of courtship is over and the matches are all
+settled; and when she leads him on too wild a chase, he turns, lightly
+about and breaks out with a song is precisely analogous to a burst of
+gay and self-satisfied laughter, as much as to say, _"Ha! ha! ha! I
+must have my fun, Miss Silverthimble, thimble, thimble, if I break every
+heart in the meadow, see, see, see!"_
+
+At the approach of the breeding season the bobolink undergoes a complete
+change; his form changes, his color changes, his flight changes. From
+mottled brown or brindle he becomes black and white, earning, in some
+localities, the shocking name of "skunk bird;" his small, compact form
+becomes broad and conspicuous, and his ordinary flight is laid aside for
+a mincing, affected gait, in which he seems to use only the very tips of
+his wings. It is very noticeable what a contrast he presents to his mate
+at this season, not only in color but in manners, she being as shy and
+retiring as he is forward and hilarious. Indeed, she seems disagreeably
+serious and indisposed to any fun or jollity, scurrying away at his
+approach, and apparently annoyed at every endearing word and look. It
+is surprising that all this parade of plumage and tinkling of cymbals
+should be gone through with and persisted in to please a creature so
+coldly indifferent as she really seems to be. If Robert O'Lincoln has
+been stimulated into acquiring this holiday uniform and this musical
+gift by the approbation of Mrs. Robert, as Darwin, with his sexual
+selection principle, would have us believe, then there must have been
+a time when the females of this tribe were not quite so chary of their
+favors as they are now. Indeed, I never knew a female bird of any kind
+that did not appear utterly indifferent to the charms of voice and
+plumage that the male birds are so fond of displaying. But I am inclined
+to believe that the males think only of themselves and of outshining
+each other, and not at all of the approbation of their mates, as, in an
+analogous case in a higher species, it is well known whom the females
+dress for, and whom they want to kill with envy!
+
+I know of no other song-bird that expresses so much self-consciousness
+and vanity, and comes so near being an ornithological coxcomb. The
+red-bird, the yellowbird, the indigo-bird, the oriole, the cardinal
+grosbeak, and others, all birds of brilliant plumage and musical
+ability, seem quite unconscious of self, and neither by tone nor act
+challenge the admiration of the beholder.
+
+By the time the bobolink reaches the Potomac, in September, he has
+degenerated into a game-bird that is slaughtered by tens of thousands in
+the marshes. I think the prospects now are of his gradual extermination,
+as gunners and sportsmen are clearly on the increase, while the limit of
+the bird's productivity in the North has no doubt been reached long ago.
+There are no more meadows to be added to his domain there, while he is
+being waylaid and cut off more and more on his return to the South.
+It is gourmand eat gourmand, until in half a century more I expect the
+blithest and merriest of our meadow songsters will have disappeared
+before the rapacity of human throats.
+
+But the poets have had a shot at him in good time, and have preserved
+some of his traits. Bryant's poem on this subject does not compare with
+his lines "To a Water-Fowl,"--a subject so well suited to the peculiar,
+simple, and deliberate motion of his mind; at the same time it is fit
+that the poet who sings of "The Planting of the Apple-Tree" should
+render into words the song of "Robert of Lincoln." I subjoin a few
+stanzas:--
+
+                ROBERT OF LINCOLN
+
+        Merrily swinging on brier and weed,
+           Near to the nest of his little dame,
+        Over the mountain-side or mead,
+           Robert of Lincoln is telling his name:
+                 Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
+                 Spink, spank, spink:
+        Snug and safe is that nest of ours,
+        Hidden among the summer flowers.
+                 Chee, chee, chee.
+
+        Robert of Lincoln is gayly drest,
+           Wearing a bright black wedding-coat,
+        White are his shoulders and white his crest,
+           Hear him call in his merry note:
+                 Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
+                 Spink, spank, spink:
+        Look what a nice new coat is mine,
+        Sure there was never a bird so fine.
+                 Chee, chee, chee.
+
+        Robert of Lincoln's Quaker wife,
+           Pretty and quiet, with plain brown wings,
+        Passing at home a patient life,
+           Broods in the grass while her husband sings.
+                 Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
+                 Spink, spank, spink:
+        Brood, kind creature; you need not fear
+        Thieves and robbers while I am here.
+                 Chee, chee, chee.
+
+
+But it has been reserved for a practical ornithologist, Mr. Wilson
+Flagg, to write by far the best poem on the bobolink that I have yet
+seen. It is much more in the mood and spirit of the actual song than
+Bryant's poem:--
+
+                         THE O'LINCOLN FAMILY
+
+       A flock of merry singing-birds were sporting in the grove;
+       Some were warbling cheerily, and some were making love:
+       There were Bobolincon, Wadolincon, Winterseeble, Conquedle,--
+       A livelier set was never led by tabor, pipe, or fiddle,--
+       Crying, "Phew, shew, Wadolincon, see, see, Bobolincon,
+       Down among the tickletops, hiding in the buttercups!
+       I know the saucy chap, I see his shining cap
+       Bobbing in the clover there--see, see, see!"
+
+       Up flies Bobolincon, perching on an apple-tree,
+       Startled by his rival's song, quickened by his raillery.
+       Soon he spies the rogue afloat, curveting in the air,
+       And merrily he turns about, and warns him to beware!
+       "'T is you that would a-wooing go, down among the rushes O!
+       But wait a week, till flowers are cheery,--wait a week,and,
+          ere you marry,
+       Be sure of a house wherein to tarry!
+       Wadolink, Whiskodink, Tom Denny, wait, wait, wait!"
+
+       Every one's a funny fellow; every one's a little mellow;
+       Follow, follow, follow, follow, o'er the hill and in the hollow!
+       Merrily, merrily, there they hie; now they rise and now they fly;
+       They cross and turn, and in and out, and down in the middle,
+          and wheel about,--
+       With a "Phew, shew, Wadolincon! listen to me, Bobolincon!--
+       Happy's the wooing that's speedily doing, that's speedily doing,
+       That's merry and over with the bloom of the clover!
+       Bobolincon, Wadolincon, Winterseeble, follow, follow me!"
+
+
+Many persons, I presume, have admired Wordsworth's poem on the cuckoo,
+without recognizing its truthfulness, or how thoroughly, in the main,
+the description applies to our own species. If the poem had been written
+in New England or New York, it could not have suited our case better:--
+
+       "O blithe New-comer! I have heard,
+           I hear thee and rejoice,
+        O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
+           Or but a wandering Voice?
+
+       "While I am lying on the grass,
+           Thy twofold shout I hear,
+        From hill to hill it seems to pass,
+           At once far off, and near.
+
+       "Though babbling only to the Vale,
+           Of sunshine and of flowers,
+        Thou bringest unto me a tale
+           Of visionary hours.
+
+       "Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
+           Even yet thou art to me
+        No bird, but an invisible thing,
+           A voice, a mystery;
+
+       "The same whom in my schoolboy days
+           I listened to; that Cry
+        Which made me look a thousand ways
+           In bush, and tree, and sky.
+
+       "To seek thee did I often rove
+           Through woods and on the green;
+       And thou wert still a hope, a love;
+           Still longed for, never seen.
+
+       "And I can listen to thee yet;
+           Can lie upon the plain
+        And listen, till I do beget
+           That golden time again.
+
+       "O blessed Bird! the earth we pace
+           Again appears to be
+        An unsubstantial, faery place;
+           That is fit home for thee!"
+
+Logan's stanzas, "To the Cuckoo," have less merit both as poetry and
+natural history, but they are older, and doubtless the latter poet
+benefited by them. Burke admired them so much that, while on a visit to
+Edinburgh, he sought the author out to compliment him:--
+
+       "Hail, beauteous stranger of the grove!
+           Thou messenger of spring!
+        Now Heaven repairs thy rural seat,
+           And woods thy welcome sing.
+
+       "What time the daisy decks the green,
+           Thy certain voice we hear;
+        Hast thou a star to guide thy path,
+           Or mark the rolling year?
+
+     . . . . . . . .
+
+       "The schoolboy, wandering through the wood
+           To pull the primrose gay,
+       Starts, the new voice of spring to hear,
+          And imitates thy lay.
+
+     . . . . . . . .
+
+       "Sweet bird! thy bower is ever green,
+           Thy sky is ever clear;
+       Thou hast no sorrow in thy song,
+           No winter in thy year."
+
+The European cuckoo is evidently a much gayer bird than ours, and much
+more noticeable.
+
+       "Hark, how the jolly cuckoos sing
+       'Cuckoo!' to welcome in the spring,"
+
+says John Lyly three hundred years agone. Its note is easily imitated,
+and boys will render it so perfectly as to deceive any but the shrewdest
+ear. An English lady tells me its voice reminds one of children at play,
+and is full of gayety and happiness. It is a persistent songster,
+and keeps up its call from morning to night. Indeed, certain parts
+of Wordsworth's poem--those that refer to the bird as a mystery, a
+wandering, solitary voice--seem to fit our bird better than the European
+species. Our cuckoo is in fact a solitary wanderer, repeating its loud,
+guttural call in the depths of the forest, and well calculated to arrest
+the attention of a poet like Wordsworth, who was himself a kind of
+cuckoo, a solitary voice, syllabling the loneliness that broods over
+streams and woods,--
+
+       "And once far off, and near."
+
+Our cuckoo is not a spring bird, being seldom seen or heard in the North
+before late in May. He is a great devourer of canker-worms, and, when
+these pests appear, he comes out of his forest seclusion and makes
+excursions through the orchards stealthily and quietly, regaling himself
+upon those pulpy, fuzzy titbits. His coat of deep cinnamon brown has a
+silky gloss and is very beautiful. His note or call is not musical
+but loud, and has in a remarkable degree the quality of remoteness and
+introvertedness. It is like a vocal legend, and to the farmer bodes
+rain.
+
+It is worthy of note, and illustrates some things said farther back,
+that birds not strictly denominated songsters, but criers like the
+cuckoo, have been quite as great favorites with the poets, and
+have received as affectionate treatment at their hands, as have the
+song-birds. One readily recalls Emerson's "Titmouse," Trowbridge's
+"Pewee," Celia Thaxter's "Sandpiper," and others of a like character.
+
+It is also worthy of note that the owl appears to be a greater favorite
+with the poets than the proud, soaring hawk. The owl is doubtless the
+more human and picturesque bird; then he belongs to the night and its
+weird effects. Bird of the silent wing and expansive eye, grimalkin in
+feathers, feline, mousing, haunting ruins" and towers, and mocking the
+midnight stillness with thy uncanny cry! The owl is the great bugaboo of
+the feathered tribes. His appearance by day is hailed by shouts of
+alarm and derision from nearly every bird that flies, from crows down
+to sparrows. They swarm about him like flies, and literally mob him back
+into his dusky retreat. Silence is as the breath of his nostrils to him,
+and the uproar that greets him when he emerges into the open day seems
+to alarm and confuse him as it does the pickpocket when everybody cries
+Thief.
+
+But the poets, I say, have not despised him:--
+
+       "The lark is but a bumpkin fowl;
+           He sleeps in his nest till morn;
+        But my blessing upon the jolly owl
+           That all night blows his horn."
+
+Both Shakespeare and Tennyson have made songs about him. This is
+Shakespeare's, from "Love's Labor's Lost," and perhaps has reference to
+the white or snowy owl:--
+
+       "When icicles hang by the wall,
+           And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
+        And Tom bears logs into the hall,
+           And milk comes frozen home in pail;
+        When blood is nipped and ways be foul,
+        Then nightly sings the staring owl,
+                 Tu-whoo!
+        Tu-whit! tu-whoo! a merry note,
+        While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
+
+       "When all aloud the wind doth blow,
+           And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
+        And birds sit brooding in the snow,
+           And Marian's nose looks red and raw;
+       When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
+       Then nightly sings the staring owl,
+                 Tu-whoo!
+        Tu-whit! Tu-whoo! a merry note,
+        While greasy Joan doth keel the pot."
+
+There is, perhaps, a slight reminiscence of this song in Tennyson's
+"Owl:"--
+
+       "When cats run home and light is come,
+           And dew is cold upon the ground,
+        And the far-off stream is dumb,
+          And the whirring sail goes round,
+          And the whirring sail goes round;
+             Alone and warming his five wits,
+             The white owl in the belfry sits.
+
+       "When merry milkmaids click the latch,
+           And rarely smells the new-mown hay,
+        And the cock hath sung beneath the thatch
+           Twice or thrice his roundelay,
+           Twice or thrice his roundelay;
+              Alone and warming his five wits,
+              The white owl in the belfry sits."
+
+Tennyson has not directly celebrated any of the more famous birds, but
+his poems contain frequent allusions to them. The
+
+       "Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
+           Rings Eden through the budded quicks,
+           Oh, tell me where the senses mix,
+        Oh, tell me where the passions meet,"
+
+of "In Memoriam," is doubtless the nightingale. And here we have the
+lark:--
+
+       "Now sings the woodland loud and long,
+           And distance takes a lovelier hue,
+           And drowned in yonder living blue
+        The lark becomes a sightless song."
+
+And again in this from "A Dream of Fair Women:"--
+
+                   "Then I heard
+        A noise of some one coming through the lawn,
+        And singing clearer than the crested bird
+              That claps his wings at dawn."
+
+The swallow is a favorite bird with Tennyson, and is frequently
+mentioned, beside being the principal figure in one of those charming
+love-songs in "The Princess." His allusions to the birds, as to any
+other natural feature, show him to be a careful observer, as when he
+speaks of
+
+       "The swamp, where hums the dropping snipe."
+
+His single bird-poem, aside from the song I have quoted, is "The
+Blackbird," the Old World prototype of our robin, as if our bird had
+doffed the aristocratic black for a more democratic suit on reaching
+these shores. In curious contrast to the color of its plumage is its
+beak, which is as yellow as a kernel of Indian corn. The following are
+the two middle stanzas of the poem:--
+
+       "Yet, though I spared thee all the spring,
+           Thy sole delight is, sitting still,
+           With that gold dagger of thy bill
+        To fret the summer jenneting.
+
+       "A golden bill! the silver tongue
+           Cold February loved is dry;
+           Plenty corrupts the melody
+        That made thee famous once, when young."
+
+Shakespeare, in one of his songs, alludes to the blackbird as the
+ouzel-cock; indeed, he puts quite a flock of birds in this song:--
+
+       "The ouzel-cock so black of hue,
+           With orange tawny bill;
+        The throstle with his note so true,
+           The wren with little quill;
+        The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
+           The plain song cuckoo gray,
+        Whose note full many a man doth mark,
+           And dares not answer nay."
+
+So far as external appearances are concerned,--form, plumage, grace of
+manner,--no one ever had a less promising subject than had Trowbridge
+in the "Pewee." This bird, if not the plainest dressed, is the most
+unshapely in the woods. It is stiff and abrupt in its manners and
+sedentary in its habits, sitting around all day, in the dark recesses
+of the woods, on the dry twigs and branches, uttering now and then
+its plaintive cry, and "with many a flirt and flutter" snapping up its
+insect game.
+
+The pewee belongs to quite a large family of birds, all of whom have
+strong family traits, and who are not the most peaceable and harmonious
+of the sylvan folk. They are pugnacious, harsh-voiced, angular in form
+and movement, with flexible tails and broad, flat, bristling beaks that
+stand to the face at the angle of a turn-up nose, and most of them wear
+a black cap pulled well down over their eyes. Their heads are large,
+neck and legs short, and elbows sharp. The wild Irishman of them all
+is the great crested flycatcher, a large, leather-colored or
+sandy-complexioned bird that prowls through the woods, uttering its
+harsh, uncanny note and waging fierce warfare upon its fellows. The
+exquisite of the family, and the braggart of the orchard, is the
+kingbird, a bully that loves to strip the feathers off its more timid
+neighbors such as the bluebird, that feeds on the stingless bees of the
+hive, the drones, and earns the reputation of great boldness by teasing
+large hawks, while it gives a wide berth to little ones.
+
+The best beloved of them all is the phoebe-bird, one of the firstlings
+of the spring, of whom so many of our poets have made affectionate
+mention.
+
+The wood pewee is the sweetest voiced, and, notwithstanding the
+ungracious things I have said of it and of its relations, merits to
+the full all Trowbridge's pleasant fancies. His poem is indeed a very
+careful study of the bird and its haunts, and is good poetry as well as
+good ornithology:--
+
+       "The listening Dryads hushed the woods;
+           The boughs were thick, and thin and few
+           The golden ribbons fluttering through;
+        Their sun-embroidered, leafy hoods
+           The lindens lifted to the blue;
+        Only a little forest-brook
+        The farthest hem of silence shook;
+        When in the hollow shades I heard--
+        Was it a spirit or a bird?
+        Or, strayed from Eden, desolate,
+        Some Peri calling to her mate,
+        Whom nevermore her mate would cheer?
+           'Pe-ri! pe-ri! peer!'
+
+     . . . . . . . .
+
+       "To trace it in its green retreat
+           I sought among the boughs in vain;
+           And followed still the wandering strain,
+        So melancholy and so sweet,
+           The dim-eyed violets yearned with pain.
+        'T was now a sorrow in the air,
+        Some nymph's immortalized despair
+        Haunting the woods and waterfalls;
+        And now, at long, sad intervals,
+        Sitting unseen in dusky shade,
+        His plaintive pipe some fairy played,
+       With long-drawn cadence thin and clear,--
+          'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'
+
+       "Long-drawn and clear its closes were--
+           As if the hand of Music through
+           The sombre robe of Silence drew
+        A thread of golden gossamer;
+           So pure a flute the fairy blew.
+        Like beggared princes of the wood,
+        In silver rags the birches stood;
+        The hemlocks, lordly counselors,
+        Were dumb; the sturdy servitors,
+        In beechen jackets patched and gray,
+        Seemed waiting spellbound all the day
+        That low, entrancing note to hear,--
+           'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'
+
+       "I quit the search, and sat me down
+           Beside the brook, irresolute,
+           And watched a little bird in suit
+        Of sober olive, soft and brown,
+           Perched in the maple branches, mute;
+        With greenish gold its vest was fringed,
+        Its tiny cap was ebon-tinged,
+        With ivory pale its wings were barred,
+        And its dark eyes were tender-starred.
+       "Dear bird," I said, "what is thy name?"
+        And thrice the mournful answer came,
+        So faint and far, and yet so near,--
+           'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'
+
+       "For so I found my forest bird,--
+           The pewee of the loneliest woods,
+           Sole singer in these solitudes,
+        Which never robin's whistle stirred,
+           Where never bluebird's plume intrudes.
+        Quick darting through the dewy morn,
+        The redstart trilled his twittering horn
+        And vanished in thick boughs; at even,
+        Like liquid pearls fresh showered from heaven,
+        The high notes of the lone wood thrush
+        Fell on the forest's holy hush;
+        But thou all day complainest here,--
+           'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'"
+
+Emerson's best natural history poem is the "Humble-Bee,"--a poem as
+good in its way as Burns's poem on the mouse; but his later poem,
+"The Titmouse," has many of the same qualities, and cannot fail to be
+acceptable to both poet and naturalist.
+
+The chickadee is indeed a truly Emersonian bird, and the poet shows him
+to be both a hero and a philosopher. Hardy, active, social, a winter
+bird no less than a summer, a defier of both frost and heat, lover of
+the pine-tree, and diligent searcher after truth in the shape of eggs
+and larvae of insects, preeminently a New England bird, clad in black
+and ashen gray, with a note the most cheering and reassuring to be
+heard in our January woods,--I know of none other of our birds so well
+calculated to captivate the Emersonian muse.
+
+Emerson himself is a northern hyperborean genius,--a winter bird with
+a clear, saucy, cheery call, and not a passionate summer songster.
+His lines have little melody to the ear, but they have the vigor and
+distinctness of all pure and compact things. They are like the needles
+of the pine--"the snow loving pine"--more than the emotional foliage of
+the deciduous trees, and the titmouse becomes them well:--
+
+       "Up and away for life! be fleet!--
+        The frost-king ties my fumbling feet,
+        Sings in my ears, my hands are stones,
+        Curdles the blood to the marble bones,
+        Tugs at the heart-strings, numbs the sense,
+        And hems in life with narrowing fence.
+        Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep,--
+        The punctual stars will vigil keep,--
+        Embalmed by purifying cold;
+        The wind shall sing their dead march old,
+        The snow is no ignoble shroud,
+        The moon thy mourner, and the cloud.
+
+       "Softly,--but this way fate was pointing,
+        'T was coming fast to such anointing,
+        When piped a tiny voice hard by,
+        Gay and polite, a cheerful cry,
+        _Chick-chickadeedee!_ saucy note,
+        Out of sound heart and merry throat,
+        As if it said 'Good day, good sir!
+        Fine afternoon, old passenger!
+        Happy to meet you in these places,
+        Where January brings few faces.'
+
+       "This poet, though he lived apart,
+        Moved by his hospitable heart,
+        Sped, when I passed his sylvan fort,
+        To do the honors of his court,
+        As fits a feathered lord of land;
+        Flew near, with soft wing grazed my hands
+        Hopped on the bough, then darting low,
+        Prints his small impress on the snow,
+        Shows feats of his gymnastic play,
+        Head downward, clinging to the spray.
+
+       "Here was this atom in full breath,
+        Hurling defiance at vast death;
+        This scrap of valor just for play
+        Fronts the north-wind in waistcoat gray,
+        As if to shame my weak behavior;
+        I greeted loud my little savior,
+       'You pet! what dost here? and what for?
+        In these woods, thy small Labrador,
+        At this pinch, wee San Salvador!
+        What fire burns in that little chest,
+        So frolic, stout, and self-possest?
+        Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine;
+        Ashes and jet all hues outshine.
+        Why are not diamonds black and gray,
+        To ape thy dare-devil array?
+        And I affirm, the spacious North
+        Exists to draw thy virtue forth.
+        I think no virtue goes with size;
+        The reason of all cowardice
+        Is, that men are overgrown,
+        And, to be valiant, must come down
+        To the titmouse dimension.'
+
+     . . . . . . . .
+
+       "I think old Caesar must have heard
+        In northern Gaul my dauntless bird,
+        And, echoed in some frosty wold,
+        Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold.
+        And I will write our annals new
+        And thank thee for a better clew.
+        I, who dreamed not when I came here
+        To find the antidote of fear,
+        Now hear thee say in Roman key,
+        _Poean! Veni, vidi, vici."_
+
+A late bird-poem, and a good one of its kind, is Celia Thaxter's
+"Sandpiper," which recalls Bryant's "Water-Fowl" in its successful
+rendering of the spirit and atmosphere of the scene, and the
+distinctness with which the lone bird, flitting along the beach, is
+brought before the mind. It is a woman's or a feminine poem, as Bryant's
+is characteristically a man's.
+
+The sentiment or feeling awakened by any of the aquatic fowls is
+preeminently one of loneliness. The wood duck which your approach starts
+from the pond or the marsh, the loon neighing down out of the April
+sky, the wild goose, the curlew, the stork, the bittern, the sandpiper,
+awaken quite a different train of emotions from those awakened by
+the land-birds. They all have clinging to them some reminiscence and
+suggestion of the sea. Their cries echo its wildness and desolation;
+their wings are the shape of its billows.
+
+Of the sandpipers there are many varieties, found upon the coast and
+penetrating inland along the rivers and water-courses, one of the most
+interesting of the family, commonly called the "tip-up," going up all
+the mountain brooks and breeding in the sand along their banks; but
+the characteristics are the same in all, and the eye detects little
+difference except in size.
+
+The walker on the beach sees it running or flitting before him,
+following up the breakers and picking up the aquatic insects left on the
+sands; and the trout-fisher along the farthest inland stream likewise
+intrudes upon its privacy. Flitting along from stone to stone seeking
+its food, the hind part of its body "teetering" up and down, its soft
+gray color blending it with the pebbles and the rocks, or else skimming
+up or down the stream on its long, convex wings, uttering its shrill
+cry, the sandpiper is not a bird of the sea merely; and Mrs. Thaxter's
+poem is as much for the dweller inland as for the dweller upon the
+coast:--
+
+                     THE SANDPIPER
+
+       Across the narrow beach we flit,
+          One little sandpiper and I;
+       And fast I gather, bit by bit,
+          The scattered driftwood bleached and dry.
+       The wild waves reach their hands for it,
+          The wild wind raves, the tide runs high,
+       As up and down the beach we flit,--
+          One little sandpiper and I.
+
+       Above our heads the sullen clouds
+          Scud black and swift across the sky;
+       Like silent ghosts in misty shrouds
+          Stand out the white lighthouses high.
+       Almost as far as eye can reach
+          I see the close-reefed vessels fly,
+       As fast we flit along the beach,--
+          One little sandpiper and I.
+
+       I watch him as he skims along,
+          Uttering his sweet and mournful cry;
+       He starts not at my fitful song,
+          Or flash of fluttering drapery;
+       He has no thought of any wrong;
+          He scans me with a fearless eye.
+       Stanch friends are we, well tried and strong,
+          The little sandpiper and I.
+
+       Comrade, where wilt thou be to-night
+          When the loosed storm breaks furiously?
+       My driftwood fire will burn so bright!
+          To what warm shelter canst thou fly?
+       I do not fear for thee, though wroth
+          The tempest rushes through the sky;
+       For are we not God's children both,
+          Thou, little sandpiper, and I?
+
+Others of our birds have been game for the poetic muse, but in most
+cases the poets have had some moral or pretty conceit to convey, and
+have not loved the bird first. Mr. Lathrop preaches a little in his
+pleasant poem, "The Sparrow," but he must some time have looked upon the
+bird with genuine emotion to have written the first two stanzas:--
+
+       "Glimmers gay the leafless thicket
+           Close beside my garden gate,
+        Where, so light, from post to wicket,
+           Hops the sparrow, blithe, sedate:
+              Who, with meekly folded wing,
+              Comes to sun himself and sing.
+
+       "It was there, perhaps, last year,
+           That his little house he built;
+        For he seems to perk and peer,
+           And to twitter, too, and tilt
+              The bare branches in between,
+              With a fond, familiar mien."
+
+The bluebird has not been overlooked, and Halleek, Longfellow, and Mrs.
+Sigourney have written poems upon him, but from none of them does there
+fall that first note of his in early spring,--a note that may be called
+the violet of sound, and as welcome to the ear, heard above the cold,
+damp earth; as is its floral type to the eye a few weeks later Lowell's
+two lines come nearer the mark:--
+
+       "The bluebird, shifting his light load of song
+       From post to post along the cheerless fence."
+
+Or the first swallow that comes twittering up the southern valley,
+laughing a gleeful, childish laugh, and awakening such memories in
+the heart, who has put him in a poem? So the hummingbird, too, escapes
+through the finest meshes of rhyme.
+
+The most melodious of our songsters, the wood thrush and the hermit
+thrush,--birds whose strains, more than any others, express harmony
+and serenity,--have not yet, that I am aware, had reared to them their
+merited poetic monument, unless, indeed, Whitman has done this service
+for the hermit thrush in his "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn." Here
+the threnody is blent of three chords, the blossoming lilac, the evening
+star, and the hermit thrush, the latter playing the most prominent part
+throughout the composition. It is the exalting and spiritual utterance
+of the "solitary singer" that calms and consoles the poet when the
+powerful shock of the President's assassination comes upon him, and he
+flees from the stifling atmosphere and offensive lights and conversation
+of the house,--
+
+          "Forth to hiding, receiving night that talks not,
+Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
+To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still."
+
+Numerous others of our birds would seem to challenge attention by their
+calls and notes. There is the Maryland yellowthroat, for instance,
+standing in the door of his bushy tent, and calling out as you approach,
+_"which way, sir! which way, sir!"_ If he says this to the ear of common
+folk, what would he not say to the poet? One of the peewees says _"stay
+there!"_ with great emphasis. The cardinal grosbeak calls out _"what
+cheer" "what cheer;"_ " the bluebird says _"purity," "purity," "purity;"_
+the brown thrasher, or ferruginous thrush, according to Thoreau, calls
+out to the farmer planting his corn, _"drop it," "drop it," "cover it
+up," "cover it up"_ The yellow-breasted chat says _"who," "who"_ and
+_"tea-boy"_ What the robin says, caroling that simple strain from
+the top of the tall maple, or the crow with his hardy haw-haw, or the
+pedestrain meadowlark sounding his piercing and long-drawn note in the
+spring meadows, the poets ought to be able to tell us. I only know the
+birds all have a language which is very expressive, and which is easily
+translatable into the human tongue.
+
+
+
+
+II TOUCHES OF NATURE
+
+
+I
+
+WHEREVER Nature has commissioned one creature to prey upon another, she
+has preserved the balance by forewarning that other creature of what she
+has done. Nature says to the cat, "Catch the mouse," and she equips her
+for that purpose; but on the selfsame day she says to the mouse, "Be
+wary,--the cat is watching for you." Nature takes care that none of her
+creatures have smooth sailing, the whole voyage at least. Why has she
+not made the mosquito noiseless and its bite itchless? Simply because
+in that case the odds would be too greatly in its favor. She has taken
+especial pains to enable the owl to fly softly and silently, because the
+creatures it preys upon are small and wary, and never venture far from
+their holes. She has not shown the same caution in the case of the crow,
+because the crow feeds on dead flesh, or on grubs and beetles, or fruit
+and grain, that do not need to be approached stealthily. The big fish
+love to cat up the little fish, and the little fish know it, and, on the
+very day they are hatched, seek shallow water, and put little sandbars
+between themselves and their too loving parents.
+
+How easily a bird's tail, or that of any fowl, or in fact any part of
+the plumage, comes out when the hold of its would-be capturer is upon
+this alone; and how hard it yields in the dead bird! No doubt there is
+relaxation in the former case. Nature says to the pursuer, "Hold on,"
+and to the pursued, "Let your tail go." What is the tortuous, zigzag
+course of those slow-flying moths for but to make it difficult for the
+birds to snap them up? The skunk is a slow, witless creature, and the
+fox and lynx love its meat; yet it carries a bloodless weapon that
+neither likes to face.
+
+I recently heard of an ingenious method a certain other simple and
+slow-going creature has of baffling its enemy. A friend of mine was
+walking in the fields when he saw a commotion in the grass a few
+yards off. Approaching the spot, he found a snake--the common garter
+snake--trying to swallow a lizard. And how do you suppose the lizard was
+defeating the benevolent designs of the snake? By simply taking hold
+of its own tail and making itself into a hoop. The snake went round and
+round, and could find neither beginning nor end. Who was the old giant
+that found himself wrestling with Time? This little snake had a tougher
+customer the other day in the bit of eternity it was trying to swallow.
+
+The snake itself has not the same wit, because I lately saw a black
+snake in the woods trying to swallow the garter snake, and he had made
+some headway, though the little snake was fighting every inch of the
+ground, hooking his tail about sticks and bushes, and pulling back with
+all his might, apparently not liking the look of things down there
+at all. I thought it well to let him have a good taste of his own
+doctrines, when I put my foot down against further proceedings.
+
+This arming of one creature against another is often cited as an
+evidence of the wisdom of Nature, but it is rather an evidence of her
+impartiality. She does not care a fig more for one creature than for
+another, and is equally on the side of both, or perhaps it would be
+better to say she does not care a fig for either. Every creature must
+take its chances, and man is no exception. We can ride if we know
+how and are going her way, or we can be run over if we fall or make a
+mistake. Nature does not care whether the hunter slay the beast or the
+beast the hunter; she will make good compost of them both, and her ends
+are prospered whichever succeeds.
+
+       "If the red slayer think he slays,
+           Or if the slain think he is slain,
+        They know not well the subtle ways
+           I keep, and pass, and turn again."
+
+What is the end of Nature? Where is the end of a sphere? The sphere
+balances at any and every point. So everything in Nature is at the top,
+and yet no _one_ thing is at the top.
+
+She works with reference to no measure of time, no limit of space, and
+with an abundance of material, not expressed by exhaustless. Did you
+think Niagara a great exhibition of power? What is that, then, that
+withdraws noiseless and invisible in the ground about, and of which
+Niagara is but the lifting of the finger?
+
+Nature is thoroughly selfish, and looks only to her own ends. One
+thing she is bent upon, and that is keeping up the supply, multiplying
+endlessly and scattering as she multiplies. Did Nature have in view our
+delectation when she made the apple, the peach, the plum, the cherry?
+Undoubtedly; but only as a means to her own private ends. What a bribe
+or a wage is the pulp of these delicacies to all creatures to come and
+sow their seed! And Nature has taken care to make the seed indigestible,
+so that, though the fruit be eaten, the germ is not, but only planted.
+
+God made the crab, but man made the pippin; but the pippin cannot
+propagate itself, and exists only by violence and usurpation. Bacon
+says, "It is easier to deceive Nature than to force her," but it seems
+to me the nurserymen really force her. They cut off the head of a savage
+and clap on the head of a fine gentleman, and the crab becomes a Swaar
+or a Baldwin. Or is it a kind of deception practiced upon Nature, which
+succeeds only by being carefully concealed? If we could play the same
+tricks upon her in the human species, how the great geniuses could be
+preserved and propagated, and the world stocked with them! But what a
+frightful condition of things that would be! No new men, but a tiresome
+and endless repetition of the old ones,--a world perpetually stocked
+with Newtons and Shakespeares!
+
+We say Nature knows best, and has adapted this or that to our wants or
+to our constitution,--sound to the ear, light and color to the eye; but
+she has not done any such thing, but has adapted man to these things.
+The physical cosmos is the mould, and man is the molten metal that is
+poured into it. The light fashioned the eye, the laws of sound made
+the ear; in fact, man is the outcome of Nature and not the reverse.
+Creatures that live forever in the dark have no eyes; and would not any
+one of our senses perish and be shed, as it were, in a world where it
+could not be used?
+
+
+
+II
+
+It is well to let down our metropolitan pride a little. Man thinks
+himself at the top, and that the immense display and prodigality of
+Nature are for him. But they are no more for him than they are for
+the birds and beasts, and he is no more at the top than they are. He
+appeared upon the stage when the play had advanced to a certain point,
+and he will disappear from the stage when the play has reached another
+point, and the great drama will go on without him. The geological ages,
+the convulsions and parturition throes of the globe, were to bring him
+forth no more than the beetles. Is not all this wealth of the seasons,
+these solar and sidereal influences, this depth and vitality and
+internal fire, these seas, and rivers, and oceans, and atmospheric
+currents, as necessary to the life of the ants and worms we tread under
+foot as to our own? And does the sun shine for me any more than for yon
+butterfly? What I mean to say is, we cannot put our finger upon this
+or that and say, Here is the end of Nature. The Infinite cannot be
+measured. The plan of Nature is so immense,--but she has no plan,
+no scheme, but to go on and on forever. What is size, what is time,
+distance, to the Infinite? Nothing. The Infinite knows no time, no
+space, no great, no small, no beginning, no end.
+
+I sometimes think that the earth and the worlds are a kind of nervous
+ganglia in an organization of which we can form no conception, or less
+even than that. If one of the globules of blood that circulate in our
+veins were magnified enough million times, we might see a globe teeming
+with life and power. Such is this earth of ours, coursing in the veins
+of the Infinite. Size is only relative, and the imagination finds no end
+to the series either way.
+
+
+
+III
+
+Looking out of the car window one day, I saw the pretty and unusual
+sight of an eagle sitting upon the ice in the river, surrounded by half
+a dozen or more crows. The crows appeared as if looking up to the
+noble bird and attending his movements. "Are those its young?" asked a
+gentleman by my side. How much did that man know--not about eagles,
+but about Nature? If he had been familiar with geese or hens, or with
+donkeys, he would not have asked that question. The ancients had an
+axiom that he who knew one truth knew all truths; so much else becomes
+knowable when one vital fact is thoroughly known. You have a key, a
+standard, and cannot be deceived. Chemistry, geology, astronomy, natural
+history, all admit one to the same measureless interiors.
+
+I heard a great man say that he could see how much of the theology
+of the day would fall before the standard of him who had got even the
+insects. And let any one set about studying these creatures carefully,
+and he will see the force of the remark. We learn the tremendous
+doctrine of metamorphosis from the insect world; and have not the bee
+and the ant taught man wisdom from the first? I was highly edified
+the past summer by observing the ways and doings of a colony of black
+hornets that established themselves under one of the projecting gables
+of my house. This hornet has the reputation of being a very ugly
+customer, but I found it no trouble to live on the most friendly terms
+with her. She was as little disposed to quarrel as I was. She is indeed
+the eagle among hornets, and very noble and dignified in her bearing.
+She used to come freely into the house and prey upon the flies. You
+would hear that deep, mellow hum, and see the black falcon poising on
+wing, or striking here and there at the flies, that scattered on her
+approach like chickens before a hawk. When she had caught one, she would
+alight upon some object and proceed to dress and draw her game. The
+wings were sheared off, the legs cut away, the bristles trimmed, then
+the body thoroughly bruised and broken. When the work was completed,
+the fly was rolled up into a small pellet, and with it under her arm
+the hornet flew to her nest, where no doubt in due time it was properly
+served up on the royal board. Every dinner inside these paper walls is a
+state dinner, for the queen is always present.
+
+I used to mount the ladder to within two or three feet of the nest
+and observe the proceedings. I at first thought the workshop must be
+inside,--a place where the pulp was mixed, and perhaps treated with
+chemicals; for each hornet, when she came with her burden of materials,
+passed into the nest, and then, after a few moments, emerged again and
+crawled to the place of building. But I one day stopped up the entrance
+with some cotton, when no one happened to be on guard, and then observed
+that, when the loaded hornet could not get inside, she, after some
+deliberation, proceeded to the unfinished part and went forward with her
+work. Hence I inferred that maybe the hornet went inside to report and
+to receive orders, or possibly to surrender her material into fresh
+hands. Her career when away from the nest is beset with dangers; the
+colony is never large, and the safe return of every hornet is no doubt a
+matter of solicitude to the royal mother.
+
+The hornet was the first paper-maker, and holds the original patent. The
+paper it makes is about like that of the newspaper; nearly as firm, and
+made of essentially the same material,--woody fibres scraped from old
+rails and boards. And there is news on it, too, if one could make out
+the characters.
+
+When I stopped the entrance with cotton, there was no commotion or
+excitement, as there would have been in the case of yellow-jackets.
+Those outside went to pulling, and those inside went to pushing and
+chewing. Only once did one of the outsiders come down and look me
+suspiciously in the face, and inquire very plainly what my business
+might be up there. I bowed my head, being at the top of a twenty-foot
+ladder, and had nothing to say.
+
+The cotton was chewed and moistened about the edges till every fibre
+was loosened, when the mass dropped. But instantly the entrance was
+made smaller, and changed so as to make the feat of stopping it more
+difficult.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+There are those who look at Nature from the standpoint of
+conventional and artificial life,--from parlor windows and through
+gilt-edged poems,--the sentimentalists. At the other extreme are those
+who do not look at Nature at all, but are a grown part of her, and look
+away from her toward the other class,--the backwoodsmen and pioneers,
+and all rude and simple persons. Then there are those in whom the
+two are united or merged,--the great poets and artists. In them the
+sentimentalist is corrected and cured, and the hairy and taciturn
+frontiersman has had experience to some purpose. The true poet knows
+more about Nature than the naturalist because he carries her open
+secrets in his heart. Eckermann could instruct Goethe in ornithology,
+but could not Goethe instruct Eckermann in the meaning and mystery of
+the bird? It is my privilege to number among my friends a man who has
+passed his life in cities amid the throngs of men, who never goes to
+the woods or to the country, or hunts or fishes, and yet he is the true
+naturalist. I think he studies the orbs. I think day and night and the
+stars, and the faces of men and women, have taught him all there is
+worth knowing.
+
+We run to Nature because we are afraid of man. Our artists paint the
+landscape because they cannot paint the human face. If we could look
+into the eyes of a man as coolly as we can into the eyes of an animal,
+the products of our pens and brushes would be quite different from what
+they are.
+
+
+
+V
+
+But I suspect, after all, it makes but little difference to which school
+you go, whether to the woods or to the city. A sincere man learns pretty
+much the same things in both places. The differences are superficial,
+the resemblances deep and many. The hermit is a hermit, and the poet
+a poet, whether he grow up in the town or the country. I was forcibly
+reminded of this fact recently on opening the works of Charles Lamb
+after I had been reading those of our Henry Thoreau. Lamb cared nothing
+for nature, Thoreau for little else. One was as attached to the city and
+the life of the street and tavern as the other to the country and the
+life of animals and plants. Yet they are close akin. They give out the
+same tone and are pitched in about the same key. Their methods are the
+same; so are their quaintness and scorn of rhetoric. Thoreau has the
+drier humor, as might be expected, and is less stomachic. There is more
+juice and unction in Lamb, but this he owes to his nationality. Both are
+essayists who in a less reflective age would have been poets pure and
+simple. Both were spare, high-nosed men, and I fancy a resemblance even
+in their portraits. Thoreau is the Lamb of New England fields and
+woods, and Lamb is the Thoreau of London streets and clubs. There was a
+willfulness and perversity about Thoreau, behind which he concealed his
+shyness and his thin skin, and there was a similar foil in Lamb, though
+less marked, on account of his good-nature; that was a part of his
+armor, too.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Speaking of Thoreau's dry humor reminds me how surely the old English
+unctuous and sympathetic humor is dying out or has died out of our
+literature. Our first notable crop of authors had it,--Paulding, Cooper,
+Irving, and in a measure Hawthorne,--but our later humorists have it not
+at all, but in its stead an intellectual quickness and perception of the
+ludicrous that is not unmixed with scorn.
+
+One of the marks of the great humorist, like Cervantes, or Sterne, or
+Scott, is that he approaches his subject, not through his head merely,
+but through his heart, his love, his humanity. His humor is full of
+compassion, full of the milk of human kindness, and does not separate
+him from his subject, but unites him to it by vital ties. How Sterne
+loved Uncle Toby and sympathized with him, and Cervantes his luckless
+knight! I fear our humorists would have made fun of them, would have
+shown them up and stood aloof superior, and "laughed a laugh of merry
+scorn." Whatever else the great humorist or poet, or any artist, may be
+or do, there is no contempt in his laughter. And this point cannot
+be too strongly insisted on in view of the fact that nearly all our
+humorous writers seem impressed with the conviction that their own
+dignity and self-respect require them to _look down_ upon what they
+portray. But it is only little men who look down upon anything or speak
+down to anybody. One sees every day how clear it is that specially fine,
+delicate, intellectual persons cannot portray satisfactorily coarse,
+common, uncultured characters. Their attitude is at once scornful and
+supercilious. The great man, like Socrates, or Dr. Johnson, or Abraham
+Lincoln, is just as surely coarse as he is fine, but the complaint I
+make with our humorists is that they are fine and not coarse in any
+healthful and manly sense. A great part of the best literature and the
+best art is of the vital fluids, the bowels, the chest, the appetites,
+and is to be read and judged only through love and compassion. Let us
+pray for unction, which is the marrowfat of humor, and for humility,
+which is the badge of manhood.
+
+As the voice of the American has retreated from his chest to his
+throat and nasal passages, so there is danger that his contribution to
+literature will soon cease to imply any blood or viscera, or healthful
+carnality, or depth of human and manly affection, and will be the fruit
+entirely of our toploftical brilliancy and cleverness.
+
+What I complain of is just as true of the essayists and the critics as
+of the novelists. The prevailing tone here also is born of a feeling of
+immense superiority. How our lofty young men, for instance, look down
+upon Carlyle, and administer their masterly rebukes to him! But see how
+Carlyle treats Burns, or Scott, or Johnson, or Novalis, or any of his
+heroes. Ay, there's the rub; he makes heroes of them, which is not a
+trick of small natures. He can say of Johnson that he was "moonstruck,"
+but it is from no lofty height of fancied superiority, but he uses the
+word as a naturalist uses a term to describe an object he loves.
+
+What we want, and perhaps have got more of than I am ready to admit, is
+a race of writers who affiliate with their subjects, and enter into them
+through their blood, their sexuality and manliness, instead of
+standing apart and criticising them and writing about them through mere
+intellectual cleverness and "smartness."
+
+
+
+VII
+
+There is a feeling in heroic poetry, or in a burst of eloquence, that I
+sometimes catch in quite different fields. I caught it this morning,
+for instance, when I saw the belated trains go by, and knew how they
+had been battling with storm, darkness, and distance, and had triumphed.
+They were due at my place in the night, but did not pass till after
+eight o'clock in the morning. Two trains coupled together,--the fast
+mail and the express,--making an immense line of coaches hauled by two
+engines. They had come from the West, and were all covered with snow and
+ice, like soldiers with the dust of battle upon them. They had massed
+their forces, and were now moving with augmented speed, and with a
+resolution that was epic and grand. Talk about the railroad dispelling
+the romance from the landscape; if it does, it brings the heroic element
+in. The moving train is a proud spectacle, especially on stormy and
+tempestuous nights. When I look out and see its light, steady and
+unflickering as the planets, and hear the roar of its advancing tread,
+or its sound diminishing in the distance, I am comforted and made stout
+of heart. O night, where is thy stay! O space, where is thy victory! Or
+to see the fast mail pass in the morning is as good as a page of Homer.
+It quickens one's pulse for all day. It is the Ajax of trains. I hear
+its defiant, warning whistle, hear it thunder over the bridges, and its
+sharp, rushing ring among the rocks, and in the winter mornings see its
+glancing, meteoric lights, or in summer its white form bursting through
+the silence and the shadows, its plume of smoke lying flat upon its
+roofs and stretching far behind,--a sight better than a battle. It
+is something of the same feeling one has in witnessing any wild, free
+careering in storms, and in floods in nature; or in beholding the
+charge of an army; or in listening to an eloquent man, or to a hundred
+instruments of music in full blast,--it is triumph, victory. What is
+eloquence but mass in motion,--a flood, a cataract, an express train, a
+cavalry charge? We are literally carried away, swept from our feet, and
+recover our senses again as best we can.
+
+I experienced the same emotion when I saw them go by with the sunken
+steamer. The procession moved slowly and solemnly. It was like a funeral
+cortege,--a long line of grim floats and barges and boxes, with their
+bowed and solemn derricks, the pall-bearers; and underneath in her
+watery grave, where she had been for six months, the sunken steamer,
+partially lifted and borne along. Next day the procession went back
+again, and the spectacle was still more eloquent. The steamer had been
+taken to the flats above and raised till her walking-beam was out of
+water; her bell also was exposed and cleaned and rung, and the wreckers'
+Herculean labor seemed nearly over. But that night the winds and the
+storms held high carnival. It looked like preconcerted action on the
+part of tide, tempest, and rain to defeat these wreckers, for the
+elements all pulled together and pulled till cables and hawser snapped
+like threads. Back the procession started, anchors were dragged or lost,
+immense new cables were quickly taken ashore and fastened to trees; but
+no use: trees were upturned, the cables stretched till they grew
+small and sang like harp-strings, then parted; back, back against the
+desperate efforts of the men, till within a few feet of her old
+grave, when there was a great commotion among the craft, floats were
+overturned, enormous chains parted, colossal timbers were snapped
+like pipestems, and, with a sound that filled all the air, the steamer
+plunged to the bottom again in seventy feet of water.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+I am glad to observe that all the poetry of the midsummer harvesting has
+not gone out with the scythe and the whetstone. The line of mowers was a
+pretty sight, if one did not sympathize too deeply with the human backs
+turned up there to the sun, and the sound of the whetstone, coming up
+from the meadows in the dewy morning, was pleasant music. But I find the
+sound of the mowing-machine and the patent reaper is even more in tune
+with the voices of Nature at this season. The characteristic sounds of
+midsummer are the sharp, whirring crescendo of the cicada or harvest
+fly, and the rasping, stridulous notes of the nocturnal insects. The
+mowing-machine repeats and imitates these sounds. 'T is like the hum of
+a locust or the shuffling of a mighty grasshopper. More than that, the
+grass and the grain at this season have become hard. The timothy stalk
+is like a file; the rye straw is glazed with flint; the grasshoppers
+snap sharply as they fly up in front of you; the bird-songs have ceased;
+the ground crackles under foot; the eye of day is brassy and merciless;
+and in harmony with all these things is the rattle of the mower and the
+hay-tedder.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+'T is an evidence of how directly we are related to Nature, that we more
+or less sympathize with the weather, and take on the color of the day.
+Goethe said he worked easiest on a high barometer. One is like a chimney
+that draws well some days and won't draw at all on others, and the
+secret is mainly in the condition of the atmosphere. Anything positive
+and decided with the weather is a good omen. A pouring rain may be more
+auspicious than a sleeping sunshine. When the stove draws well, the fogs
+and fumes will leave your mind. I find there is great virtue in the bare
+ground, and have been much put out at times by those white angelic
+days we have in winter, such as Whittier has so well described in these
+lines:--
+
+       "Around the glistening wonder bent
+           The blue walls of the firmament;
+        No cloud above, no earth below,
+           A universe of sky and snow."
+
+On such days my spirit gets snow-blind; all things take on the same
+color, or no color; my thought loses its perspective; the inner world is
+a blank like the outer, and all my great ideals are wrapped in the same
+monotonous and expressionless commonplace. The blackest of black days
+are better.
+
+Why does snow so kill the landscape and blot out our interest in it? Not
+merely because it is cold, and the symbol of death,--for I imagine as
+many inches of apple blossoms would have about the same effect,--but
+because it expresses nothing. White is a negative; a perfect blank. The
+eye was made for color, and for the earthy tints, and, when these are
+denied it, the mind is very apt to sympathize and to suffer also.
+
+Then when the sap begins to mount in the trees, and the spring languor
+comes, does not one grow restless indoors? The sun puts out the fire,
+the people say, and the spring sun certainly makes one's intellectual
+light grow dim. Why should not a man sympathize with the seasons and the
+moods and phases of Nature? He is an apple upon this tree, or rather he
+is a babe at this breast, and what his great mother feels affects him
+also.
+
+
+
+X
+
+I have frequently been surprised, in late fall and early winter, to
+see how unequal or irregular was the encroachment of the frost upon the
+earth. If there is suddenly a great fall in the mercury, the frost lays
+siege to the soil and effects a lodgment here and there, and extends its
+conquests gradually. At one place in the field you can easily run your
+staff through into the soft ground, when a few rods farther on it will
+be as hard as a rock. A little covering of dry grass or leaves is a
+great protection. The moist places hold out long, and the spring runs
+never freeze. You find the frost has gone several inches into the plowed
+ground, but on going to the woods, and poking away the leaves and debris
+under the hemlocks and cedars, you find there is no frost at all. The
+Earth freezes her ears and toes and naked places first, and her body
+last.
+
+If heat were visible, or if we should represent it say by smoke, then
+the December landscape would present a curious spectacle. We should see
+the smoke lying low over the meadows, thickest in the hollows and moist
+places, and where the turf is oldest and densest. It would cling to the
+fences and ravines. Under every evergreen tree we should see the vapor
+rising and filling the branches, while the woods of pine and hemlock
+would be blue with it long after it had disappeared from the open
+country. It would rise from the tops of the trees, and be carried this
+way and that with the wind. The valleys of the great rivers, like the
+Hudson, would overflow with it. Large bodies of water become regular
+magazines in which heat is stored during the summer, and they give it
+out again during the fall and early winter. The early frosts keep well
+back from the Hudson, skulking behind the ridges, and hardly come over
+in sight at any point. But they grow bold as the season advances, till
+the river's fires, too, I are put out and Winter covers it with his
+snows.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+One of the strong and original strokes of Nature was when she made the
+loon. It is always refreshing to contemplate a creature so positive and
+characteristic. He is the great diver and flyer under water. The loon
+is the genius loci of the wild northern lakes, as solitary as they are.
+Some birds represent the majesty of nature, like the eagles; others its
+ferocity, like the hawks; others its cunning, like the crow; others
+its sweetness and melody, like the song-birds. The loon represents
+its wildness and solitariness. It is cousin to the beaver. It has the
+feathers of a bird and the fur of an animal, and the heart of both. It
+is as quick and cunning as it is bold and resolute. It dives with such
+marvelous quickness that the shot of the gunner get there just in time
+"to cut across a circle of descending tail feathers and a couple of
+little jets of water flung upward by the web feet of the loon." When
+disabled so that it can neither dive nor fly, it is said to face its
+foe, look him in the face with its clear, piercing eye, and fight
+resolutely till death. The gunners say there is something in its
+wailing, piteous cry, when dying, almost human in its agony. The loon
+is, in the strictest sense, an aquatic fowl. It can barely walk upon the
+land, and one species at least cannot take flight from the shore. But in
+the water its feet are more than feet, and its wings more than wings. It
+plunges into this denser air and flies with incredible speed. Its head
+and beak form a sharp point to its tapering neck. Its wings are far in
+front and its legs equally far in the rear, and its course through the
+crystal depths is like the speed of an arrow. In the northern lakes it
+has been taken forty feet under water upon hooks baited for the great
+lake trout. I had never seen one till last fall, when one appeared on
+the river in front of my house. I knew instantly it was the loon. Who
+could not tell a loon a half mile or more away, though he had never seen
+one before? The river was like glass, and every movement of the bird as
+it sported about broke the surface into ripples, that revealed it far
+and wide. Presently a boat shot out from shore, and went ripping up
+the surface toward the loon. The creature at once seemed to divine the
+intentions of the boatman, and sidled off obliquely, keeping a sharp
+lookout as if to make sure it was pursued. A steamer came down and
+passed between them, and when the way was again clear, the loon was
+still swimming on the surface. Presently it disappeared under the
+water, and the boatman pulled sharp and hard. In a few moments the bird
+reappeared some rods farther on, as if to make an observation. Seeing it
+was being pursued, and no mistake, it dived quickly, and, when it came
+up again, had gone many times as far as the boat had in the same space
+of time. Then it dived again, and distanced its pursuer so easily that
+he gave over the chase and rested upon his oars. But the bird made a
+final plunge, and, when it emerged upon the surface again, it was over
+a mile away. Its course must have been, and doubtless was, an actual
+flight under water, and half as fast as the crow flies in the air.
+
+The loon would have delighted the old poets. Its wild, demoniac laughter
+awakens the echoes on the solitary lakes, and its ferity and hardiness
+are kindred to those robust spirits.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+One notable difference between man and the four-footed animals which
+has often occurred to me is in the eye, and the greater perfection, or
+rather supremacy, of the sense of sight in the human species. All
+the animals--the dog, the fox, the wolf, the deer, the cow, the
+horse--depend mainly upon the senses of hearing and smell. Almost their
+entire powers of discrimination are confined to these two senses. The
+dog picks his master out of the crowd by smell, and the cow her calf out
+of the herd. Sight is only partial recognition. The question can only
+be settled beyond all doubt by the aid of the nose. The fox, alert and
+cunning as he is, will pass within a few yards of the hunter and not
+know him from a stump. A squirrel will run across your lap, and a marmot
+between your feet, if you are motionless. When a herd of cattle see a
+strange object, they are not satisfied till each one has sniffed it; and
+the horse is cured of his fright at the robe, or the meal-bag, or other
+object, as soon as he can be induced to smell it. There is a great deal
+of speculation in the eye of an animal, but very little science. Then
+you cannot catch an animal's eye; he looks at you, but not into your
+eye. The dog directs his gaze toward your face, but, for aught you can
+tell, it centres upon your mouth or nose. The same with your horse or
+cow. Their eye is vague and indefinite.
+
+Not so with the birds. The bird has the human eye in its clearness, its
+power, and its supremacy over the other senses. How acute their sense
+of smell may be is uncertain; their hearing is sharp enough, but their
+vision is the most remarkable. A crow or a hawk, or any of the larger
+birds, will not mistake you for a stump or a rock, stand you never so
+still amid the bushes. But they cannot separate you from your horse or
+team. A hawk reads a man on horseback as one animal, and reads it as a
+horse. None of the sharp-scented animals could be thus deceived.
+
+The bird has man's brain also in its size. The brain of a song-bird is
+even much larger in proportion than that of the greatest human monarch,
+and its life is correspondingly intense and high-strung. But the bird's
+eye is superficial. It is on the outside of his head. It is round, that
+it may take in a full circle at a glance.
+
+All the quadrupeds emphasize their direct forward gaze by a
+corresponding movement of the ears, as if to supplement and aid one
+sense with another. But man's eye seldom needs the confirmation of
+his ear, while it is so set, and his head so poised, that his look is
+forcible and pointed without being thus seconded.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+I once saw a cow that had lost her cud. How forlorn and desolate and
+sick at heart that cow looked! No more rumination, no more of that
+second and finer mastication, no more of that sweet and juicy reverie
+under the spreading trees, or in the stall. Then the farmer took an
+elder and scraped the bark and put something with it, and made the cow a
+cud, and, after due waiting, the experiment took, a response came back,
+and the mysterious machinery was once more in motion, and the cow was
+herself again.
+
+Have you, O poet, or essayist, or story-writer, never lost your cud,
+and wandered about days and weeks without being able to start a single
+thought or an image that tasted good,--your literary appetite dull or
+all gone, and the conviction daily growing that it was all over with you
+in that direction? A little elder-bark, something fresh and bitter from
+the woods, is about the best thing you can take.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+Notwithstanding what I have elsewhere said about the desolation of snow,
+when one looks closely it is little more than a thin veil after all, and
+takes and repeats the form of whatever it covers. Every path through
+the fields is just as plain as before. On every hand the ground sends
+tokens, and the curves and slopes are not of the snow, but of the earth
+beneath. In like manner the rankest vegetation hides the ground less
+than we think. Looking across a wide valley in the month of July, I have
+noted that the fields, except the meadows, had a ruddy tinge, and that
+corn, which near at hand seemed to completely envelop the soil, at that
+distance gave only a slight shade of green. The color of the ground
+everywhere predominated, and I doubt not that, if we could see the earth
+from a point sufficiently removed, as from the moon, its ruddy hue, like
+that of Mars, would alone be visible.
+
+What is a man but a miniature earth, with many disguises in the way of
+manners, possessions, dissemblances? Yet through all--through all the
+work of his hands and all the thoughts of his mind--how surely the
+ground quality of him, the fundamental hue, whether it be this or that,
+makes itself felt and is alone important!
+
+
+
+XV
+
+Men follow their noses, it is said. I have wondered why the Greek did
+not follow his nose in architecture,--did not copy those arches that
+spring from it as from a pier, and support his brow,--but always and
+everywhere used the post and the lintel. There was something in that
+face that has never reappeared in the human countenance. I am thinking
+especially of that straight, strong profile. Is it really godlike, or
+is this impression the result of association? But any suggestion or
+reminiscence of it in the modern face at once gives one the idea of
+strength. It is a face strong in the loins, or it suggests a high,
+elastic instep. It is the face of order and proportion. Those arches are
+the symbols of law and self-control. The point of greatest interest is
+the union of the nose with the brow,--that strong, high embankment;
+it makes the bridge from the ideal to the real sure and easy. All the
+Greek's ideas passed readily into form. In the modern face the arches
+are more or less crushed, and the nose is severed from the brow,--hence
+the abstract and the analytic; hence the preponderance of the
+speculative intellect over creative power.
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+I have thought that the boy is the only true lover of Nature, and that
+we, who make such a dead set at studying and admiring her, come very
+wide of the mark. "The nonchalance of a boy who is sure of his dinner,"
+says our Emerson, "is the healthy attitude of humanity." The boy is a
+part of Nature; he is as indifferent, as careless, as vagrant as she. He
+browses, he digs, he hunts, he climbs, he halloes, he feeds on roots
+and greens and mast. He uses things roughly and without sentiment. The
+coolness with which boys will drown dogs or cats, or hang them to trees,
+or murder young birds, or torture frogs or squirrels, is like Nature's
+own mercilessness.
+
+Certain it is that we often get some of the best touches of nature from
+children. Childhood is a world by itself, and we listen to children when
+they frankly speak out of it with a strange interest. There is such a
+freedom from responsibility and from worldly wisdom,--it is heavenly
+wisdom. There is no sentiment in children, because there is no ruin;
+nothing has gone to decay about them yet,--not a leaf or a twig. Until
+he is well into his teens, and sometimes later, a boy is like a
+bean-pod before the fruit has developed,--indefinite, succulent, rich in
+possibilities which are only vaguely outlined. He is a pericarp merely.
+How rudimental are all his ideas! I knew a boy who began his
+school composition on swallows by saying there were two kinds of
+swallows,--chimney swallows and swallows.
+
+Girls come to themselves sooner; are indeed, from the first, more
+definite and "translatable."
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+Who will write the natural history of the boy? One of the first points
+to be taken account of is his clannishness. The boys of one neighborhood
+are always pitted against those of an adjoining neighborhood, or of one
+end of the town against those of the other end. A bridge, a river, a
+railroad track, are always boundaries of hostile or semi-hostile tribes.
+The boys that go up the road from the country school hoot derisively
+at those that go down the road, and not infrequently add the insult of
+stones; and the down-roaders return the hooting and the missiles with
+interest.
+
+Often there is open war, and the boys meet and have regular battles. A
+few years since, the boys of two rival towns on opposite sides of the
+Ohio River became so belligerent that the authorities had to interfere.
+Whenever an Ohio boy was caught on the West Virginia side of the river,
+he was unmercifully beaten; and when a West Virginia boy was discovered
+on the Ohio side, he was pounced upon in the same manner. One day a
+vast number of boys, about one hundred and fifty on a side, met
+by appointment upon the ice and engaged in a pitched battle. Every
+conceivable missile was used, including pistols. The battle, says the
+local paper, raged with fury for about two hours. One boy received
+a wound behind the ear, from the effects of which he died the next
+morning. More recently the boys of a large manufacturing town of New
+Jersey were divided into two hostile clans that came into frequent
+collision. One Saturday both sides mustered their forces, and a regular
+fight ensued, one boy here also losing his life from the encounter.
+
+Every village and settlement is at times the scene of these youthful
+collisions When a new boy appears in the village, or at the country
+school, how the other boys crowd around him and take his measure, or
+pick at him and insult him to try his mettle!
+
+I knew a boy, twelve or thirteen years old, who was sent to help a
+drover with some cattle as far as a certain village ten miles from his
+home. After the place was reached, and while the boy was eating his
+cracker and candies, he strolled about the village, and fell in with
+some other boys playing upon a bridge. In a short time a large number of
+children of all sizes had collected upon the bridge. The new-comer was
+presently challenged by the boys of his own age to jump with them. This
+he readily did, and cleared their farthest mark. Then he gave them a
+sample of his stone-throwing, and at this pastime he also far surpassed
+his competitors. Before long, the feeling of the crowd began to set
+against him, showing itself first in the smaller fry, who began half
+playfully to throw pebbles and lumps of dry earth at him. Then they
+would run up slyly and strike him with sticks. Presently the large
+ones began to tease him in like manner, till the contagion of hostility
+spread, and the whole pack was arrayed against the strange boy. He kept
+them at bay for a few moments with his stick, till, the feeling mounting
+higher and higher, he broke through their ranks, and fled precipitately
+toward home, with the throng of little and big at his heels. Gradually
+the girls and smaller boys dropped behind, till at the end of the
+first fifty rods only two boys of about his own size, with wrath and
+determination in their faces, kept up the pursuit. But to these he added
+the final insult of beating them at running also, and reached, much
+blown, a point beyond which they refused to follow.
+
+The world the boy lives in is separate and distinct from the world
+the man lives in. It is a world inhabited only by boys. No events are
+important or of any moment save those affecting boys. How they
+ignore the presence of their elders on the street, shouting out their
+invitations, their appointments, their pass-words from our midst, as
+from the veriest solitude! They have peculiar calls, whistles, signals,
+by which they communicate with each other at long distances, like birds
+or wild creatures. And there is as genuine a wildness about these notes
+and calls as about those of a fox or a coon.
+
+The boy is a savage, a barbarian, in his taste,--devouring roots,
+leaves, bark, unripe fruit; and in the kind of music or discord he
+delights in,--of harmony he has no perception. He has his fashions that
+spread from city to city. In one of our large cities the rage at one
+time was an old tin can with a string attached, out of which they
+tortured the most savage and ear-splitting discords. The police were
+obliged to interfere and suppress the nuisance. On another occasion, at
+Christmas, they all came forth with tin horns, and nearly drove the town
+distracted with the hideous uproar.
+
+Another savage trait of the boy is his untruthfulness. Corner him, and
+the chances are ten to one he will lie his way out. Conscience is
+a plant of slow growth in the boy. If caught in one lie, he invents
+another. I know a boy who was in the habit of eating apples in school.
+His teacher finally caught him in the act, and, without removing his eye
+from him, called him to the middle of the floor.
+
+"I saw you this time," said the teacher.
+
+"Saw me what?" said the boy innocently.
+
+"Bite that apple," replied the teacher.
+
+"No, sir," said the rascal.
+
+"Open your mouth;" and from its depths the teacher, with his thumb and
+finger, took out the piece of apple.
+
+"Did n't know it was there," said the boy, unabashed.
+
+Nearly all the moral sentiment and graces are late in maturing in the
+boy. He has no proper self-respect till past his majority. Of course
+there are exceptions, but they are mostly windfalls. The good boys
+die young. We lament the wickedness and thoughtlessness of the young
+vagabonds at the same time that we know it is mainly the acridity and
+bitterness of the unripe fruit that we are lamenting.
+
+
+
+
+III A BIRD MEDLEY
+
+People who have not made friends with the birds do not know how much
+they miss. Especially to one living in the country, of strong local
+attachments and an observing turn of mind, does an acquaintance with
+the birds form a close and invaluable tie. The only time I saw Thomas
+Carlyle, I remember his relating, apropos of this subject, that in his
+earlier days he was sent on a journey to a distant town on some business
+that gave him much bother and vexation, and that on his way back home,
+forlorn and dejected, he suddenly heard the larks singing all about
+him,--soaring and singing, just as they did about his father's fields,
+and it comforted him and cheered him up amazingly.
+
+Most lovers of the birds can doubtless recall similar experiences from
+their own lives. Nothing wonts me to a new place more than the birds. I
+go, for instance, to take up my abode in the country,--to plant myself
+upon unfamiliar ground. I know nobody, and nobody knows me. The roads,
+the fields, the hills, the streams, the woods, are all strange. I look
+wistfully upon them, but they know me not. They give back nothing to
+my yearning gaze. But there, on every hand, are the long-familiar
+birds,--the same ones I left behind me, the same ones I knew in my
+youth,--robins, sparrows, swallows, bobolinks, crows, hawks, high-holes,
+meadowlarks, all there before me, and ready to renew and perpetuate the
+old associations. Before my house is begun, theirs is completed; before
+I have taken root at all, they are thoroughly established. I do not yet
+know what kind of apples my apple-trees bear, but there, in the cavity
+of a decayed limb, the bluebirds are building a nest, and yonder, on
+that branch, the social sparrow is busy with hairs and straws. The
+robins have tasted the quality of my cherries, and the cedar-birds have
+known every red cedar on the place these many years. While my house
+is yet surrounded by its scaffoldings, the phoebe-bird has built her
+exquisite mossy nest on a projecting stone beneath the eaves, a robin
+has filled a niche in the wall with mud and dry grass, the chimney
+swallows are going out and in the chimney, and a pair of house wrens are
+at home in a snug cavity over the door, and, during an April snowstorm,
+a number of hermit thrushes have taken shelter in my unfinished
+chambers. Indeed, I am in the midst of friends before I fairly know it.
+The place is not so new as I had thought. It is already old; the birds
+have supplied the memories of many decades of years.
+
+There is something almost pathetic in the fact that the birds remain
+forever the same. You grow old, your friends die or move to distant
+lands, events sweep on, and all things are changed. Yet there in your
+garden or orchard are the birds of your boyhood, the same notes, the
+same calls, and, to all intents and purposes, the identical birds
+endowed with perennial youth. The swallows, that built so far out of
+your reach beneath the eaves of your father's barn, the same ones now
+squeak and chatter beneath the eaves of your barn. The warblers and
+shy wood-birds you pursued with such glee ever so many summers ago, and
+whose names you taught to some beloved youth who now, perchance, sleeps
+amid his native hills, no marks of time or change cling to them; and
+when you walk out to the strange woods, there they are, mocking you with
+their ever-renewed and joyous youth. The call of the high-holes, the
+whistle of the quail, the strong piercing note of the meadowlark, the
+drumming of the grouse,--how these sounds ignore the years, and strike
+on the ear with the melody of that springtime when the world was young,
+and life was all holiday and romance!
+
+During any unusual tension of the feelings or emotions, how the note or
+song of a single bird will sink into the memory, and become inseparably
+associated with your grief or joy! Shall I ever again be able to hear
+the song of the oriole without being pierced through and through? Can it
+ever be other than a dirge for the dead to me? Day after day, and week
+after week, this bird whistled and warbled in a mulberry by the door,
+while sorrow, like a pall, darkened my day. So loud and persistent was
+the singer that his note teased and worried my excited ear.
+
+       "Hearken to yon pine warbler,
+           Singing aloft in the tree!
+        Hearest thou, O traveler!
+           What he singeth to me?
+
+       "Not unless God made sharp thine ear
+           With sorrow such as mine,
+        Out of that delicate lay couldst thou
+           Its heavy tale divine."
+
+It is the opinion of some naturalists that birds never die what is
+called a natural death, but come to their end by some murderous or
+accidental means; yet I have found sparrows and vireos in the fields and
+woods dead or dying, that bore no marks of violence; and I remember that
+once in my childhood a redbird fell down in the yard exhausted, and was
+brought in by the girl; its bright scarlet image is indelibly stamped
+upon my recollection. It is not known that birds have any distempers
+like the domestic fowls, but I saw a social sparrow one day quite
+disabled by some curious malady that suggested a disease that sometimes
+attacks poultry; one eye was nearly put out by a scrofulous-looking
+sore, and on the last joint of one wing there was a large tumorous or
+fungous growth that crippled the bird completely. On another occasion
+I picked up one that appeared well, but could not keep its centre of
+gravity when in flight, and so fell to the ground.
+
+One reason why dead birds and animals are so rarely found is, that on
+the approach of death their instinct prompts them to creep away in some
+hole or under some cover, where they will be least liable to fall a prey
+to their natural enemies. It is doubtful if any of the game-birds, like
+the pigeon and grouse, ever die of old age, or the semi-game-birds, like
+the bobolink, or the "century living" crow; but in what other form can
+death overtake the hummingbird, or even the swift and the barn swallow?
+Such are true birds of the air; they may be occasionally lost at sea
+during their migrations, but, so far as I know, they are not preyed upon
+by any other species.
+
+The valley of the Hudson, I find, forms a great natural highway for the
+birds, as do doubtless the Connecticut, the Susquehanna, the Delaware,
+and all other large water-courses running north and south. The birds
+love an easy way, and in the valleys of the rivers they find a road
+already graded for them; and they abound more in such places throughout
+the season than they do farther inland. The swarms of robins that come
+to us in early spring are a delight to behold. In one of his poems
+Emerson speaks of
+
+                                 "April's bird,
+        Blue-coated, flying before from tree to tree;"
+
+but April's bird with me is the robin, brisk, vociferous, musical,
+dotting every field, and larking it in every grove; he is as easily atop
+at this season as the bobolink is a month or two later. The tints of
+April are ruddy and brown,--the new furrow and the leafless trees,--and
+these are the tints of its dominant bird.
+
+From my dining-room window I look, or did look, out upon a long stretch
+of smooth meadow, and as pretty a spring sight as I ever wish to behold
+was this field, sprinkled all over with robins, their red breasts turned
+toward the morning sun, or their pert forms sharply outlined against
+lingering patches of snow. Every morning for weeks I had those robins
+for breakfast; but what they had I never could find out.
+
+After the leaves are out, and gayer colors come into fashion, the robin
+takes a back seat. He goes to housekeeping in the old apple-tree, or,
+what he likes better, the cherry-tree. A pair reared their domestic
+altar (of mud and dry grass) in one of the latter trees, where I saw
+much of them. The cock took it upon himself to keep the tree free of all
+other robins during cherry time, and its branches were the scene of
+some lively tussles every hour in the day. The innocent visitor would
+scarcely alight before the jealous cock was upon him; but while he was
+thrusting the intruder out at one side, a second would be coming in on
+the other. He managed, however, to protect his cherries very well, but
+had so little time to eat the fruit himself that we got fully our share.
+
+I have frequently seen the robin courting, and have always been
+astonished and amused at the utter coldness and indifference of the
+female. The females of every species of bird, however, I believe, have
+this in common,--they are absolutely free from coquetry, or any airs and
+wiles whatever. In most cases, Nature has given the song and the plumage
+to the other sex, and all the embellishing and acting is done by the
+male bird.
+
+I am always at home when I see the passenger pigeon. Few spectacles
+please me more than to see clouds of these birds sweeping across the
+sky, and few sounds are more agreeable to my ear than their lively
+piping and calling in the spring woods. They come in such multitudes,
+they people the whole air; they cover townships, and make the solitary
+places gay as with a festival. The naked woods are suddenly blue as with
+fluttering ribbons and scarfs, and vocal as with the voices of children.
+Their arrival is always unexpected. We know April will bring the robins
+and May the bobolinks, but we do not know that either they or any
+other month will bring the passenger pigeon. Sometimes years elapse and
+scarcely a flock is seen. Then, of a sudden, some March or April they
+come pouring over the horizon from the south or southwest, and for a few
+days the land is alive with them.
+
+The whole race seems to be collected in a few vast swarms or
+assemblages. Indeed, I have sometimes thought there was only one such
+in the United States, and that it moved in squads, and regiments, and
+brigades, and divisions, like a giant army. The scouting and foraging
+squads are not unusual, and every few years we see larger bodies of
+them, but rarely indeed do we witness the spectacle of the whole vast
+tribe in motion. Sometimes we hear of them in Virginia, or Kentucky
+and Tennessee; then in Ohio or Pennsylvania; then in New York; then in
+Canada or Michigan or Missouri. They are followed from point to point,
+and from State to State, by human sharks, who catch and shoot them for
+market.
+
+A year ago last April, the pigeons flew for two or three days up and
+down the Hudson. In long bowing lines, or else in dense masses, they
+moved across the sky. It was not the whole army, but I should think at
+least one corps of it; I had not seen such a flight of pigeons since
+my boyhood. I went up to the top of the house, the better to behold the
+winged procession. The day seemed memorable and poetic in which such
+sights occurred.
+
+    [Footnote: This proved to be the last flight of the pigeons
+    in the valley of the Hudson. The whole tribe has now (1895)
+    been nearly exterminated by pot-hunters. The few that still
+    remain appear to be scattered through the Northern States
+    in small, loose flocks.]
+
+While I was looking at the pigeons, a flock of wild geese went by,
+harrowing the sky northward. The geese strike a deeper chord than the
+pigeons. Level and straight they go as fate to its mark. I cannot tell
+what emotions these migrating birds awaken in me,--the geese especially.
+One seldom sees more than a flock or two in a season, and what a spring
+token it is! The great bodies are in motion. It is like the passage of
+a victorious army. No longer inch by inch does spring come, but these
+geese advance the standard across zones at one pull. How my desire goes
+with them; how something in me, wild and migratory, plumes itself and
+follows fast!
+
+       "Steering north, with raucous cry,
+        Through tracts and provinces of sky,
+        Every night alighting down
+        In new landscapes of romance,
+        Where darkling feed the clamorous clans
+        By lonely lakes to men unknown."
+
+Dwelling upon these sights, I am reminded that the seeing of spring
+come, not only upon the great wings of the geese and the lesser wings
+of the pigeons and birds, but in the many more subtle and indirect
+signs and mediums, is also a part of the compensation of living in
+the country. I enjoy not less what may be called the negative side of
+spring,--those dark, dank, dissolving days,
+ yellow sposh and mud and water everywhere,--yet who can stay long
+indoors? The humidity is soft and satisfying to the smell, and to the
+face and hands, and, for the first time for months, there is the fresh
+odor of the earth. The air is full of the notes and calls of the first
+birds. The domestic fowls refuse their accustomed food and wander far
+from the barn. Is it something winter has left, or spring has dropped,
+that they pick up? And what is it that holds me so long standing in the
+yard or in the fields? Something besides the ice and snow melts and runs
+away with the spring floods.
+
+The little sparrows and purple finches are so punctual in announcing
+spring, that some seasons one wonders how they know without looking in
+the almanac, for surely there are no signs of spring out of doors. Yet
+they will strike up as cheerily amid the driving snow as if they had
+just been told that to-morrow is the first day of March. About the same
+time I notice the potatoes in the cellar show signs of sprouting.
+They, too, find out so quickly when spring is near. Spring comes by two
+routes,--in the air and underground, and often gets here by the latter
+course first. She undermines Winter when outwardly his front is nearly
+as bold as ever. I have known the trees to bud long before, by outward
+appearances, one would expect them to. The frost was gone from the
+ground before the snow was gone from the surface.
+
+But Winter hath his birds also; some of them such tiny bodies that one
+wonders how they withstand the giant cold,--but they do. Birds live on
+highly concentrated food,--the fine seeds of weeds and grasses, and
+the eggs and larvae of insects. Such food must be very stimulating and
+heating. A gizzard full of ants, for instance, what spiced and seasoned
+extract is equal to that? Think what virtue there must be in an ounce
+of gnats or mosquitoes, or in the fine mysterious food the chickadee and
+the brown creeper gather in the winter woods! It is doubtful if these
+birds ever freeze when fuel enough can be had to keep their little
+furnaces going. And, as they get their food entirely from the limbs and
+trunks of trees, like the woodpeckers, their supply is seldom interfered
+with by the snow. The worst annoyance must be the enameling of ice our
+winter woods sometimes get.
+
+Indeed, the food question seems to be the only serious one with the
+birds. Give them plenty to eat, and no doubt the majority of them would
+face our winters. I believe all the woodpeckers are winter birds, except
+the high-hole or yellow-hammer, and he obtains the greater part of
+his subsistence from the ground, and is not a woodpecker at all in his
+habits of feeding. Were it not that it has recourse to budding, the
+ruffed grouse would be obliged to migrate. The quail--a bird, no doubt,
+equally hardy, but whose food is at the mercy of the snow--is frequently
+cut off by our severe winters when it ventures to brave them, which is
+not often. Where plenty of the berries of the red cedar can be had, the
+cedar-bird will pass the winter in New York. The old ornithologists say
+the bluebird migrates to Bermuda; but in the winter of 1874-75, severe
+as it was, a pair of them wintered with me eighty miles north of
+New York city. They seem to have been decided in their choice by the
+attractions of my rustic porch and the fruit of a sugar-berry tree
+(celtis--a kind of tree-lotus) that stood in front of it. They lodged in
+the porch and took their meals in the tree. Indeed, they became regular
+lotus-eaters. Punctually at dusk they were in their places on a
+large laurel root in the top of the porch, whence, however, they were
+frequently routed by an indignant broom that was jealous of the neatness
+of the porch floor. But the pair would not take any hints of this kind,
+and did not give up their quarters in the porch or their lotus berries
+till spring.
+
+Many times during the winter the sugar-berry tree was visited by a flock
+of cedar-birds that also wintered in the vicinity. At such times it
+was amusing to witness the pretty wrath of the bluebirds, scolding and
+threatening the intruders, and begrudging them every berry they ate. The
+bluebird cannot utter a harsh or unpleasing note. Indeed, he seems
+to have but one language, one speech, for both love and war, and the
+expression of his indignation is nearly as musical as his song. The male
+frequently made hostile demonstrations toward the cedar-birds, but did
+not openly attack them, and, with his mate, appeared to experience great
+relief when the poachers had gone.
+
+I had other company in my solitude also, among the rest a distinguished
+arrival from the far north, the pine grosbeak, a bird rarely seen in
+these parts, except now and then a single specimen. But in the winter of
+1875, heralding the extreme cold weather, and no doubt in consequence of
+it, there was a large incursion of them into this State and New England.
+They attracted the notice of the country people everywhere. I first saw
+them early in December about the head of the Delaware. I was walking
+along a cleared ridge with my gun, just at sundown, when I beheld two
+strange birds sitting in a small maple. On bringing one of them down, I
+found it was a bird I had never before seen; in color and shape like the
+purple finch, but quite as large again in size. From its heavy beak,
+I at once recognized it as belonging to the family of grosbeaks. A few
+days later I saw large numbers of them in the woods, on the ground,
+and in the trees. And still later, and on till February, they were very
+numerous on the Hudson, coming all about my house,--more familiar even
+than the little snowbird, hopping beneath the windows, and looking up
+at me apparently with as much curiosity as I looked down upon them.
+They fed on the buds of the sugar maples and upon frozen apples in the
+orchard. They were mostly young birds and females, colored very
+much like the common sparrow, with now and then visible the dull
+carmine-colored head and neck of an old male.
+
+Other northern visitors that tarried with me the same winter were the
+tree or Canada sparrow and the redpoll, the former a bird larger than
+the social sparrow or hair-bird, but otherwise much resembling it, and
+distinguishable by a dark spot in the middle of its breast; the latter a
+bird the size and shape of the common goldfinch, with the same manner
+of flight and nearly the same note or cry, but darker than the winter
+plumage of the goldfinch, and with a red crown and a tinge of red on the
+breast. Little bands of these two species lurked about the barnyard all
+winter, picking up the hayseed, the sparrow sometimes venturing in on
+the haymow when the supply outside was short. I felt grateful to them
+for their company. They gave a sort of ornithological air to every
+errand I had to the barn.
+
+Though a number of birds face our winters, and by various shifts worry
+through till spring, some of them permanent residents, and some of them
+visitors from the far north, yet there is but one genuine snow bird,
+nursling of the snow, and that is the snow bunting, a bird that seems
+proper to this season, heralding the coming storm, sweeping by on bold
+and rapid wing, and calling and chirping as cheerily as the songsters
+of May. In its plumage it reflects the winter landscape,--an expanse of
+white surmounted or streaked with gray and brown; a field of snow with
+a line of woods or a tinge of stubble. It fits into the scene, and does
+not appear to lead a beggarly and disconsolate life, like most of our
+winter residents. During the ice-harvesting on the river, I see them
+flitting about among the gangs of men, or floating on the cakes of ice,
+picking and scratching amid the droppings of the horses. They love the
+stack and hay-barn in the distant field, where the farmer fodders his
+cattle upon the snow, and every red-root, ragweed, or pigweed left
+standing in the fall adds to their winter stores.
+
+Though this bird, and one or two others, like the chickadee and
+nuthatch, are more or less complacent and cheerful during the winter,
+yet no bird can look our winters in the face and sing, as do so many of
+the English birds. Several species in Great Britain, their biographers
+tell us, sing the winter through, except during the severest frosts; but
+with us, as far south as Virginia, and, for aught I know, much farther,
+the birds are tuneless at this season. The owls, even, do not hoot, nor
+the hawks scream.
+
+Among the birds that tarry briefly with us in the spring on their way to
+Canada and beyond, there is none I behold with so much pleasure as the
+white-crowned sparrow. I have an eye out for him all through April
+and the first week in May. He is the rarest and most beautiful of the
+sparrow kind. He is crowned, as some hero or victor in the games. He is
+usually in company with his congener, the white-throated sparrow, but
+seldom more than in the proportion of one to twenty of the latter.
+Contrasted with this bird, he looks like its more fortunate brother,
+upon whom some special distinction has been conferred, and who is, from
+the egg, of finer make and quality. His sparrow color of ashen gray
+and brown is very clear and bright, and his form graceful. His whole
+expression, however, culminates in a singular manner in his crown. The
+various tints of the bird are brought to a focus here and intensified,
+the lighter ones becoming white, and the deeper ones nearly black.
+There is the suggestion of a crest, also, from a habit the bird has
+of slightly elevating this part of its plumage, as if to make more
+conspicuous its pretty markings. They are great scratchers, and will
+often remain several minutes scratching in one place, like a hen. Yet,
+unlike the hen and like all hoppers, they scratch with both feet at
+once, which is by no means the best way to scratch.
+
+The white-throats often sing during their sojourning both in fall and
+spring; but only on one occasion have I ever heard any part of the song
+of the white-crowned, and that proceeded from what I took to be a young
+male, one October morning, just as the sun was rising. It was pitched
+very low, like a half-forgotten air, but it was very sweet. It was the
+song of the vesper sparrow and the white-throat in one. In his breeding
+haunts he must be a superior songster, but he is very chary of his music
+while on his travels.
+
+The sparrows are all meek and lowly birds. They are of the grass, the
+fences, the low bushes, the weedy wayside places. Nature has denied them
+all brilliant tints, but she has given them sweet and musical voices.
+Theirs are the quaint and simple lullaby songs of childhood. The
+white-throat has a timid, tremulous strain, that issues from the low
+bushes or from behind the fence, where its cradle is hid. The song
+sparrow modulates its simple ditty as softly as the lining of its own
+nest. The vesper sparrow has only peace and gentleness in its strain.
+
+What pretty nests, too, the sparrows build! Can anything be more
+exquisite than a sparrow's nest under a grassy or mossy bank? What care
+the bird has taken not to disturb one straw or spear of grass, or
+thread of moss! You cannot approach it and put your hand into it without
+violating the place more or less, and yet the little architect has
+wrought day after day and left no marks. There has been an excavation,
+and yet no grain of earth appears to have been moved. If the nest had
+slowly and silently grown like the grass and the moss, it could not
+have been more nicely adjusted to its place and surroundings. There is
+absolutely nothing to tell the eye it is there. Generally a few spears
+of dry grass fall down from the turf above and form a slight screen
+before it. How commonly and coarsely it begins, blending with the debris
+that lies about, and how it refines and comes into form as it approaches
+the centre, which is modeled so perfectly and lined so softly! Then,
+when the full complement of eggs is laid, and incubation has fairly
+begun, what a sweet, pleasing little mystery the silent old bank holds!
+
+The song sparrow, whose nest I have been describing, displays a
+more marked individuality in its song than any bird with which I am
+acquainted. Birds of the same species generally all sing alike, but I
+have observed numerous song sparrows with songs peculiarly their own.
+Last season, the whole summer through, one sang about my grounds like
+this: _swee-e-t, swee-e-t, swee-e-t, bitter._ Day after day, from May
+to September, I heard this strain, which I thought a simple but very
+profound summing-up of life, and wondered how the little bird had
+learned it so quickly. The present season, I heard another with a song
+equally original, but not so easily worded. Among a large troop of
+them in April, my attention was attracted to one that was a master
+songster,--some Shelley or Tennyson among his kind. The strain was
+remarkably prolonged, intricate, and animated, and far surpassed
+anything I ever before heard from that source.
+
+But the most noticeable instance of departure from the standard song
+of a species I ever knew of was in the case of a wood thrush. The bird
+sang, as did the sparrow, the whole season through, at the foot of my
+lot near the river. The song began correctly and ended correctly; but
+interjected into it about midway was a loud, piercing, artificial note,
+at utter variance with the rest of the strain. When my ear first caught
+this singular note, I started out, not a little puzzled, to make, as
+I supposed, a new acquaintance, but had not gone far when I discovered
+whence it proceeded. Brass amid gold, or pebbles amid pearls, are
+not more out of place than was this discordant scream or cry in the
+melodious strain of the wood thrush. It pained and startled the ear. It
+seemed as if the instrument of the bird was not under control, or else
+that one note was sadly out of tune, and, when its turn came, instead of
+giving forth one of those sounds that are indeed like pearls, it shocked
+the ear with a piercing discord. Yet the singer appeared entirely
+unconscious of the defect; or had he grown used to it, or had his
+friends persuaded him that it was a variation to be coveted? Sometimes,
+after the brood had hatched and the bird's pride was at its full, he
+would make a little triumphal tour of the locality, coming from under
+the hill quite up to the house, and flaunting his cracked instrument
+in the face of whoever would listen. He did not return again the next
+season; or, if he did, the malformation of his song was gone.
+
+I have noticed that the bobolink does not sing the same in different
+localities. In New Jersey it has one song; on the Hudson, a slight
+variation of the same; and on the high grass-lands of the interior
+of the State, quite a different strain,--clearer, more distinctly
+articulated, and running off with more sparkle and liltingness. It
+reminds one of the clearer mountain air and the translucent spring-water
+of those localities. I never could make out what the bobolink says in
+New Jersey, but in certain districts in this State his enunciation is
+quite distinct. Sometimes he begins with the word _gegue, gegue._
+Then again, more fully, _be true to me, Clarsy, be true to me, Clarsy,
+Clarsy,_ thence full tilt into his inimitable song, interspersed in
+which the words _kick your slipper, kick your slipper,_ and temperance,
+temperance (the last with a peculiar nasal resonance), are plainly
+heard. At its best, it is a remarkable performance, a unique
+performance, as it contains not the slightest hint or suggestion, either
+in tone or manner or effect, of any other bird-song to be heard. The
+bobolink has no mate or parallel in any part of the world. He stands
+alone. There is no closely allied species. He is not a lark, nor a
+finch, nor a warbler, nor a thrush, nor a starling (though classed
+with the starlings by late naturalists). He is an exception to many
+well-known rules. He is the only ground-bird known to me of marked and
+conspicuous plumage. He is the only black and white field-bird we
+have east of the Mississippi, and, what is still more odd, he is black
+beneath and white above,--the reverse of the fact in all other cases.
+Preeminently a bird of the meadow during the breeding season, and
+associated with clover and daisies and buttercups as no other bird is,
+he yet has the look of an interloper or a newcomer, and not of one to
+the manner born.
+
+The bobolink has an unusually full throat, which may help account for
+his great power of song. No bird has yet been found that could imitate
+him, or even repeat or suggest a single note, as if his song were the
+product of a new set of organs. There is a vibration about it, and a
+rapid running over the keys, that is the despair of other songsters. It
+is said that the mockingbird is dumb in the presence of the bobolink.
+My neighbor has an English skylark that was hatched and reared in
+captivity. The bird is a most persistent and vociferous songster, and
+fully as successful a mimic as the mockingbird. It pours out a strain
+that is a regular mosaic of nearly all the bird-notes to be heard, its
+own proper lark song forming a kind of bordering for the whole. The
+notes of the phoebe-bird, the purple finch, the swallow, the yellowbird,
+the kingbird, the robin, and others, are rendered with perfect
+distinctness and accuracy, but not a word of the bobolink's, though the
+lark must have heard its song every day for four successive summers. It
+was the one conspicuous note in the fields around that the lark made no
+attempt to plagiarize. He could not steal the bobolink's thunder.
+
+The lark is a more marvelous songster than the bobolink only on account
+of his soaring flight and the sustained copiousness of his song. His
+note is rasping and harsh, in point of melody, when compared with the
+bobolink's. When caged and near at hand, the lark's song is positively
+disagreeable, it is so loud and full of sharp, aspirated sounds. But
+high in air above the broad downs, poured out without interruption for
+many minutes together, it is very agreeable.
+
+The bird among us that is usually called a lark, namely, the meadowlark,
+but which our later classifiers say is no lark at all, has nearly the
+same quality of voice as the English skylark,--loud, piercing, z-z-ing;
+and during the mating season it frequently indulges while on the wing in
+a brief song that is quite lark-like. It is also a bird of the stubble,
+and one of the last to retreat on the approach of winter.
+
+The habits of many of our birds are slowly undergoing a change. Their
+migrations are less marked. With the settlement and cultivation of the
+country, the means of subsistence of nearly every species are vastly
+increased. Insects are more numerous, and seeds of weeds and grasses
+more abundant. They become more and more domestic, like the English
+birds. The swallows have nearly all left their original abodes--hollow
+trees, and cliffs, and rocks--for human habitations and their
+environments. Where did the barn swallow nest before the country was
+settled? The chimney swallow nested in hollow trees, and, perhaps,
+occasionally resorts thither yet. But the chimney, notwithstanding the
+smoke, seems to suit his taste best. In the spring, before they have
+paired, I think these swallows sometimes pass the night in the woods,
+but not if an old, disused chimney is handy.
+
+One evening in early May, my attention was arrested by a band of them
+containing several hundreds, perhaps a thousand, circling about near a
+large, tall, disused chimney in a secluded place in the country. They
+were very lively, and chippering, and diving in a most extraordinary
+manner. They formed a broad continuous circle many rods in diameter.
+Gradually the circle contracted and neared the chimney. Presently
+some of the birds as they came round began to dive toward it, and the
+chippering was more animated than ever. Then a few ventured in; in a
+moment more, the air at the mouth of the chimney was black with the
+stream of descending swallows. When the passage began to get crowded,
+the circle lifted and the rest of the birds continued their flight,
+giving those inside time to dispose of themselves. Then the influx began
+again, and was kept up till the crowd became too great, when it cleared
+as before. Thus by installments, or in layers, the swallows were packed
+into the chimney until the last one was stowed away. Passing by the
+place a few days afterward, I saw a board reaching from the roof of the
+building to the top of the chimney, and imagined some curious person or
+some predaceous boy had been up to take a peep inside, and see how so
+many swallows could dispose of themselves in such a space. It would have
+been an interesting spectacle to see them emerge from the chimney in the
+morning.
+
+
+
+
+IV APRIL
+
+If we represent the winter of our northern climate by a rugged snow-clad
+mountain, and summer by a broad fertile plain, then the intermediate
+belt, the hilly and breezy uplands, will stand for spring, with March
+reaching well up into the region of the snows, and April lapping well
+down upon the greening fields and unloosened currents, not beyond
+the limits of winter's sallying storms, but well within the vernal
+zone,--within the reach of the warm breath and subtle, quickening
+influences of the plain below. At its best, April is the tenderest of
+tender salads made crisp by ice or snow water. Its type is the first
+spear of grass. The senses--sight, hearing, smell--are as hungry for
+its delicate and almost spiritual tokens as the cattle are for the first
+bite of its fields. How it touches one and makes him both glad and sad!
+The voices of the arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of
+pigeons sweeping across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin horn of
+the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear
+piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the campfire in
+the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, the tinge of
+green that comes so suddenly on the sunny knolls and slopes, the full
+translucent streams, the waxing and warming sun,--how these things and
+others like them are noted by the eager eye and ear! April is my natal
+month, and I am born again into new delight and new surprises at
+each return of it. Its name has an indescribable charm to me. Its two
+syllables are like the calls of the first birds,--like that of the
+phoebe-bird, or of the meadowlark. Its very snows are fertilizing, and
+are called the poor man's manure.
+
+Then its odors! I am thrilled by its fresh and indescribable odors,--the
+perfume of the bursting sod, of the quickened roots and rootlets, of the
+mould under the leaves, of the fresh furrows. No other month has odors
+like it. The west wind the other day came fraught with a perfume that
+was to the sense of smell what a wild and delicate strain of music is to
+the ear. It was almost transcendental. I walked across the hill with my
+nose in the air taking it in. It lasted for two days. I imagined it came
+from the willows of a distant swamp, whose catkins were affording the
+bees their first pollen: or did it come from much farther,--from beyond
+the horizon, the accumulated breath of innumerable farms and budding
+forests? The main characteristic of these April odors is their uncloying
+freshness. They are not sweet, they are oftener bitter, they are
+penetrating and lyrical. I know well the odors of May and June, of the
+world of meadows and orchards bursting into bloom, but they are not so
+ineffable and immaterial and so stimulating to the sense as the incense
+of April.
+
+The season of which I speak does not correspond with the April of the
+almanac in all sections of our vast geography. It answers to March in
+Virginia and Maryland, while in parts of New York and New England it
+laps well over into May. It begins when the partridge drums, when the
+hyla pipes, when the shad start up the rivers, when the grass greens in
+the spring runs, and it ends when the leaves are unfolding and the last
+snowflake dissolves in midair. It may be the first of May before the
+first swallow appears, before the whip-poor-will is heard, before the
+wood thrush sings; but it is April as long as there is snow upon the
+mountains, no matter what the almanac may say. Our April is, in fact,
+a kind of Alpine summer, full of such contrasts and touches of wild,
+delicate beauty as no other season affords. The deluded citizen fancies
+there is nothing enjoyable in the country till June, and so misses the
+freshest, tenderest part. It is as if one should miss strawberries
+and begin his fruit-eating with melons and peaches. These last are
+good,--supremely so, they are melting and luscious,--but nothing so
+thrills and penetrates the taste, and wakes up and teases the papillae
+of the tongue, as the uncloying strawberry. What midsummer sweetness
+half so distracting as its brisk sub-acid flavor, and what splendor of
+full-leaved June can stir the blood like the best of leafless April?
+
+One characteristic April feature, and one that delights me very much,
+is the perfect emerald of the spring runs while the fields are yet brown
+and sere,--strips and patches of the most vivid velvet green on the
+slopes and in the valleys. How the eye grazes there, and is filled
+and refreshed! I had forgotten what a marked feature this was until I
+recently rode in an open wagon for three days through a mountainous,
+pastoral country, remarkable for its fine springs. Those delicious
+green patches are yet in my eye. The fountains flowed with May. Where no
+springs occurred, there were hints and suggestions of springs about
+the fields and by the roadside in the freshened grass,--sometimes
+overflowing a space in the form of an actual fountain. The water did not
+quite get to the surface in such places, but sent its influence.
+
+The fields of wheat and rye, too, how they stand out of the April
+landscape,--great green squares on a field of brown or gray!
+
+Among April sounds there is none more welcome or suggestive to me than
+the voice of the little frogs piping in the marshes. No bird-note
+can surpass it as a spring token; and as it is not mentioned, to my
+knowledge, by the poets and writers of other lands, I am ready to
+believe it is characteristic of our season alone. You may be sure April
+has really come when this little amphibian creeps out of the mud and
+inflates its throat. We talk of the bird inflating its throat, but you
+should see this tiny minstrel inflate _its_ throat, which becomes like a
+large bubble, and suggests a drummer-boy with his drum slung very high.
+In this drum, or by the aid of it, the sound is produced. Generally the
+note is very feeble at first, as if the frost was not yet all out of the
+creature's throat, and only one voice will be heard, some prophet bolder
+than all the rest, or upon whom the quickening ray of spring has first
+fallen. And it often happens that he is stoned for his pains by the yet
+unpacified element, and is compelled literally to "shut up" beneath
+a fall of snow or a heavy frost. Soon, however, he lifts up his voice
+again with more confidence, and is joined by others and still others,
+till in due time, say toward the last of the month, there is a shrill
+musical uproar, as the sun is setting, in every marsh and bog in the
+land. It is a plaintive sound, and I have heard people from the city
+speak of it as lonesome and depressing, but to the lover of the country
+it is a pure spring melody. The little piper will sometimes climb a
+bulrush, to which he clings like a sailor to a mast, and send forth his
+shrill call. There is a Southern species, heard when you have reached
+the Potomac, whose note is far more harsh and crackling. To stand on the
+verge of a swamp vocal with these, pains and stuns the ear. The call
+of the Northern species is far more tender and musical. [Footnote: The
+Southern species is called the green hyla. I have since heard them in my
+neighborhood on the Hudson.]
+
+Then is there anything like a perfect April morning? One hardly knows
+what the sentiment of it is, but it is something very delicious. It is
+youth and hope. It is a new earth and a new sky. How the air transmits
+sounds, and what an awakening, prophetic character all sounds have! The
+distant barking of a dog, or the lowing of a cow, or the crowing of
+a cock, seems from out the heart of Nature, and to be a call to come
+forth. The great sun appears to have been reburnished, and there is
+something in his first glance above the eastern hills, and the way his
+eye-beams dart right and left and smite the rugged mountains into gold,
+that quickens the pulse and inspires the heart.
+
+Across the fields in the early morning I hear some of the rare April
+birds,--the chewink and the brown thrasher. The robin, the bluebird, the
+song sparrow, the phoebe-bird, come in March; but these two ground-birds
+are seldom heard till toward the last of April. The ground-birds are all
+tree-singers or air-singers; they must have an elevated stage to speak
+from. Our long-tailed thrush, or thrasher, like its congeners the
+catbird and the mockingbird, delights in a high branch of some solitary
+tree, whence it will pour out its rich and intricate warble for an hour
+together. This bird is the great American chipper. There is no other
+bird that I know of that can chip with such emphasis and military
+decision as this yellow-eyed songster. It is like the click of a giant
+gunlock. Why is the thrasher so stealthy? It always seems to be going
+about on tiptoe. I never knew it to steal anything, and yet it skulks
+and hides like a fugitive from justice. One never sees it flying aloft
+in the air and traversing the world openly, like most birds, but
+it darts along fences and through bushes as if pursued by a guilty
+conscience. Only when the musical fit is upon it does it come up into
+full view, and invite the world to hear and behold.
+
+The chewink is a shy bird also, but not stealthy. It is very
+inquisitive, and sets up a great scratching among the leaves, apparently
+to attract your attention. The male is perhaps the most conspicuously
+marked of all the ground-birds except the bobolink, being black above,
+bay on the sides, and white beneath. The bay is in compliment to the
+leaves he is forever scratching among,--they have rustled against his
+breast and sides so long that these parts have taken their color; but
+whence come the white and the black? The bird seems to be aware that his
+color betrays him, for there are few birds in the woods so careful about
+keeping themselves screened from view. When in song, its favorite perch
+is the top of some high bush near to cover. On being disturbed at such
+times, it pitches down into the brush and is instantly lost to view.
+
+This is the bird that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Wilson about, greatly
+exciting the latter's curiosity. Wilson was just then upon the threshold
+of his career as an ornithologist, and had made a drawing of the Canada
+jay which he sent to the President. It was a new bird, and in reply
+Jefferson called his attention to a "curious bird" which was everywhere
+to be heard, but scarcely ever to be seen. He had for twenty years
+interested the young sportsmen of his neighborhood to shoot one for him,
+but without success. "It is in all the forests, from spring to fall,"
+he says in his letter, "and never but on the tops of the tallest trees,
+from which it perpetually serenades us with some of the sweetest notes,
+and as clear as those of the nightingale. I have followed it for miles,
+without ever but once getting a good view of it. It is of the size
+and make of the mockingbird, lightly thrush-colored on the back, and a
+grayish white on the breast and belly. Mr. Randolph, my son-in-law, was
+in possession of one which had been shot by a neighbor," etc. Randolph
+pronounced it a flycatcher, which was a good way wide of the mark.
+Jefferson must have seen only the female, after all his tramp, from his
+description of the color; but he was doubtless following his own great
+thoughts more than the bird, else he would have had an earlier view. The
+bird was not a new one, but was well known then as the ground-robin. The
+President put Wilson on the wrong scent by his erroneous description,
+and it was a long time before the latter got at the truth of the case.
+But Jefferson's letter is a good sample of those which specialists often
+receive from intelligent persons who have seen or heard something in
+their line very curious or entirely new, and who set the man of science
+agog by a description of the supposed novelty,--a description that
+generally fits the facts of the case about as well as your coat fits the
+chair-back. Strange and curious things in the air, and in the water, and
+in the earth beneath, are seen every day except by those who are looking
+for them, namely, the naturalists. When Wilson or Audubon gets his eye
+on the unknown bird, the illusion vanishes, and your phenomenon turns
+out to be one of the commonplaces of the fields or woods.
+
+A prominent April bird, that one does not have to go to the woods or
+away from his own door to see and hear, is the hardy and ever-welcome
+meadowlark. What a twang there is about this bird, and what vigor! It
+smacks of the soil. It is the winged embodiment of the spirit of our
+spring meadows. What emphasis in its _"z-d-t, z-d-t"_ and what character
+in its long, piercing note! Its straight, tapering, sharp beak is
+typical of its voice. Its note goes like a shaft from a crossbow; it
+is a little too sharp and piercing when near at hand, but, heard in the
+proper perspective, it is eminently melodious and pleasing. It is one
+of the major notes of the fields at this season. In fact, it easily
+dominates all others. _"Spring o' the year! spring o' the year!"_ it
+says, with a long-drawn breath, a little plaintive, but not complaining
+or melancholy. At times it indulges in something much more intricate and
+lark-like while hovering on the wing in midair, but a song is beyond the
+compass of its instrument, and the attempt usually ends in a breakdown.
+A clear, sweet, strong, high-keyed note, uttered from some knoll or
+rock, or stake in the fence, is its proper vocal performance. It has the
+build and walk and flight of the quail and the grouse. It gets up before
+you in much the same manner, and falls an easy prey to the crack shot.
+Its yellow breast, surmounted by a black crescent, it need not be
+ashamed to turn to the morning sun, while its coat of mottled gray is
+in perfect keeping with the stubble amid which it walks. The two lateral
+white quills in its tail seem strictly in character. These quills spring
+from a dash of scorn and defiance in the bird's make-up. By the aid
+of these, it can almost emit a flash as it struts about the fields and
+jerks out its sharp notes. They give a rayed, a definite and piquant
+expression to its movements. This bird is not properly a lark, but a
+starling, say the ornithologists, though it is lark-like in its habits,
+being a walker and entirely a ground-bird. Its color also allies it to
+the true lark. I believe there is no bird in the English or European
+fields that answers to this hardy pedestrian of our meadows. He is a
+true American, and his note one of our characteristic April sounds.
+
+Another marked April note, proceeding sometimes from the meadows, but
+more frequently from the rough pastures and borders of the woods, is
+the call of the high-hole, or golden-shafted woodpecker. It is quite as
+strong as that of the meadowlark, but not so long-drawn and piercing.
+It is a succession of short notes rapidly uttered, as if the bird said
+_"if-if-if-if-if-if-if."_ The notes of the ordinary downy and hairy
+woodpeckers suggest, in some way, the sound of a steel punch; but
+that of the high-hole is much softer, and strikes on the ear with real
+springtime melody. The high-hole is not so much a wood-pecker as he is
+a ground-pecker. He subsists largely on ants and crickets, and does not
+appear till they are to be found.
+
+In Solomon's description of spring, the voice of the turtle is
+prominent, but our turtle, or mourning dove, though it arrives in April,
+can hardly be said to contribute noticeably to the open-air sounds.
+Its call is so vague, and soft, and mournful,--in fact, so remote and
+diffused,--that few persons ever hear it at all.
+
+Such songsters as the cow blackbird are noticeable at this season,
+though they take a back seat a little later. It utters a peculiarly
+liquid April sound. Indeed, one would think its crop was full of water,
+its notes so bubble up and regurgitate, and are delivered with such
+an apparent stomachic contraction. This bird is the only feathered
+polygamist we have. The females are greatly in excess of the males, and
+the latter are usually attended by three or four of the former. As soon
+as the other birds begin to build, they are on the _qui vive,_ prowling
+about like gypsies, not to steal the young of others, but to steal their
+eggs into other birds' nests, and so shirk the labor and responsibility
+of hatching and rearing their own young. As these birds do not mate, and
+as therefore there can be little or no rivalry or competition between
+the males, one wonders--in view of Darwin's teaching--why one sex should
+have brighter and richer plumage than the other, which is the fact. The
+males are easily distinguished from the dull and faded females by their
+deep glossy-black coats.
+
+The April of English literature corresponds nearly to our May. In Great
+Britain, the swallow and the cuckoo usually arrive by the middle of
+April; with us, their appearance is a week or two later. Our April,
+at its best, is a bright, laughing face under a hood of snow, like the
+English March, but presenting sharper contrasts, a greater mixture of
+smiles and tears and icy looks than are known to our ancestral climate.
+Indeed, Winter sometimes retraces his steps in this month, and unburdens
+himself of the snows that the previous cold has kept back; but we are
+always sure of a number of radiant, equable days,--days that go before
+the bud, when the sun embraces the earth with fervor and determination.
+How his beams pour into the woods till the mould under the leaves is
+warm and emits an odor! The waters glint and sparkle, the birds gather
+in groups, and even those unused to singing find a voice. On the streets
+of the cities, what a flutter, what bright looks and gay colors! I
+recall one preeminent day of this kind last April. I made a note of it
+in my note-book. The earth seemed suddenly to emerge from a wilderness
+of clouds and chilliness into one of these blue sunlit spaces. How
+the voyagers rejoiced! Invalids came forth, old men sauntered down the
+street, stocks went up, and the political outlook brightened.
+
+Such days bring out the last of the hibernating animals. The woodchuck
+unrolls and creeps out of his den to see if his clover has started yet.
+The torpidity leaves the snakes and the turtles, and they come forth and
+bask in the sun. There is nothing so small, nothing so great, that it
+does not respond to these celestial spring days, and give the pendulum
+of life a fresh start.
+
+April is also the month of the new furrow. As soon as the frost is gone
+and the ground settled, the plow is started upon the hill, and at each
+bout I see its brightened mould-board flash in the sun. Where the last
+remnants of the snowdrift lingered yesterday the plow breaks the sod
+to-day. Where the drift was deepest the grass is pressed flat, and there
+is a deposit of sand and earth blown from the fields to windward. Line
+upon line the turf is reversed, until there stands out of the neutral
+landscape a ruddy square visible for miles, or until the breasts of the
+broad hills glow like the breasts of the robins.
+
+Then who would not have a garden in April? to rake together the rubbish
+and burn it up, to turn over the renewed soil, to scatter the rich
+compost, to plant the first seed, or bury the first tuber! It is not the
+seed that is planted, any more than it is I that is planted; it is not
+the dry stalks and weeds that are burned up, any more than it is my
+gloom and regrets that are consumed. An April smoke makes a clean
+harvest.
+
+I think April is the best month to be born in. One is just in time, so
+to speak, to catch the first train, which is made up in this month. My
+April chickens always turn out best. They get an early start; they have
+rugged constitutions. Late chickens cannot stand the heavy dews, or
+withstand the predaceous hawks. In April all nature starts with you. You
+have not come out of your hibernaculum too early or too late; the time
+is ripe, and, if you do not keep pace with the rest, why, the fault is
+not in the season.
+
+
+
+
+V SPRING POEMS
+
+There is no month oftener on the tongues of the poets than April. It is
+the initiative month; it opens the door of the seasons; the interest and
+expectations of the untried, the untasted, lurk in it,
+
+       "From you have I been absent in the spring,"
+
+says Shakespeare in one of his sonnets,--
+
+       "When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
+        Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
+        That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him."
+
+The following poem, from Tennyson's "In Memoriam," might be headed
+"April," and serve as descriptive of parts of our season:--
+
+       "Now fades the last long streak of snow,
+           Now bourgeons every maze of quick
+           About the flowering squares, and thick
+        By ashen roots the violets blow.
+
+       "Now rings the woodland loud and long,
+           The distance takes a lovelier hue,
+           And drowned in yonder living blue
+       The lark becomes a sightless song.
+
+       "Now dance the lights on lawn and lea,
+           The flocks are whiter down the vale,
+           And milkier every milky sail
+        On winding stream or distant sea;
+
+       "Where now the sea-mew pipes, or dives
+           In yonder greening gleam, and fly
+           The happy birds, that change their sky
+        To build and brood; that live their lives
+
+        "From land to land; and in my breast
+           Spring wakens too; and my regret
+           Becomes an April violet,
+        And buds and blossoms like the rest."
+
+In the same poem the poet asks:--
+
+        "Can trouble live with April days?"
+
+Yet they are not all jubilant chords that this season awakens.
+Occasionally there is an undertone of vague longing and sadness, akin
+to that which one experiences in autumn. Hope for a moment assumes the
+attitude of memory and stands with reverted look. The haze, that in
+spring as well as in fall sometimes descends and envelops all things,
+has in it in some way the sentiment of music, of melody, and awakens
+pensive thoughts. Elizabeth Akers, in her "April," has recognized and
+fully expressed this feeling. I give the first and last stanzas:--
+
+       "The strange, sweet days are here again,
+           The happy-mournful days;
+        The songs which trembled on our lips
+           Are half complaint, half praise.
+
+       "Swing, robin, on the budded sprays,
+           And sing your blithest tune;--
+        Help us across these homesick days
+           Into the joy of June!"
+
+This poet has also given a touch of spring in her "March," which,
+however, should be written "April" in the New England climate:--
+
+       "The brown buds thicken on the trees,
+           Unbound, the free streams sing,
+        As March leads forth across the leas
+           The wild and windy spring.
+
+       "Where in the fields the melted snow
+           Leaves hollows warm and wet,
+        Ere many days will sweetly blow
+           The first blue violet."
+
+But on the whole the poets have not been eminently successful in
+depicting spring. The humid season, with its tender, melting blue sky,
+its fresh, earthy smells, its new furrow, its few simple signs and
+awakenings here and there, and its strange feeling of unrest,--how
+difficult to put its charms into words! None of the so-called pastoral
+poets have succeeded in doing it. That is the best part of spring which
+escapes a direct and matter-of-fact description of her. There is more
+of spring in a line or two of Chaucer and Spenser than in the elaborate
+portraits of her by Thomson or Pope, because the former had spring
+in their hearts, and the latter only in their inkhorns. Nearly all
+Shakespeare's songs are spring songs,--full of the banter, the frolic,
+and the love-making of the early season. What an unloosed current, too,
+of joy and fresh new life and appetite in Burns!
+
+In spring everything has such a margin! there are such spaces of
+silence! The influences are at work underground. Our delight is in a few
+things. The drying road is enough; a single wild flower, the note of
+the first bird, the partridge drumming in the April woods, the restless
+herds, the sheep steering for the uplands, the cow lowing in the highway
+or hiding her calf in the bushes, the first fires, the smoke going up
+through the shining atmosphere, from the burning of rubbish in gardens
+and old fields,--each of these simple things fills the breast with
+yearning and delight, for they are tokens of the spring. The best spring
+poems have this singleness and sparseness. Listen to Solomon: "For lo,
+the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the
+earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the
+turtle is heard in the land." In Wordsworth are some things that breathe
+the air of spring. These lines, written in early spring, afford a good
+specimen:--
+
+       "I heard a thousand blended notes,
+           While in a grove I sate reclined,
+        In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
+           Bring sad thoughts to the mind."
+
+       "To her fair works did Nature link
+           The human soul that through me ran;
+        And much it grieved my heart to think
+           What man has made of man.
+
+       "Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
+           The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
+        And 't is my faith that every flower
+           Enjoys the air it breathes.
+
+       "The birds around me hopped and played,
+           Their thoughts I cannot measure:
+        But the least motion which they made
+           It seemed a thrill of pleasure."
+
+Or these from another poem, written in his usual study, "Out-of-Doors,"
+and addressed to his sister:--
+
+       "It is the first mild day of March,
+           Each minute sweeter than before;
+       The redbreast sings from the tall larch
+          That stands beside the door.
+
+       "There is a blessing in the air,
+           Which seems a sense of joy to yield
+        To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
+           And grass in the green field.
+
+   . . . . . . . . .
+
+       "Love, now a universal birth,
+           From heart to heart is stealing,
+        From earth to man, from man to earth;
+           It is the hour of feeling.
+
+       "One moment now may give us more
+           Than years of toiling reason:
+        Our minds shall drink at every pore
+           The spirit of the season."
+
+It is the simplicity of such lines, like the naked branches of the
+trees or the unclothed fields, and the spring-like depth of feeling and
+suggestion they hold, that make them so appropriate to this season.
+
+At this season I often find myself repeating these lines of his also:--
+
+       "My heart leaps up, when I behold
+           A rainbow in the sky;
+        So was it, when my life began;
+        So is it, now I am a man;
+           So be it, when I shall grow old,
+           Or let me die!"
+
+Though there are so few good poems especially commemorative of the
+spring, there have no doubt been spring poets,--poets with such newness
+and fullness of life, and such quickening power, that the world is
+re-created, as it were, beneath their touch. Of course this is in a
+measure so with all real poets. But the difference I would indicate may
+exist between poets of the same or nearly the same magnitude. Thus, in
+this light Tennyson is an autumnal poet, mellow and dead-ripe, and was
+so from the first; while Wordsworth has much more of the spring in him,
+is nearer the bone of things and to primitive conditions.
+
+Among the old poems, one which seems to me to have much of the charm
+of springtime upon it is the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. The
+songs, gambols, and wooings of the early birds are not more welcome
+and suggestive. How graceful and airy, and yet what a tender, profound,
+human significance it contains! But the great vernal poem, doubly so in
+that it is the expression of the springtime of the race, the boyhood of
+man as well, is the Iliad of Homer. What faith, what simple wonder,
+what unconscious strength, what beautiful savagery, what magnanimous
+enmity,--a very paradise of war!
+
+Though so young a people, there is not much of the feeling of spring
+in any of our books. The muse of our poets is wise rather than joyous.
+There is no excess or extravagance or unruliness in her. There are
+spring sounds and tokens in Emerson's "May-Day:"--
+
+          "April cold with dropping rain
+        Willows and lilacs brings again,
+        The whistle of returning birds,
+        And trumpet-lowing of the herds.
+        The scarlet maple-keys betray
+        What potent blood hath modest May,
+        What fiery force the earth renews,
+        The wealth of forms, the flush of hues;
+        What joy in rosy waves outpoured
+        Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord."
+
+But this is not spring in the blood. Among the works of our young
+and rising poets, I am not certain but that Mr. Gilder's "New Day" is
+entitled to rank as a spring poem in the sense in which I am speaking.
+It is full of gayety and daring, and full of the reckless abandon of
+the male bird when he is winning his mate. It is full also of the
+tantalizing suggestiveness, the half-lights and shades, of April and
+May.
+
+Of prose poets who have the charm of the springtime upon them, the best
+recent example I know of is Bjoernson, the Norwegian romancist. What
+especially makes his books spring-like is their freshness and sweet good
+faith. There is also a reticence and an unwrought suggestiveness about
+them that is like the promise of buds and early flowers. Of Turgenieff,
+the Russian, much the same thing might be said. His stories are simple
+and elementary, and have none of the elaborate hair-splitting and forced
+hot-house character of the current English or American novel. They
+spring from stronger, more healthful and manly conditions, and have a
+force in them that is like a rising, incoming tide.
+
+
+
+
+VI OUR RURAL DIVINITY
+
+I wonder that Wilson Flagg did not include the cow among his
+"Picturesque Animals," for that is where she belongs. She has not the
+classic beauty of the horse, but in picture-making qualities she is far
+ahead of him. Her shaggy, loose-jointed body; her irregular, sketchy
+outlines, like those of the landscape,--the hollows and ridges, the
+slopes and prominences; her tossing horns, her bushy tail, tier swinging
+gait, her tranquil, ruminating habits,--all tend to make her an object
+upon which the artist eye loves to dwell. The artists are forever
+putting her into pictures, too. In rural landscape scenes she is
+an important feature. Behold her grazing in the pastures and on the
+hillsides, or along banks of streams, or ruminating under wide-spreading
+trees, or standing belly-deep in the creek or pond, or lying upon the
+smooth places in the quiet summer afternoon, the day's grazing done,
+and waiting to be summoned home to be milked; and again in the twilight
+lying upon the level summit of the hill, or where the sward is thickest
+and softest; or in winter a herd of them filing along toward the spring
+to drink, or being "foddered" from the stack in the field upon the new
+snow,--surely the cow is a picturesque animal, and all her goings and
+comings are pleasant to behold.
+
+I looked into Hamerton's clever book on the domestic animals also,
+expecting to find my divinity duly celebrated, but he passes her by and
+contemplates the bovine qualities only as they appear in the ox and the
+bull.
+
+Neither have the poets made much of the cow, but have rather dwelt
+upon the steer, or the ox yoked to the plow. I recall this touch from
+Emerson:--
+
+       "The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
+        Far heard, lows not thine ear to charm."
+
+But the ear is charmed, nevertheless, especially if it be not too near,
+and the air be still and dense, or hollow, as the farmer says. And
+again, if it be springtime and she task that powerful bellows of hers
+to its utmost capacity, how round the sound is, and how far it goes over
+the hills!
+
+The cow has at least four tones or lows. First, there is her alarmed
+or distressed low when deprived of her calf, or when separated from
+her mates,--her low of affection. Then there is her call of hunger, a
+petition for food, sometimes full of impatience, or her answer to the
+farmer's call, full of eagerness. Then there is that peculiar frenzied
+bawl she utters on smelling blood, which causes every member of the herd
+to lift its head and hasten to the spot,--the native cry of the clan.
+When she is gored or in great danger she bawls also, but that is
+different. And lastly, there is the long, sonorous volley she lets off
+on the hills or in the yard, or along the highway, and which seems to
+be expressive of a kind of unrest and vague longing,--the longing of the
+imprisoned Io for her lost identity. She sends her voice forth so that
+every god on Mount Olympus can hear her plaint. She makes this sound in
+the morning, especially in the spring, as she goes forth to graze.
+
+One of our rural poets, Myron Benton, whose verse often has the flavor
+of sweet cream, has written some lines called "Rumination," in which the
+cow is the principal figure, and with which I am permitted to adorn my
+theme. The poet first gives his attention to a little brook that "breaks
+its shallow gossip" at his feet and "drowns the oriole's voice:"--
+
+       "But moveth not that wise and ancient cow,
+        Who chews her juicy cud so languid now
+        Beneath her favorite elm, whose drooping bough
+        Lulls all but inward vision fast asleep:
+        But still, her tireless tail a pendulum sweep
+        Mysterious clock-work guides, and some hid pulley
+        Her drowsy cud, each moment, raises duly.
+
+       "Of this great, wondrous world she has seen more
+        Than you, my little brook, and cropped its store
+        Of succulent grass on many a mead and lawn;
+        And strayed to distant uplands in the dawn.
+        And she has had some dark experience
+        Of graceless man's ingratitude; and hence
+        Her ways have not been ways of pleasantness,
+        Nor all her paths of peace. But her distress
+        And grief she has lived past; your giddy round
+        Disturbs her not, for she is learned profound
+        In deep brahminical philosophy.
+        She chews the cud of sweetest revery
+        Above your worldly prattle, brooklet merry,
+        Oblivious of all things sublunary."
+
+The cow figures in Grecian mythology, and in the Oriental literature is
+treated as a sacred animal. "The clouds are cows and the rain milk." I
+remember what Herodotus says of the Egyptians' worship of heifers and
+steers; and in the traditions of the Celtic nations the cow is regarded
+as a divinity. In Norse mythology the milk of the cow Andhumbla afforded
+nourishment to the Frost giants, and it was she that licked into being
+and into shape a god, the father of Odin. If anything could lick a god
+into shape, certainly the cow could do it. You may see her perform this
+office for young Taurus any spring. She licks him out of the fogs and
+bewilderments and uncertainties in which he finds himself on first
+landing upon these shores, and up onto his feet in an incredibly short
+time. Indeed, that potent tongue of hers can almost make the dead alive
+any day, and the creative lick of the old Scandinavian mother cow is
+only a large-lettered rendering of the commonest facts.
+
+The horse belongs to the fiery god Mars. He favors war, and is one of
+its oldest, most available, and most formidable engines. The steed is
+clothed with thunder, and smells the battle from afar; but the cattle
+upon a thousand hills denote that peace and plenty bear sway in the
+land. The neighing of the horse is a call to battle; but the lowing of
+old Brockleface in the valley brings the golden age again. The savage
+tribes are never without the horse; the Scythians are all mounted; but
+the cow would tame and humanize them. When the Indians will cultivate
+the cow, I shall think their civilization fairly begun. Recently, when
+the horses were sick with the epizooetic, and the oxen came to the city
+and helped to do their work, what an Arcadian air again filled the
+streets! But the dear old oxen,--how awkward and distressed they looked!
+Juno wept in the face of every one of them. The horse is a true citizen,
+and is entirely at home in the paved streets; but the ox,--what a
+complete embodiment of all rustic and rural things! Slow, deliberate,
+thick-skinned, powerful, hulky, ruminating, fragrant-breathed, when he
+came to town the spirit and suggestion of all Georgics and Bucolics came
+with him. O citizen, was it only a plodding, unsightly brute that went
+by? Was there no chord in your bosom, long silent, that sweetly vibrated
+at the sight of that patient, Herculean couple? Did you smell no hay or
+cropped herbage, see no summer pastures with circles of cool shade, hear
+no voice of herds among the hills? They were very likely the only horses
+your grandfather ever had. Not much trouble to harness and unharness
+them. Not much vanity on the road in those days. They did all the work
+on the early pioneer farm. They were the gods whose rude strength first
+broke the soil. They could live where the moose and the deer could. If
+there was no clover or timothy to be had, then the twigs of the basswood
+and birch would do. Before there were yet fields given up to grass, they
+found ample pasturage in the woods. Their wide-spreading horns gleamed
+in the duskiness, and their paths and the paths of the cows became the
+future roads and highways, or even the streets of great cities.
+
+All the descendants of Odin show a bovine trace, and cherish and
+cultivate the cow. In Norway she is a great feature. Professor Boyesen
+describes what he calls the _saeter_, the spring migration of the dairy
+and dairymaids, with all the appurtenances of butter and cheese making,
+from the valleys to the distant plains upon the mountains, where the
+grass keeps fresh and tender till fall. It is the great event of the
+year in all the rural districts. Nearly the whole family go with the
+cattle and remain with them. At evening the cows are summoned home with
+a long horn, called the _loor,_ in the hands of the milkmaid. The
+whole herd comes winding down the mountain-side toward the _saeter_ in
+obedience to the mellow blast.
+
+What were those old Vikings but thick-hided bulls that delighted
+in nothing so much as goring each other? And has not the charge of
+beefiness been brought much nearer home to us than that? But about all
+the northern races there is something that is kindred to cattle in the
+best sense,--something in their art and literature that is essentially
+pastoral, sweet-breathed, continent, dispassionate, ruminating,
+wide-eyed, soft-voiced,--a charm of kine, the virtue of brutes.
+
+The cow belongs more especially to the northern peoples, to the region
+of the good, green grass. She is the true _grazing_ animal. That broad,
+smooth, always dewy nose of hers is just the suggestion of greensward.
+She caresses the grass; she sweeps off the ends of the leaves; she reaps
+it with the soft sickle of her tongue. She crops close, but she does
+not bruise or devour the turf like the horse. She is the sward's best
+friend, and will make it thick and smooth as a carpet.
+
+       "The turfy mountains where live the nibbling sheep"
+
+are not for her. Her muzzle is too blunt; then she does not _bite_ as do
+the sheep; she has no upper teeth; she _crops._ But on the lower slopes,
+and margins, and rich bottoms, she is at home. Where the daisy and the
+buttercup and clover bloom, and where corn will grow, is her proper
+domain. The agriculture of no country can long thrive without her. Not
+only a large part of the real, but much of the potential, wealth of the
+land is wrapped up in her.
+
+Then the cow has given us some good words and hints. How could we get
+along without the parable of the cow that gave a good pail of milk and
+then kicked it over? One could hardly keep house without it. Or the
+parable of the cream and the skimmed milk, or of the buttered bread? We
+know, too, through her aid, what the horns of the dilemma mean, and what
+comfort there is in the juicy cud of reverie.
+
+I have said the cow has not been of much service to the poets, and yet
+I remember that Jean Ingelow could hardly have managed her "High Tide"
+without "Whitefoot" and "Lightfoot" and "Cusha! Cusha! Cusha! calling;"
+or Trowbridge his "Evening at the Farm," in which the real call of the
+American farm-boy of "Co', boss! Co', boss! Co', Co'," makes a very
+musical refrain.
+
+Tennyson's charming "Milking Song" is another flower of poesy that has
+sprung up in my divinity's footsteps.
+
+What a variety of individualities a herd of cows presents when you have
+come to know them all, not only in form and color, but in manners and
+disposition! Some are timid and awkward, and the butt of the whole
+herd. Some remind you of deer. Some have an expression in the face
+like certain persons you have known. A petted and well-fed cow has a
+benevolent and gracious look; an ill-used and poorly fed one, a pitiful
+and forlorn look. Some cows have a masculine or ox expression; others
+are extremely feminine. The latter are the ones for milk. Some cows
+will kick like a horse; some jump fences like deer. Every herd has its
+ringleader, its unruly spirit,--one that plans all the mischief, and
+leads the rest through the fences into the grain or into the orchard.
+This one is usually quite different from the master spirit, the "boss of
+the yard." The latter is generally the most peaceful and law-abiding cow
+in the lot, and the least bullying and quarrelsome. But she is not to be
+trifled with; her will is law; the whole herd give way before her, those
+that have crossed horns with her and those that have not, but yielded
+their allegiance without crossing. I remember such a one among my
+father's milkers when I was a boy,--a slender-horned, deep-shouldered,
+large-uddered, dewlapped old cow that we always put first in the long
+stable, so she could not have a cow on each side of her to forage upon;
+for the master is yielded to no less in the stanchions than in the
+yard. She always had the first place anywhere. She had her choice of
+standing-room in the milking-yard, and when she wanted to lie down there
+or in the fields the best and softest spot was hers. When the herd were
+foddered from the stack or barn, or fed with pumpkins in the fall, she
+was always first served. Her demeanor was quiet but impressive. She
+never bullied or gored her mates, but literally ruled them with the
+breath of her nostrils. If any new-comer or ambitious younger cow,
+however, chafed under her supremacy, she was ever ready to make good her
+claims. And with what spirit she would fight when openly challenged!
+She was a whirlwind of pluck and valor; and not after one defeat or two
+defeats would she yield the championship. The boss cow, when overcome,
+seems to brood over her disgrace, and day after day will meet her rival
+in fierce combat.
+
+A friend of mine, a pastoral philosopher, whom I have consulted in
+regard to the master cow, thinks it is seldom the case that one rules
+all the herd, if it number many, but that there is often one that will
+rule nearly all. "Curiously enough," he says, "a case like this will
+often occur: No. 1 will whip No. 2; No. 2 whips No. 3; and No. 3 whips
+No. 1; so around in a circle. This is not a mistake; it is often the
+case. I remember," he continued, "we once had feeding out of a large
+bin in the centre of the yard six cows who mastered right through in
+succession from No. 1 to No. 6; _but_ No. 6 _paid off the score by
+whipping No. 1._ I often watched them when they were all trying to feed
+out of the box, and of course trying, dog-in-the-manger fashion, each to
+prevent any other she could. They would often get in the order to do it
+very systematically, since they could keep rotating about the box
+till the chain happened to get broken somewhere, when there would be
+confusion. Their mastership, you know, like that between nations, is
+constantly changing. There are always Napoleons who hold their own
+through many vicissitudes; but the ordinary cow is continually liable to
+lose her foothold. Some cow she has always despised, and has often sent
+tossing across the yard at her horns' ends, some pleasant morning will
+return the compliment and pay off old scores."
+
+But my own observation has been that, in herds in which there have
+been no important changes for several years, the question of might gets
+pretty well settled, and some one cow becomes the acknowledged ruler.
+
+The bully of the yard is never the master, but usually a second or third
+rate pusher that never loses an opportunity to hook those beneath her,
+or to gore the masters if she can get them in a tight place. If such a
+one can get loose in the stable, she is quite certain to do mischief.
+She delights to pause in the open bars and turn and keep those behind
+her at bay till she sees a pair of threatening horns pressing toward
+her, when she quickly passes on. As one cow masters all, so there is one
+cow that is mastered by all. These are the two extremes of the herd, the
+head and the tail. Between them are all grades of authority, with none
+so poor but hath some poorer to do her reverence.
+
+The cow has evidently come down to us from a wild or semi-wild state;
+perhaps is a descendant of those wild, shaggy cattle of which a small
+band is still preserved in some nobleman's park in Scotland. Cuvier
+seems to have been of this opinion. One of the ways in which her wild
+instincts still crop out is the disposition she shows in spring to hide
+her calf,--a common practice among the wild herds. Her wild nature would
+be likely to come to the surface at this crisis if ever; and I have
+known cows that practiced great secrecy in dropping their calves. As
+their time approached, they grew restless, a wild and excited look was
+upon them; and if left free, they generally set out for the woods, or
+for some other secluded spot. After the calf is several hours old,
+and has got upon its feet and had its first meal, the dam by some sign
+commands it to lie down and remain quiet while she goes forth to feed.
+If the calf is approached at such time, it plays "possum," pretends
+to be dead or asleep, till, on finding this ruse does not succeed, it
+mounts to its feet, bleats loudly and fiercely, and charges desperately
+upon the intruder. But it recovers from this wild scare in a little
+while, and never shows signs of it again.
+
+The habit of the cow, also, in eating the placenta, looks to me like a
+vestige of her former wild instincts,--the instinct to remove everything
+that would give the wild beasts a clew or a scent, and so attract them
+to her helpless young.
+
+How wise and sagacious the cows become that run upon the street, or pick
+their living along the highway! The mystery of gates and bars is at last
+solved to them. They ponder over them by night, they lurk about them by
+day, till they acquire a new sense,--till they become _en rapport_ with
+them and know when they are open and unguarded. The garden gate, if it
+open into the highway at any point, is never out of the mind of these
+roadsters, or out of their calculations. They calculate upon the chances
+of its being left open a certain number of times in the season; and if
+it be but once, and only for five minutes, your cabbage and sweet corn
+suffer. What villager, or countryman either, has not been awakened at
+night by the squeaking and crunching of those piratical jaws under the
+window, or in the direction of the vegetable patch? I have had the cows,
+after they had eaten up my garden, break into the stable where my own
+milcher was tied, and gore her and devour her meal. Yes, life presents
+but one absorbing problem to the street cow, and that is how to get into
+your garden. She catches glimpses of it over the fence or through the
+pickets, and her imagination or her epigastrium is inflamed. When
+the spot is surrounded by a high board fence, I think I have seen her
+peeping at the cabbages through a knothole. At last she learns to open
+the gate. It is a great triumph of bovine wit. She does it with her horn
+or her nose, or may be with her ever-ready tongue. I doubt if she has
+ever yet penetrated the mystery of the newer patent fastenings; but the
+old-fashioned thumb-latch she can see through, give her time enough.
+
+A large, lank, muley or polled cow used to annoy me in this way when I
+was a dweller in a certain pastoral city. I more than half suspected she
+was turned in by some one; so one day I watched. Presently I heard the
+gate-latch rattle; the gate swung open, and in walked the old buffalo.
+On seeing me she turned and ran like a horse. I then fastened the gate
+on the inside and watched again. After long waiting the old cow came
+quickly round the corner and approached the gate. She lifted the latch
+with her nose. Then, as the gate did not move, she lifted it again and
+again. Then she gently nudged it. Then, the obtuse gate not taking
+the hint, she butted it gently, then harder and still harder, till it
+rattled again. At this juncture I emerged from my hiding-place, when
+the old villain scampered off with great precipitation. She knew she
+was trespassing, and she had learned that there were usually some swift
+penalties attached to this pastime.
+
+I have owned but three cows and loved but one. That was the first one,
+Chloe, a bright red, curly-pated, golden-skinned Devonshire cow, that an
+ocean steamer landed for me upon the banks of the Potomac one bright May
+Day many clover summers ago. She came from the north, from the pastoral
+regions of the Catskills, to graze upon the broad commons of the
+national capital. I was then the fortunate and happy lessee of an old
+place with an acre of ground attached, almost within the shadow of the
+dome of the Capitol. Behind a high but aged and decrepit board fence I
+indulged my rural and unclerical tastes. I could look up from my homely
+tasks and cast a potato almost in the midst of that cataract of marble
+steps that flows out of the north wing of the patriotic pile. Ah! when
+that creaking and sagging back gate closed behind me in the evening, I
+was happy; and when it opened for my egress thence in the morning, I was
+not happy. Inside that gate was a miniature farm, redolent of homely,
+primitive life, a tumble-down house and stables and implements of
+agriculture and horticulture, broods of chickens, and growing pumpkins,
+and a thousand antidotes to the weariness of an artificial life.
+Outside of it were the marble and iron palaces, the paved and blistering
+streets, and the high, vacant mahogany desk of a government clerk.
+In that ancient inclosure I took an earth bath twice a day. I planted
+myself as deep in the soil as I could, to restore the normal tone and
+freshness of my system, impaired by the above-mentioned government
+mahogany. I have found there is nothing like the earth to draw the
+various social distempers out of one. The blue devils take flight at
+once if they see you mean to bury them and make compost of them. Emerson
+intimates that the scholar had better not try to have two gardens; but
+I could never spend an hour hoeing up dock and red-root and twitch-grass
+without in some way getting rid of many weeds and fungi, unwholesome
+growths, that a petty indoor life is forever fostering in my moral and
+intellectual nature.
+
+But the finishing touch was not given till Chloe came. She was the jewel
+for which this homely setting waited. My agriculture had some object
+then. The old gate never opened with such alacrity as when she paused
+before it. How we waited for her coming! Should I send Drewer, the
+colored patriarch, for her? No; the master of the house himself should
+receive Juno at the capital.
+
+"One cask for you," said the clerk, referring to the steamer bill of
+lading.
+
+"Then I hope it's a cask of milk," I said. "I expected a cow."
+
+"One cask, it says here."
+
+"Well, let's see it; I'll warrant it has horns and is tied by a rope;"
+which proved to be the case, for there stood the only object that bore
+my name, chewing its cud, on the forward deck. How she liked the voyage
+I could not find out; but she seemed to relish so much the feeling of
+solid ground beneath her feet once more, that she led me a lively step
+all the way home. She cut capers in front of the White House, and tried
+twice to wind me up in the rope as we passed the Treasury. She kicked up
+her heels on the broad avenue, and became very coltish as she came under
+the walls of the Capitol. But that night the long-vacant stall in the
+old stable was filled, and the next morning the coffee had met with a
+change of heart. I had to go out twice with the lantern and survey my
+treasure before I went to bed. Did she not come from the delectable
+mountains, and did I not have a sort of filial regard for her as toward
+my foster-mother?
+
+This was during the Arcadian age at the capital, before the easy-going
+Southern ways had gone out and the prim new Northern ways had come
+in, and when the domestic animals were treated with distinguished
+consideration and granted the freedom of the city. There was a charm of
+cattle in the street and upon the commons; goats cropped your rosebushes
+through the pickets, and nooned upon your front porch; and pigs dreamed
+Arcadian dreams under your garden fence, or languidly frescoed it with
+pigments from the nearest pool. It was a time of peace; it was the poor
+man's golden age. Your cow, your goat, your pig, led vagrant, wandering
+lives, and picked up a subsistence wherever they could, like the bees,
+which was almost everywhere. Your cow went forth in the morning and came
+home fraught with milk at night, and you never troubled yourself where
+she went or how far she roamed.
+
+Chloe took very naturally to this kind of life. At first I had to go
+with her a few times and pilot her to the nearest commons, and then I
+left her to her own wit, which never failed her. What adventures she
+had, what acquaintances she made, how far she wandered, I never knew.
+I never came across her in my walks or rambles. Indeed, on several
+occasions I thought I would look her up and see her feeding in national
+pastures, but I never could find her. There were plenty of cows, but
+they were all strangers. But punctually, between four and five o'clock
+in the afternoon, her white horns would be seen tossing above the gate
+and her impatient low be heard. Sometimes, when I turned her forth in
+the morning, she would pause and apparently consider which way she would
+go. Should she go toward Kendall Green to-day, or follow the Tiber,
+or over by the Big Spring, or out around Lincoln Hospital? She seldom
+reached a conclusion till she had stretched forth her neck and blown a
+blast on her trumpet that awoke the echoes in the very lantern on the
+dome of the Capitol. Then, after one or two licks, she would disappear
+around the corner. Later in the season, when the grass was parched or
+poor on the commons, and the corn and cabbage tempting in the garden,
+Chloe was loath to depart in the morning, and her deliberations were
+longer than ever, and very often I had to aid her in coming to a
+decision.
+
+For two summers she was a wellspring of pleasure and profit in my farm
+of one acre, when, in an evil moment, I resolved to part with her and
+try another. In an evil moment I say, for from that time my luck in
+cattle left me. The goddess never forgave me the execution of that rash
+and cruel resolve.
+
+The day is indelibly stamped on my memory when I exposed my Chloe for
+sale in the public market-place. It was in November, a bright, dreamy,
+Indian summer day. A sadness oppressed me, not unmixed with guilt and
+remorse. An old Irish woman came to the market also with her pets to
+sell, a sow and five pigs, and took up a position next me. We condoled
+with each other; we bewailed the fate of our darlings together; we
+berated in chorus the white-aproned but blood-stained fraternity who
+prowled about us. When she went away for a moment I minded the pigs, and
+when I strolled about she minded my cow. How shy the innocent beast was
+of those carnal marketmen! How she would shrink away from them! When
+they put out a hand to feel her condition she would "scrooch" down her
+back, or bend this way or that, as if the hand were a branding-iron. So
+long as I stood by her head she felt safe--deluded creature!--and chewed
+the cud of sweet content; but the moment I left her side she seemed
+filled with apprehension, and followed me with her eyes, lowing softly
+and entreatingly till I returned.
+
+At last the money was counted out for her, and her rope surrendered to
+the hand of another. How that last look of alarm and incredulity, which
+I caught as I turned for a parting glance, went to my heart!
+
+Her stall was soon filled, or partly filled, and this time with a
+native,--a specimen of what may be called the cornstalk breed of
+Virginia; a slender, furtive, long-geared heifer just verging on
+cowhood, that in spite of my best efforts would wear a pinched and
+hungry look. She evidently inherited a humped back. It was a family
+trait, and evidence of the purity of her blood. For the native blooded
+cow of Virginia, from shivering over half rations of cornstalks in the
+open air during those bleak and windy winters, and roaming over those
+parched fields in summer, has come to have some marked features. For
+one thing, her pedal extremities seem lengthened; for another, her
+udder does not impede her traveling; for a third, her backbone inclines
+strongly to the curve; then, she despiseth hay. This last is a sure
+test. Offer a thorough-bred Virginia cow hay, and she will laugh in
+your face; but rattle the husks or shucks, and she knows you to be her
+friend.
+
+The new-comer even declined corn-meal at first. She eyed it furtively,
+then sniffed it suspiciously, but finally discovered that it bore some
+relation to her native "shucks," when she fell to eagerly.
+
+I cherish the memory of this cow, however, as the most affectionate
+brute I ever knew. Being deprived of her calf, she transferred her
+affections to her master, and would fain have made a calf of him, lowing
+in the most piteous and inconsolable manner when he was out of her
+sight, hardly forgetting her grief long enough to eat her meal, and
+entirely neglecting her beloved husks. Often in the middle of the night
+she would set up that sonorous lamentation, and continue it till sleep
+was chased from every eye in the household. This generally had the
+effect of bringing the object of her affection before her, but in a mood
+anything but filial or comforting. Still, at such times a kick seemed
+a comfort to her, and she would gladly have kissed the rod that was the
+instrument of my midnight wrath.
+
+But her tender star was destined soon to a fatal eclipse. Being tied
+with too long a rope on one occasion during my temporary absence, she
+got her head into the meal-barrel, and stopped not till she had devoured
+nearly half a bushel of dry meal. The singularly placid and benevolent
+look that beamed from the meal-besmeared face when I discovered her was
+something to be remembered. For the first time, also, her spinal column
+came near assuming a horizontal line. But the grist proved too much
+for her frail mill, and her demise took place on the third day, not of
+course without some attempt to relieve her on my part. I gave her, as is
+usual in such emergencies, everything I "could think of," and everything
+my neighbors could think of, besides some fearful prescriptions which I
+obtained from a German veterinary surgeon, but to no purpose. I imagined
+her poor maw distended and inflamed with the baking sodden mass which no
+physic could penetrate or enliven.
+
+Thus ended my second venture in live-stock. My third, which followed
+sharp upon the heels of this disaster, was scarcely more of a success.
+This time I led to the altar a buffalo cow, as they call the "muley"
+down South,--a large, spotted, creamy-skinned cow, with a fine udder,
+that I persuaded a Jew drover to part with for ninety dollars. "Pag like
+a dish rack (rag)," said he, pointing to her udder after she had been
+milked. "You vill come pack and gif me the udder ten tollar" (for he
+had demanded an even hundred), he continued, "after you have had her a
+gouple of days." True, I felt like returning to him after a "gouple of
+days," but not to pay the other ten dollars. The cow proved to be as
+blind as a bat, though capable of counterfeiting the act of seeing to
+perfection. For did she not lift up her head and follow with her eyes a
+dog that scaled the fence and ran through the other end of the lot,
+and the next moment dash my hopes thus raised by trying to walk over
+a locust-tree thirty feet high? And when I set the bucket before her
+containing her first mess of meal, she missed it by several inches, and
+her nose brought up against the ground. Was it a kind of far-sightedness
+and near blindness? That was it, I think; she had genius, but not
+talent; she could see the man in the moon, but was quite oblivious to
+the man immediately in her front. Her eyes were telescopic and required
+a long range.
+
+As long as I kept her in the stall, or confined to the inclosure, this
+strange eclipse of her sight was of little consequence. But when spring
+came, and it was time for her to go forth and seek her livelihood in the
+city's waste places, I was embarrassed. Into what remote corners or into
+what _terra incognita_ might she not wander! There was little doubt but
+that she would drift around home in the course of the summer, or perhaps
+as often as every week or two; but could she be trusted to find her way
+back every night? Perhaps she could be taught. Perhaps her other senses
+were acute enough to compensate in a measure for her defective vision.
+So I gave her lessons in the topography of the country. I led her forth
+to graze for a few hours each day and led her home again. Then I left
+her to come home alone, which feat she accomplished very encouragingly.
+She came feeling her way along, stepping very high, but apparently a
+most diligent and interested sight-seer. But she was not sure of the
+right house when she got to it, though she stared at it very hard.
+
+Again I turned her forth, and again she came back, her telescopic eyes
+apparently of some service to her. On the third day, there was a fierce
+thunder-storm late in the afternoon, and old buffalo did not come home.
+It had evidently scattered and bewildered what little wits she had.
+Being barely able to navigate those streets on a calm day, what could
+she be expected to do in a tempest?
+
+After the storm had passed, and near sundown, I set out in quest of
+her, but could get no clew. I heard that two cows had been struck by
+lightning about a mile out on the commons. My conscience instantly told
+me that one of them was mine. It would be a fit closing of the third act
+of this pastoral drama. Thitherward I bent my steps, and there upon the
+smooth plain I beheld the scorched and swollen forms of two cows slain
+by thunderbolts, but neither of them had ever been mine.
+
+The next day I continued the search, and the next, and the next. Finally
+I hoisted an umbrella over my head, for the weather had become hot, and
+set out deliberately and systematically to explore every foot of open
+common on Capitol Hill. I tramped many miles, and found every man's cow
+but my own,--some twelve or fifteen hundred, I should think. I saw many
+vagrant boys and Irish and colored women, nearly all of whom had seen a
+buffalo cow that very day that answered exactly to my description, but
+in such diverse and widely separate places that I knew it was no cow of
+mine. And it was astonishing how many times I was myself deceived; how
+many rumps or heads, or line backs or white flanks, I saw peeping over
+knolls, or from behind fences or other objects, that could belong to no
+cow but mine!
+
+Finally I gave up the search, concluded the cow had been stolen, and
+advertised her, offering a reward. But days passed, and no tidings were
+obtained. Hope began to burn pretty low,--was indeed on the point of
+going out altogether,--when one afternoon, as I was strolling over the
+commons (for in my walks I still hovered about the scenes of my lost
+milcher), I saw the rump of a cow, over a grassy knoll, that looked
+familiar. Coming nearer, the beast lifted up her head; and, behold! it
+was she! only a few squares from home, where doubtless she had been most
+of the time. I had overshot the mark in my search. I had ransacked the
+far-off, and had neglected the near-at-hand, as we are so apt to do. But
+she was ruined as a milcher, and her history thenceforward was brief and
+touching!
+
+
+
+
+VII BEFORE GENIUS
+
+If there did not something else go to the making of literature besides
+mere literary parts, even the best of them, how long ago the old bards
+and the Biblical writers would have been superseded by the learned
+professors and the gentlemanly versifiers of later times! Is there
+to-day a popular poet, using the English language, who does not, in
+technical acquirements and in the artificial adjuncts of poetry,--rhyme,
+metre, melody, and especially sweet, dainty fancies,--surpass Europe's
+and Asia's loftiest and oldest? Indeed, so marked is the success of the
+latter-day poets in this respect, that any ordinary reader may well be
+puzzled, and ask, if the shaggy antique masters are poets, what are the
+refined and euphonious producers of our own day?
+
+If we were to inquire what this something else is which is prerequisite
+to any deep and lasting success in literature, we should undoubtedly
+find that it is the man behind the book. It is the fashion of the day
+to attribute all splendid results to genius and culture. But genius and
+culture are not enough. "All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has
+not the science of honesty and goodness," says Montaigne. The quality
+of simple manhood, and the universal human traits which form the bond
+of union between man and man,--which form the basis of society, of the
+family, of government, of friendship,--are quite overlooked; and the credit
+is given to some special facility, or to brilliant and lucky hit. Does
+any one doubt that the great poets and artists are made up mainly of the
+most common universal human and heroic characteristics?--that in them,
+though working to other ends, is all that construct the soldier, the
+sailor, the farmer, the discoverer, the bringer-to-pass in any field,
+and that their work is good and enduring in proportion as it is
+saturated and fertilized by the qualities of these? Good human stock is
+the main dependence. No great poet ever appeared except from a race of
+good fighters, good eaters, good sleepers, good breeders. Literature
+dies with the decay of the _un-_literary element. It is not in the
+spirit of something far away in the clouds or under the moon, something
+ethereal, visionary, and anti-mundane, that Angelo, Dante, and
+Shakespeare work, but in the spirit of common Nature and of the
+homeliest facts; through these, and not away from them, the path of the
+creator lies.
+
+It is no doubt this tendency, always more or less marked in highly
+refined and cultivated times, to forget or overlook the primary
+basic qualities, and to parade and make much of verbal and technical
+acquirements, that led Huxley to speak with such bitter scorn of the
+"sensual caterwauling of the literary classes," for this is not the
+only country in which books are produced that are a mere skin of elegant
+words blown up by copious literary gas.
+
+In imaginative works, especially, much depends upon the quality of
+mere weight. A stern, material inertia is indispensable. It is like
+the immobility and the power of resistance of a piece of ordnance, upon
+which the force and efficacy of the projectile finally depend. In
+the most daring flights of the master, there is still something which
+remains indifferent and uncommitted, and which acts as reserve power,
+making the man always superior to his work. He must always leave the
+impression that if he wanted to pull harder or to fly higher he could
+easily do so. In Homer there is much that is not directly available
+for Homer's purposes as poet. This is his personality,--the real
+Homer,--which lies deeper than his talents and skill, and which works
+through these by indirections. This gives the authority; this is the
+unseen backer, which makes every promise good.
+
+What depths can a man sound but his own, or what heights explore? "We
+carry within us," says Sir Thomas Browne, "the wonders we seek without
+us."
+
+Indeed, there is a strict moral or ethical dependence of the capacity
+to conceive or to project great things upon the capacity to be or to
+do them. It is as true as any law of hydraulics or of statics, that the
+workmanship of a man can never rise above the level of his character.
+He can never adequately say or do anything greater than he himself is.
+There is no such thing, for instance, as deep insight into the mystery
+of Creation, without integrity and simplicity of character.
+
+In the highest mental results and conditions the whole being
+sympathizes. The perception of a certain range of truth, such as is
+indicated by Plato, Hegel, Swedenborg, and which is very far from
+what is called "religious" or "moral," I should regard as the best
+testimonial that could be offered of a man's probity and essential
+nobility of soul. Is it possible to imagine a fickle, inconstant, or a
+sly, vain, mean person reading and appreciating Emerson? Think of the
+real men of science, the great geologists and astronomers, one opening
+up time, the other space! Shall mere intellectual acumen be accredited
+with these immense results? What noble pride, self-reliance, and
+continuity of character underlie Newton's deductions!
+
+Only those books are for the making of men into which a man has gone in
+the making. Mere professional skill and sleight of hand, of themselves,
+are to be apprized as lightly in letters as in war or in government,
+or in any kind of leadership. Strong native qualities only avail in the
+long run; and the more these dominate over the artificial endowments,
+sloughing or dropping the latter in the final result, the more we are
+refreshed and enlarged. Who has not, at some period of his life, been
+captivated by the rhetoric and fine style of nearly all the popular
+authors of a certain sort, but at last waked up to discover that behind
+these brilliant names was no strong, loving man, but only a refined
+taste, a fertile invention, or a special talent of one kind or another.
+
+Think of the lather of the modern novel, and the fashion-plate men and
+women that figure in it! What noble person has Dickens sketched, or
+has any novelist since Scott? The utter poverty of almost every current
+novelist, in any grand universal human traits in his own character, is
+shown in nothing more clearly than in the _kind_ of interest the reader
+takes in his books. We are led along solely by the ingenuity of the
+plot, and a silly desire to see how the affair came out. What must be
+the effect, long continued, of this class of jugglers working upon the
+sympathies and the imagination of a nation of gestating women?
+
+How the best modern novel collapses before the homely but immense human
+significance of Homer's celestial swineherd entertaining divine Ulysses,
+or even the solitary watchman in Aeschylus' "Agamemnon," crouched, like
+a night-dog, on the roofs of the Atreidae, waiting for the signal fires
+that should announce the fall of sacred Ilion!
+
+But one need not look long, even in contemporary British literature, to
+find a man. In the author of "Characteristics" and "Sartor Resartus"
+we surely encounter one of the true heroic cast. We are made aware that
+here is something more than a _litterateur,_ something more than genius.
+Here is veracity, homely directness and sincerity, and strong primary
+idiosyncrasies. Here the man enters into the estimate of the author.
+There is no separating them, as there never is in great examples. A
+curious perversity runs through all, but in no way vitiates the result.
+In both his moral and intellectual nature, Carlyle seems made with
+a sort of stub and twist, like the best gun-barrels. The knotty and
+corrugated character of his sentences suits well the peculiar and
+intense activity of his mind. What a transition from his terse and
+sharply articulated pages, brimming with character and life, and a
+strange mixture of rage, humor, tenderness, poetry, philosophy, to the
+cold disbelief and municipal splendor of Macaulay! Nothing in Carlyle's
+contributions seems fortuitous. It all flows from a good and sufficient
+cause in the character of the man.
+
+Every great man is, in a certain way, an Atlas, with the weight of the
+world upon him. And if one is to criticise at all, he may say that, if
+Carlyle had not been quite so conscious of this weight, his work would
+have been better done. Yet to whom do we owe more, even as Americans?
+Anti-democratic in his opinions, he surely is not so in spirit, or
+in the quality of his make. The nobility of labor and the essential
+nobility of man were never so effectively preached before. The deadliest
+enemy of democracy is not the warning or dissenting voice, but it is the
+spirit, rife among us, which would engraft upon our hardy Western stock
+the sickly and decayed standards of the expiring feudal world.
+
+With two or three exceptions, there is little as yet in American
+literature that shows much advance beyond the merely conventional and
+scholastic,--little, I mean, in which one gets a whiff of the strong,
+unbreathed air of mountain or prairie, or a taste of rude, new power
+that is like the tonic of the sea. Thoreau occupies a niche by himself.
+Thoreau was not a great personality, yet his writings have a strong
+characteristic flavor. He is anti-scorbutic, like leeks and onions. He
+has reference, also, to the highest truths.
+
+It is very likely true that our most native and original characters do
+not yet take to literature. It is, perhaps, too early in the day. Iron
+and lime have to pass through the vegetable before they can reach the
+higher organization of the animal, and maybe this Western nerve and
+heartiness will yet emerge on the intellectual plane. Let us hope that
+it will indeed be Western nerve and heartiness when it gets there, and
+not Eastern wit and epigram!
+
+In Abraham Lincoln we had a character of very marked and lofty type, the
+most suggestive study or sketch of the future American man that has
+yet appeared in our history. How broad, unconventional, and humane!
+How democratic! how adhesive! No fine arabesque carvings, but strong,
+unhewn, native traits, and deep lines of care, toil, and human
+sympathy. Lincoln's Gettysburg speech is one of the most genuine
+and characteristic utterances in our annals. It has the true antique
+simplicity and impressiveness. It came straight from the man, and is as
+sure an index of character as the living voice, or the physiognomy, or
+the personal presence. Indeed, it may be said of Mr. Lincoln's entire
+course while at the head of the nation, that no President, since the
+first, ever in his public acts allowed the man so fully to appear, or
+showed so little disposition to retreat behind the featureless political
+mask which seems to adhere to the idea of gubernatorial dignity.
+
+It would be hardly fair to cite Everett's speech on the same occasion
+as a specimen of the opposite style, wherein ornate scholarship and the
+pride of talents dominate. Yet a stern critic would be obliged to
+say that, as an author, Everett allowed, for the most part, only
+the expurgated, complimenting, drawing-room man to speak; and that,
+considering the need of America to be kept virile and broad at all
+hazards, his contribution, both as man and writer, falls immeasurably
+short of Abraham Lincoln's.
+
+What a noble specimen of its kind, and how free from any verbal tricks
+or admixture of literary sauce, is Thoreau's "Maine Woods"! And what a
+marked specimen of the opposite style is a certain other book I could
+mention in which these wild and grand scenes serve but as a medium to
+advertise the author's fund of classic lore!
+
+Can there be any doubt about the traits and outward signs of a noble
+character, and is not the style of an author the manners of his soul?
+
+Is there a lyceum lecturer in the country who is above manoeuvring for
+the applause of his audience? or a writer who is willing to make himself
+of no account for the sake of what he has to say? Even in the best there
+is something of the air and manners of a performer on exhibition. The
+newspaper, or magazine, or book is a sort of raised platform upon which
+the advertiser advances before a gaping and expectant crowd. Truly, how
+well he _handles_ his subject! He turns it over, and around, and inside
+out, and top-side down. He tosses it about; he twirls it; he takes it
+apart and puts it together again, and knows well beforehand where the
+applause will come in. Any reader, in taking up the antique authors,
+must be struck by the contrast.
+
+"In Aeschylus," says Landor, "there is no trickery, no trifling, no
+delay, no exposition, no garrulity, no dogmatism, no declamation, no
+prosing,... but the loud, clear challenge, the firm, unstealthy step, of
+an erect, broad-breasted soldier."
+
+On the whole, the old authors are better than the new. The real question
+of literature is not simplified by culture or a multiplication of books,
+as the conditions of life are always the same, and are not made one
+whit easier by all the myriads of men and women who have lived upon the
+globe. The standing want is never for more skill, but for newer, fresher
+power,--a more plentiful supply of arterial blood. The discoverer, or
+the historian, or the man of science, may begin where his predecessor
+left off, but the poet or any artist must go back for a fresh start.
+With him it is always the first day of creation, and he must begin at
+the stump or nowhere.
+
+
+
+
+VIII BEFORE BEAUTY
+
+I
+
+Before genius is manliness, and before beauty is power. The Russian
+novelist and poet, Turgenieff, scattered all through whose works you
+will find unmistakable traits of greatness, makes one of his characters
+say, speaking of beauty, "The old masters,--they never hunted after
+it; it comes of itself into their compositions, God knows whence, from
+heaven or elsewhere. The whole world belonged to them, but we are unable
+to clasp its broad spaces; our arms are too short."
+
+From the same depth of insight come these lines from "Leaves of Grass,"
+apropos of true poems:--
+
+"They do not seek beauty--they are sought; Forever touching them, or
+close upon them, follows beauty, longing,   fain, love-sick."
+
+The Roman was perhaps the first to separate beauty from use, and to
+pursue it as ornament merely. He built his grand edifice,--its piers,
+its vaults, its walls of brick and concrete,--and then gave it a
+marble envelope copied from the Greek architecture. The latter could be
+stripped away, as in many cases it was by the hand of time, and leave
+the essentials of the structure nearly complete. Not so with the Greek:
+he did not seek the beautiful, he was beauty; his building had no
+ornament, it was all structure; in its beauty was the flower of
+necessity, the charm of inborn fitness and proportion. In other words,
+"his art was structure refined into beautiful forms, not beautiful forms
+superimposed upon structure," as with the Roman. And it is in Greek
+mythology, is it not, that Beauty is represented as riding upon the back
+of a lion? as she assuredly always does in their poetry and art,--rides
+upon power, or terror, or savage fate; not only rides upon, but
+is wedded and incorporated with it; hence the athletic desire and
+refreshment her coming imparts.
+
+This is the invariable order of nature. Beauty without a rank material
+basis enfeebles. The world is not thus made; man is not thus begotten
+and nourished.
+
+It comes to me there is something implied or understood when we
+look upon a beautiful object, that has quite as much to do with the
+impression made upon the mind as anything in the object itself; perhaps
+more. There is somehow an immense and undefined background of vast and
+unconscionable energy, as of earthquakes, and ocean storms, and cleft
+mountains, across which things of beauty play, and to which they
+constantly defer; and when this background is wanting, as it is in much
+current poetry, beauty sickens and dies, or at most has only a feeble
+existence.
+
+Nature does nothing merely for beauty; beauty follows as the inevitable
+result; and the final impression of health and finish which her works
+make upon the mind is owing as much to those things which are not
+technically called beautiful as to those which are. The former give
+identity to the latter. The one is to the other what substance is to
+form, or bone to flesh. The beauty of nature includes all that is called
+beautiful, as its flower; and all that is not called beautiful, as its
+stalk and roots.
+
+Indeed, when I go to the woods or the fields, or ascend to the hilltop,
+I do not seem to be gazing upon beauty at all, but to be breathing it
+like the air. I am not dazzled or astonished; I am in no hurry to look
+lest it be gone. I would not have the litter and debris removed, or the
+banks trimmed, or the ground painted. What I enjoy is commensurate
+with the earth and sky itself. It clings to the rocks and trees; it is
+kindred to the roughness and savagery; it rises from every tangle and
+chasm; it perches on the dry oak-stubs with the hawks and buzzards; the
+crows shed it from their wings and weave it into their nests of coarse
+sticks; the fox barks it, the cattle low it, and every mountain path
+leads to its haunts. I am not a spectator of, but a participator in it.
+It is not an adornment; its roots strike to the centre of the earth.
+
+All true beauty in nature or in art is like the iridescent hue of
+mother-of-pearl, which is intrinsic and necessary, being the result of
+the arrangement of the particles,--the flowering of the mechanism of the
+shell; or like the beauty of health which comes out of and reaches back
+again to the bones and the digestion. There is no grace like the grace
+of strength. What sheer muscular gripe and power lie back of the firm,
+delicate notes of the great violinist! "Wit," says Heine,--and the same
+thing is true of beauty,--"isolated, is worthless. It is only endurable
+when it rests on a solid basis."
+
+In fact, beauty as a separate and distinct thing does not exist. Neither
+can it be reached by any sorting or sifting or clarifying process. It is
+an experience of the mind, and must be preceded by certain conditions,
+just as light is an experience of the eye, and sound of the ear.
+
+To attempt to manufacture beauty is as vain as to attempt to manufacture
+truth; and to give it to us in poems or any form of art, without a lion
+of some sort, a lion of truth or fitness or power, is to emasculate it
+and destroy its volition.
+
+But current poetry is, for the most part, an attempt to do this very
+thing, to give us beauty without beauty's antecedents and foil. The
+poets want to spare us the annoyance of the beast. Since beauty is
+the chief attraction, why not have this part alone, pure and
+unadulterated,--why not pluck the plumage from the bird, the flower
+from its stalk, the moss from the rock, the shell from the shore, the
+honey-bag from the bee, and thus have in brief what pleases us? Hence,
+with rare exceptions, one feels, on opening the latest book of poems,
+like exclaiming, Well, here is the beautiful at last divested of
+everything else,--of truth, of power, of utility,--and one may add of
+beauty, too. It charms as color, or flowers, or jewels, or perfume
+charms--and that is the end of it.
+
+It is ever present to the true artist, in his attempt to report nature,
+that every object as it stands in the circuit of cause and effect has
+a history which involves its surroundings, and that the depth of the
+interest which it awakens in us is in proportion as its integrity in
+this respect is preserved. In nature we are prepared for any opulence
+of color or of vegetation, or freak of form, or display of any kind,
+because of the preponderance of the common, ever-present feature of the
+earth. The foil is always at hand. In like manner in the master poems we
+are never surfeited with mere beauty.
+
+Woe to any artist who disengages Beauty from the wide background of
+rudeness, darkness, and strength,--and disengages her from absolute
+nature! The mild and beneficent aspects of nature,--what gulfs and
+abysses of power underlie them! The great shaggy, barbaric earth,--yet
+the summing-up, the plenum, of all we know or can know of beauty! So the
+orbic poems of the world have a foundation as of the earth itself, and
+are beautiful because they are something else first. Homer chose for his
+groundwork War, clinching, tearing, tugging war; in Dante, it is Hell;
+in Milton, Satan and the Fall; in Shakespeare, it is the fierce Feudal
+world, with its towering and kingly personalities; in Byron, it is
+Revolt and diabolic passion. When we get to Tennyson, the lion is a good
+deal tamed, but he is still there in the shape of the proud, haughty,
+and manly Norman, and in many forms yet stimulates the mind.
+
+The perception of cosmical beauty comes by a vital original process.
+It is in some measure a creative act, and those works that rest upon
+it make demands--perhaps extraordinary ones--upon the reader or the
+beholder. We regard mere surface glitter, or mere verbal sweetness, in
+a mood entirely passive, and with a pleasure entirely profitless. The
+beauty of excellent stage scenery seems much more obvious and easy of
+apprehension than the beauty of trees and hills themselves, inasmuch as
+the act of association in the mind is much easier and cheaper than the
+act of original perception.
+
+Only the greatest works in any department afford any explanation of this
+wonder we call nature, or aid the mind in arriving at correct
+notions concerning it. To copy here and there a line or a trait is no
+explanation; but to translate nature into another language--to bridge
+it to us, to repeat in some sort the act of creation itself--is the
+crowning triumph of poetic art.
+
+
+
+II
+
+After the critic has enumerated all the stock qualities of the poet,
+as taste, fancy, melody, it remains to be said that unless there is
+something in him that is _living identity,_ something analogous to the
+growing, pushing, reproducing forces of nature, all the rest in the end
+pass for but little.
+
+This is perhaps what the German critic, Lessing, really means by
+_action,_ for true poems are more like deeds, expressive of something
+behind, more like acts of heroism or devotion, or like personal
+character, than like thoughts or intellections.
+
+All the master poets have in their work an interior, chemical,
+assimilative property, a sort of gastric juice which dissolves thought
+and form, and holds in vital fusion religions, times, races, and the
+theory of their own construction, naming up with electric and defiant
+power,--power without any admixture of resisting form, as in a living
+organism.
+
+There are in nature two types or forms, the cell and the crystal.
+One means the organic, the other the inorganic; one means growth,
+development, life; the other means reaction, solidification, rest. The
+hint and model of all creative works is the cell; critical, reflective,
+and philosophical works are nearer akin to the crystal; while there
+is much good literature that is neither the one nor the other
+distinctively, but which in a measure touches and includes both. But
+crystallic beauty or cut and polished gems of thought, the result of the
+reflex rather than the direct action of the mind, we do not expect to
+find in the best poems, though they may be most prized by specially
+intellectual persons. In the immortal poems the solids are very few, or
+do not appear at all as solids,--as lime and iron,--any more than they
+do in organic nature, in the flesh of the peach or the apple. The main
+thing in every living organism is the vital fluids: seven tenths of man
+is water; and seven tenths of Shakespeare is passion, emotion,--fluid
+humanity. Out of this arise his forms, as Venus arose out of the sea,
+and as man is daily built up out of the liquids of the body. We cannot
+taste, much less assimilate, a solid until it becomes a liquid; and your
+great idea, your sermon or moral, lies upon your poem a dead, cumbrous
+mass unless there is adequate heat and solvent, emotional power. Herein
+I think Wordsworth's "Excursion" fails as a poem. It has too much
+solid matter. It is an over-freighted bark that does not ride the waves
+buoyantly and lifelike; far less so than Tennyson's "In Memoriam," which
+is just as truly a philosophical poem as the "Excursion." (Wordsworth is
+the fresher poet; his poems seem really to have been written in the open
+air, and to have been brought directly under the oxygenating influence
+of outdoor nature; while in Tennyson this influence seems tempered or
+farther removed.)
+
+The physical cosmos itself is not a thought, but an act. Natural objects
+do not affect us like well-wrought specimens or finished handicraft,
+which have nothing to follow, but as living, procreating energy. Nature
+is perpetual transition. Everything passes and presses on; there is no
+pause, no completion, no explanation. To produce and multiply endlessly,
+without ever reaching the last possibility of excellence, and without
+committing herself to any end, is the law of Nature.
+
+These considerations bring us very near the essential difference
+between prose and poetry, or rather between the poetic and the didactic
+treatment of a subject. The essence of creative art is always the same;
+namely, interior movement and fusion; while the method of the didactic
+or prosaic treatment is fixity, limitation. The latter must formulate
+and define; but the principle of the former is to flow, to suffuse, to
+mount, to escape. We can conceive of life only as something constantly
+_becoming._ It plays forever on the verge. It is never _in loco,_ but
+always _in transitu._ Arrest the wind, and it is no longer the wind;
+close your hands upon the light, and behold, it is gone.
+
+The antithesis of art in method is science, as Coleridge has intimated.
+As the latter aims at the particular, so the former aims at the
+universal. One would have truth of detail, the other truth of
+_ensemble._ The method of science may be symbolized by the straight
+line, that of art by the curve. The results of science, relatively to
+its aim, must be parts and pieces; while art must give the whole
+in every act; not quantitively of course, but qualitively,--by the
+integrity of the spirit in which it works.
+
+The Greek mind will always be the type of the artist mind, mainly
+because of its practical bent, its healthful objectivity. The Greek
+never looked inward, but outward. Criticism and speculation were foreign
+to him. His head shows a very marked predominance of the motive and
+perceptive powers over the reflective. The expression of the face is
+never what we call intellectual or thoughtful, but commanding. His gods
+are not philosophers, but delight in deeds, justice, rulership.
+
+Among the differences between the modern and the classical aesthetic
+mind is the greater precision and definiteness of the latter. The
+modern genius is Gothic, and demands in art a certain vagueness and
+spirituality like that of music, refusing to be grasped and formulated.
+Hence for us (and this is undoubtedly an improvement) there must always
+be something about a poem, or any work of art, besides the evident
+intellect or plot of it, or what is on its surface, or what it tells.
+This something is the Invisible, the Undefined, almost Unexpressed,
+and is perhaps the best part of any work of art, as it is of a noble
+personality. To amuse, to exhibit culture, to formulate the aesthetic,
+or even to excite the emotions, is by no means all,--is not even the
+deepest part. Beside these, and inclosing all, is the general impalpable
+effect, like good air, or the subtle presence of good spirits, wordless
+but more potent far than words. As, in the superbest person, it is not
+merely what he says or knows or shows, or even how he behaves, but the
+silent qualities, like gravitation, that insensibly but resistlessly
+hold us; so in a good poem, or in any other expression of art.
+
+
+
+
+IX EMERSON
+
+Wherein the race has so far lost and gained, in being transplanted from
+Europe to the New England soil and climate, is well illustrated by the
+writings of Emerson. There is greater refinement and sublimation of
+thought, greater clearness and sharpness of outline, greater audacity of
+statement, but, on the other hand, there is a loss of bulk, of unction,
+of adipose tissue, and shall we say of power?
+
+Emerson is undoubtedly a master on the New England scale,--such a master
+as the land and race are capable of producing. He stands out clear and
+undeniable. The national type, as illustrated by that section of the
+country, is the purest and strongest in him of any yet. He can never
+suffer eclipse. Compared with the English or German master, he is
+undoubtedly deficient in viscera, in moral and intellectual stomach;
+but, on the other hand, he is of a fibre and quality hard to match
+in any age or land. From first to last he strikes one as something
+extremely pure and compact, like a nut or an egg. Great matters and
+tendencies lie folded in him, or rather are summarized in his pages. He
+writes short but pregnant chapters on great themes, as in his "English
+Traits," a book like rich preserves put up pound for pound, a pound
+of Emerson to every pound of John Bull. His chapter on Swedenborg in
+"Representative Men" is a good sample of his power to abbreviate and
+restate with added force. His mind acts like a sun-lens in gathering the
+cold pale beams of that luminary to a focus which warms and stimulates
+the reader in a surprising manner. The gist of the whole matter is here;
+and how much weariness and dullness and plodding is left out!
+
+In fact, Emerson is an essence, a condensation; more so, perhaps, than
+any other man who has appeared in literature. Nowhere else is there such
+a preponderance of pure statement, of the very attar of thought, over
+the bulkier, circumstantial, qualifying, or secondary elements. He gives
+us net results. He is like those strong artificial fertilizers. A pinch
+of him is equivalent to a page or two of Johnson, and he is pitched many
+degrees higher as an essayist than even Bacon. He has had an immediate
+stimulating effect upon all the best minds of the country; how deep or
+lasting this influence will be remains to be seen.
+
+This point and brevity has its convenience and value especially in
+certain fields of literature. I by no means would wish to water Emerson;
+yet it will not do to lose sight of the fact that mass and inertia are
+indispensable to the creator. Considering him as poet alone, I have
+no doubt of his irremediable deficiency here. You cannot have broad,
+massive effect, deep light and shade, or a torrent of power, with such
+extreme refinement and condensation. The superphosphates cannot take the
+place of the coarser, bulkier fertilizers. Especially in poetry do
+we require pure thought to be well diluted with the human, emotional
+qualities. In the writing most precious to the race, how little is
+definition and intellectual formula, and how much is impulse, emotion,
+will, character, blood, chyle! We must have liquids and gases and
+solvents. We perhaps get more of them in Carlyle. Emerson's page
+has more serene astral beauty than Carlyle's, but not that intense
+blast-furnace heat that melts down the most obdurate facts and
+characters into something plastic and poetical. Emerson's ideal is
+always the scholar, the man of books and ready wit; Carlyle's hero is a
+riding or striding ruler, or a master worker in some active field.
+
+The antique mind no doubt affords the true type of health and wholeness
+in this respect. The Greek could see, and feel, and paint, and carve,
+and speak nothing but emotional man. In nature he saw nothing but
+personality,--nothing but human or superhuman qualities; to him the
+elements all took the human shape. Of that vague, spiritual, abstract
+something which we call Nature he had no conception. He had no
+sentiment, properly speaking, but impulse and will-power. And the
+master minds of the world, in proportion to their strength, their spinal
+strength, have approximated to this type. Dante, Angelo, Shakespeare,
+Byron, Goethe, saw mainly man, and him not abstractly but concretely.
+And this is the charm of Burns and the glory of Scott. Carlyle has
+written the best histories and biographies of modern times, because he
+sees man with such fierce and steadfast eyes. Emerson sees him also,
+but he is not interested in him as a man, but mainly as a spirit, as a
+demigod, or as a wit or a philosopher.
+
+Emerson's quality has changed a good deal in his later writings. His
+corn is no longer in the milk; it has grown hard, and we that read have
+grown hard, too. He has now ceased to be an expansive, revolutionary
+force, but he has not ceased to be a writer of extraordinary gripe and
+unexpected resources of statement. His startling piece of advice, "Hitch
+your wagon to a star," is typical of the man, as combining the most
+unlike and widely separate qualities. Because not less marked than his
+idealism and mysticism is his shrewd common sense, his practical bent,
+his definiteness,--in fact, the sharp New England mould in which he is
+cast. He is the master Yankee, the centennial flower of that thrifty and
+peculiar stock. More especially in his later writings and speakings
+do we see the native New England traits,--the alertness, eagerness,
+inquisitiveness, thrift, dryness, archness, caution, the nervous energy
+as distinguished from the old English unction and vascular force. How he
+husbands himself,--what prudence, what economy, always spending up, as
+he says, and not down! How alert, how attentive; what an inquisitor;
+always ready with some test question, with some fact or idea to match
+or to verify, ever on the lookout for some choice bit of adventure or
+information, or some anecdote that has pith and point! No tyro basks and
+takes his ease in his presence, but is instantly put on trial and must
+answer or be disgraced. He strikes at an idea like a falcon at a bird.
+His great fear seems to be lest there be some fact or point worth
+knowing that will escape him. He is a close-browed miser of the
+scholar's gains. He turns all values into intellectual coin. Every book
+or person or experience is an investment that will or will not warrant
+a good return in ideas. He goes to the Radical Club, or to the literary
+gathering, and listens with the closest attention to every word that is
+said, in hope that something will be said, some word dropped, that has
+the ring of the true metal. Apparently he does not permit himself a
+moment's indifference or inattention. His own pride is always to have
+the ready change, to speak the exact and proper word, to give to every
+occasion the dignity of wise speech. You are bartered with for your
+best. There is no profit in life but in the interchange of ideas, and
+the chief success is to have a head well filled with them. Hard cash at
+that; no paper promises satisfy him; he loves the clink and glint of the
+real coin.
+
+His earlier writings were more flowing and suggestive, and had reference
+to larger problems; but now everything has got weighed and stamped and
+converted into the medium of wise and scholarly conversation. It is of
+great value; these later essays are so many bags of genuine coin, which
+it has taken a lifetime to hoard; not all gold, but all good, and the
+fruit of wise industry and economy.
+
+I know of no other writing that yields the reader so many strongly
+stamped medallion-like sayings and distinctions. There is a perpetual
+refining and recoining of the current wisdom of life and conversation.
+It is the old gold or silver or copper, but how bright and new it looks
+in his pages! Emerson loves facts, things, objects, as the workman his
+tools. He makes everything serve. The stress of expression is so great
+that he bends the most obdurate element to his purpose; as the bird,
+under her keen necessity, weaves the most contrary and diverse
+materials into her nest. He seems to like best material that is a little
+refractory; it makes his page more piquant and stimulating. Within
+certain limits he loves roughness, but not at the expense of harmony.
+He has wonderful hardiness and push. Where else in literature is there
+a mind, moving in so rare a medium, that gives one such a sense of
+tangible resistance and force? It is a principle in mechanics that
+velocity is twice as great as mass: double your speed and you double
+your heat, though you halve your weight. In like manner this body we
+are considering is not the largest, but its speed is great, and the
+intensity of its impact with objects and experience is almost without
+parallel. Everything about a man like Emerson is important. I find his
+phrenology and physiognomy more than ordinarily typical and suggestive.
+Look at his picture there,--large, strong features on a small face and
+head,--no blank spaces; all given up to expression; a high predaceous
+nose, a sinewy brow, a massive, benevolent chin. In most men there is
+more face than feature, but here is a vast deal more feature than face,
+and a corresponding alertness and emphasis of character. Indeed, the
+man is made after this fashion. He is all type; his expression is
+transcendent. His mind has the hand's pronounced anatomy,--its cords
+and sinews and multiform articulations and processes, its opposing and
+coordinating power. If his brain is small, its texture is fine and
+its convolutions are deep. There have been broader and more catholic
+natures, but few so towering and audacious in expression and so rich
+in characteristic traits. Every scrap and shred of him is important
+and related. Like the strongly aromatic herbs and simples,--sage, mint,
+wintergreen, sassafras,--the least part carries the flavor of the whole.
+Is there one indifferent or equivocal or unsympathizing drop of blood
+in him? Where he is at all, he is entirely,--nothing extemporaneous;
+his most casual word seems to have lain in pickle a long time, and is
+saturated through and through with the Emersonian brine. Indeed, so
+pungent and penetrating is his quality that even his quotations seem
+more than half his own.
+
+He is a man who occupies every inch of his rightful territory; he is
+there in proper person to the farthest bound. Not every man is himself
+and his best self at all times and to his finger points. Many great
+characters, perhaps the greatest, have more or less neutral or waste
+ground. You must penetrate a distance before you reach the real quick.
+Or there is a good wide margin of the commonplace which is sure to put
+them on good terms with the mass of their fellow-citizens. And one would
+think Emerson could afford to relax a little; that he had earned the
+right to a dull page or two now and then. The second best or third best
+word sometimes would make us appreciate his first best all the more.
+Even his god-father Plato nods occasionally, but Emerson's good breeding
+will not for a moment permit such a slight to the reader.
+
+Emerson's peculiar quality is very subtle, but very sharp and firm
+and unmistakable. It is not analogous to the commoner, slower-going
+elements, as heat, air, fire, water, but is nearer akin to that
+elusive but potent something we call electricity. It is abrupt, freaky,
+unexpected, and always communicates a little wholesome shock. It darts
+this way and that, and connects the far and the near in every line.
+There is always a leaping thread of light, and there is always a kind
+of answering peal or percussion. With what quickness and suddenness
+extremes are brought together! The reader is never prepared for what is
+to come next; the spark will most likely leap from some source or
+fact least thought of. His page seldom glows and burns, but there is a
+never-ceasing crackling and discharge of moral and intellectual force
+into the mind.
+
+His chief weapon, and one that he never lays down, is identical with
+that of the great wits, namely, surprise. The point of his remark or
+idea is always sprung upon the reader, never quietly laid before him.
+He has a mortal dread of tameness and flatness, and would make the very
+water we drink bite the tongue.
+
+He has been from the first a speaker and lecturer, and his style has
+been largely modeled according to the demand of those sharp, heady New
+England audiences for ceaseless intellectual friction and chafing. Hence
+every sentence is braided hard, and more or less knotted, and, though
+of silk, makes the mind tingle. He startles by overstatement, by
+understatement, by paradox, by antithesis, and by synthesis. Into
+every sentence enters the unexpected,--the congruous leaping from the
+incongruous, the high coming down, the low springing up, likeness or
+relation suddenly coming into view where before was only difference or
+antagonism. How he delights to bring the reader up with a short turn,
+to impale him on a knotty point, to explode one of his verbal bombshells
+under his very nose! Yet there is no trickery or rhetorical legerdemain.
+His heroic fibre always saves him.
+
+The language in which Taine describes Bacon applies with even more force
+to Emerson:--
+
+"Bacon," he says, "is a producer of conceptions and of sentences. The
+matter being explored, he says to us: 'Such it is; touch it not on that
+side; it must be approached from the other.' Nothing more; no proof, no
+effort to convince; he affirms, and nothing more; he has thought in the
+manner of artists and poets, and he speaks after the manner of prophets
+and seers. 'Cogita et visa,'--this title of one of his books might be
+the title of all. His process is that of the creators; it is intuition,
+not reasoning.... There is nothing more hazardous, more like fantasy,
+than this mode of thought when it is not checked by natural and good
+strong common sense. This common sense, which is a kind of natural
+divination, the stable equilibrium of an intellect always gravitating
+to the true, like the needle to the north pole, Bacon possesses in the
+highest degree. He has a preeminently practical, even an utilitarian
+mind."
+
+It is significant, and is indeed the hidden seed or root out of which
+comes the explanation of much, if not the main part, of his life and
+writings, that Emerson comes of a long line of clergymen; that the blood
+in his veins has been teaching, and preaching, and thinking, and
+growing austere, these many generations. One wonders that it is still so
+bounding and strong, so red with iron and quick with oxygen. But in
+him seems to be illustrated one of those rare cases in the genealogy
+of families where the best is carried forward each time, and steadily
+recruited and intensified. It does not seem possible for any man to
+become just what Emerson is from the stump, though perhaps great men
+have been the fruit of one generation; but there is a quality in him, an
+aroma of fine manners, a propriety, a chivalry in the blood, that dates
+back, and has been refined and transmitted many times. Power is born
+with a man, and is always first hand, but culture, genius, noble
+instincts, gentle manners, or the easy capacity for these things, may
+be, and to a greater or a lesser extent are, the contribution of the
+past. Emerson's culture is radical and ante-natal, and never fails him.
+The virtues of all those New England ministers and all those tomes of
+sermons are in this casket. One fears sometimes that he has been too
+much clarified, or that there is not enough savage grace or original
+viciousness and grit in him to save him. How he hates the roysterers,
+and all the rank, turbulent, human passions, and is chilled by the
+thought that perhaps after all Shakespeare led a vulgar life!
+
+When Tyndall was here, he showed us how the dark, coarse, invisible heat
+rays could be strained out of the spectrum; or, in other words, that
+every solar beam was weighted with a vast, nether, invisible side, which
+made it a lever of tremendous power in organic nature. After some such
+analogy, one sees how the highest order of power in the intellectual
+world draws upon and is nourished by those rude, primitive, barbaric
+human qualities that our culture and pietism tend to cut off and strain
+out. Our culture has its eye on the other end of the spectrum, where
+the fine violet and indigo rays are; but all the lifting, rounding,
+fructifying powers of the system are in the coarse, dark rays--the
+black devil--at the base. The angel of light is yoked with the demon of
+darkness, and the pair create and sustain the world.
+
+In rare souls like Emerson, the fruit of extreme culture, it is
+inevitable that at least some of the heat rays should be lost, and we
+miss them especially when we contrast him with the elder masters. The
+elder masters did not seem to get rid of the coarse or vulgar in human
+life, but royally accepted it, and struck their roots into it, and drew
+from it sustenance and power: but there is an ever-present suspicion
+that Emerson prefers the saints to the sinners; prefers the prophets and
+seers to Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante. Indeed, it is to be distinctly
+stated and emphasized, that Emerson is essentially a priest, and that
+the key to all he has said and written is to be found in the fact
+that his point of view is not that of the acceptor, the
+creator,--Shakespeare's point of view,--but that of the refiner and
+selector, the priest's point of view. He described his own state rather
+than that of mankind when he said, "The human mind stands ever in
+perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally
+of each without the other."
+
+Much surprise has been expressed in literary circles in this country
+that Emerson has not followed up his first off-hand indorsement of Walt
+Whitman with fuller and more deliberate approval of that poet, but has
+rather taken the opposite tack. But the wonder is that he should have
+been carried off his feet at all in the manner he was; and it must
+have been no ordinary breeze that did it. Emerson shares with his
+contemporaries the vast preponderance of the critical and discerning
+intellect over the fervid, manly qualities and faith. His power of
+statement is enormous; his scope of being is not enormous. The prayer
+he uttered many years ago for a poet of the modern, one who could see in
+the gigantic materialism of the times the carnival of the same deities
+we so much admire in Greece and Rome, seems to many to have even been
+explicitly answered in Whitman; but Emerson is balked by the cloud of
+materials, the din and dust of action, and the moving armies, in which
+the god comes enveloped.
+
+But Emerson has his difficulties with all the poets. Homer is too
+literal, Milton too literary, and there is too much of the whooping
+savage in Whitman. He seems to think the real poet is yet to appear; a
+poet on new terms, the reconciler, the poet-priest,--one who shall unite
+the whiteness and purity of the saint with the power and unction of the
+sinner; one who shall bridge the chasm between Shakespeare and St. John.
+For when our Emerson gets on his highest horse, which he does only on
+two or three occasions, he finds Shakespeare only a half man, and
+that it would take Plato and Manu and Moses and Jesus to complete him.
+Shakespeare, he says, rested with the symbol, with the festal beauty of
+the world, and did not take the final step, and explore the essence
+of things, and ask, "Whence? What? and Whither?" He was not wise for
+himself; he did not lead a beautiful, saintly life, but ate, and drank,
+and reveled, and affiliated with all manner of persons, and quaffed the
+cup of life with gusto and relish. The elect, spotless souls will always
+look upon the heat and unconscious optimism of the great poet with deep
+regret. But if man would not become emasculated, if human life is to
+continue, we must cherish the coarse as well as the fine, the root as
+well as the top and flower. The poet-priest in the Emersonian sense
+has never yet appeared, and what reason have we to expect him? The poet
+means life, the whole of life,--all your ethics and philosophies, and
+essences and reason of things, in vital play and fusion, clothed with
+form and color, and throbbing with passion: the priest means a part, a
+thought, a precept; he means suppression, expurgation, death. To have
+gone farther than Shakespeare would have been to cease to be a poet, and
+to become a mystic or a seer.
+
+Yet it would be absurd to say, as a leading British literary journal
+recently did, that Emerson is not a poet. He is one kind of a poet. He
+has written plenty of poems that are as melodious as the hum of a wild
+bee in the air,--chords of wild aeolian music.
+
+Undoubtedly his is, on the whole, a bloodless kind of poetry. It
+suggests the pale gray matter of the cerebrum rather than flesh and
+blood. Mr. William Rossetti has made a suggestive remark about him. He
+is not so essentially a poet, says this critic, as he is a Druid that
+wanders among the bards, and strikes the harp with even more than bardic
+stress.
+
+Not in the poetry of any of his contemporaries is there such a burden
+of the mystery of things, nor are there such round wind-harp tones, nor
+lines so tense and resonant, and blown upon by a breeze from the highest
+heaven of thought. In certain respects he has gone beyond any other. He
+has gone beyond the symbol to the thing signified. He has emptied poetic
+forms of their meaning and made poetry of that. He would fain cut the
+world up into stars to shine in the intellectual firmament. He is more
+and he is less than the best.
+
+He stands among other poets like a pine-tree amid a forest of oak and
+maple. He seems to belong to another race, and to other climes and
+conditions. He is great in one direction, up; no dancing leaves, but
+rapt needles; never abandonment, never a tossing and careering, never
+an avalanche of emotion; the same in sun and snow, scattering his cones,
+and with night and obscurity amid his branches. He is moral first and
+last, and it is through his impassioned and poetic treatment of the
+moral law that he gains such an ascendency over his reader. He says, as
+for other things he makes poetry of them, but the moral law makes poetry
+of him. He sees in the world only the ethical, but he sees it through
+the aesthetic faculty. Hence his page has the double charm of the
+beautiful and the good.
+
+
+
+II
+
+One of the penalties Emerson pays for his sharp decision, his mental
+pertinence and resistance, is the curtailment of his field of vision and
+enjoyment. He is one of those men whom the gods drive with blinders on,
+so that they see fiercely in only a few directions. Supreme lover as he
+is of poetry,--Herrick's poetry,--yet from the whole domain of what may
+be called emotional poetry, the poetry of fluid humanity, tallied by
+music, he seems to be shut out. This may be seen by his reference
+to Shelley in his last book, "Letters and Social Aims," and by
+his preference of the metaphysical poet throughout his writings.
+Wordsworth's famous "Ode" is, he says, the high-water mark of English
+literature. What he seems to value most in Shakespeare is the marvelous
+wit, the pregnant sayings. He finds no poet in France, and in his
+"English Traits" credits Tennyson with little but melody and color. (In
+our last readings, do we not surely come to feel the manly and robust
+fibre beneath Tennyson's silken vestments?) He demands of poetry that
+it be a kind of spiritual manna, and is at last forced to confess that
+there are no poets, and that when such angels do appear, Homer and
+Milton will be tin pans.
+
+One feels that this will not do, and that health, and wholeness, and
+the well-being of man are more in the keeping of Shakespeare than in the
+hands of Zoroaster or any of the saints. I doubt if that rarefied air
+will make good red blood and plenty of it.
+
+But Emerson makes his point plain, and is not indebted to any of his
+teachers for it. It is the burden of all he writes upon the subject. The
+long discourse that opens his last volume [footnote: _Letters and Social
+Aims_] has numerous subheadings, as "Poetry," "Imagination," "Creation,"
+"Morals," and "Transcendency;" but it's all a plea for transcendency. I
+am reminded of the story of an old Indian chief who was invited to some
+great dinner where the first course was "succotash." When the second
+course was ready the old Indian said he would have a little more
+succotash, and when the third was ready he called for more succotash and
+so with the fourth and fifth, and on to the end. In like manner Emerson
+will have nothing but the "spiritual law" in poetry, and he has an
+enormous appetite for that. Let him have it, but why should he be so
+sure that mankind all want succotash? Mankind finally comes to care
+little for what any poet has to _say,_ but only for what he has to
+_sing._ We want the pearl of thought dissolved in the wine of life. How
+much better are sound bones and a good digestion in poetry than all the
+philosophy and transcendentalism in the world!
+
+What one comes at last to want is power, mastery; and, whether it be
+mastery over the subtleties of the intellect, as in Emerson himself, or
+over the passions and the springs of action, as in Shakespeare, or over
+our terrors and the awful hobgoblins of hell and Satan, as in Dante, or
+over vast masses and spaces of nature and the abysms of aboriginal man,
+as in Walt Whitman, what matters it? Are we not refreshed by all? There
+is one mastery in Burns, another in Byron, another in Rabelais, and in
+Victor Hugo, and in Tennyson; and though the critic has his preferences,
+though he affect one more than another, yet who shall say this one is
+a poet and that one is not? "There may be any number of supremes," says
+the master, and "one by no means contravenes another." Every gas is
+a vacuum to every other gas, says Emerson, quoting the scientist; and
+every great poet complements and leaves the world free to every other
+great poet.
+
+Emerson's limitation or fixity is seen also in the fact that he has
+taken no new step in his own direction, if indeed another step could be
+taken in that direction and not step off. He is a prisoner on his
+peak. He cannot get away from the old themes. His later essays are
+upon essentially the same subjects as his first. He began by writing
+on nature, greatness, manners, art, poetry, and he is still writing on
+them. He is a husbandman who practices no rotation of crops, but submits
+to the exhaustive process of taking about the same things from his soil
+year after year. Some readers think they detect a falling off. It is
+evident there is not the same spontaneity, and that the soil has to be
+more and more stirred and encouraged, which is not at all to be wondered
+at.
+
+But if Emerson has not advanced, he has not receded, at least in
+conviction and will, which is always the great danger with our bold
+prophets. The world in which he lives, the themes upon which he writes,
+never become hackneyed to him. They are always fresh and new. He has
+hardened, but time has not abated one jot or tittle his courage and
+hope,--no cynicism and no relaxing of his hold, no decay of his faith,
+while the nobleness of his tone, the chivalry of his utterance, is even
+more marked than at first. Better a hundred-fold than his praise of fine
+manners is the delicacy and courtesy and the grace of generous breeding
+displayed on every page. Why does one grow impatient and vicious when
+Emerson writes of fine manners and the punctilios of conventional life,
+and feel like kicking into the street every divinity enshrined in the
+drawing-room? It is a kind of insult to a man to speak the word in his
+presence. Purify the parlors indeed by keeping out the Choctaws, the
+laughers! Let us go and hold high carnival for a week, and split the
+ears of the groundlings with our "contemptible squeals of joy." And when
+he makes a dead set at praising eloquence, I find myself instantly on
+the side of the old clergyman he tells of who prayed that he might never
+be eloquent; or when he makes the test of a man an intellectual one, as
+his skill at repartee, and praises the literary crack shot, and defines
+manliness to be readiness, as he does in this last volume and in the
+preceding one, I am filled with a perverse envy of all the confused and
+stammering heroes of history. Is Washington faltering out a few broken
+and ungrammatical sentences, in reply to the vote of thanks of the
+Virginia legislature, less manly than the glib tongue in the court-room
+or in the club that can hit the mark every time? The test of a wit or of
+a scholar is one thing; the test of a man, I take it, is quite another.
+In this and some other respects Emerson is well antidoted by Carlyle,
+who lays the stress on the opposite qualities, and charges his hero to
+hold his tongue. But one cheerfully forgives Emerson the way he puts his
+thumb-nail on the bores. He speaks feelingly, and no doubt from as deep
+an experience as any man in America.
+
+I really hold Emerson in such high esteem that I think I can safely
+indulge myself in a little more fault-finding with him.
+
+I think it must be admitted that he is deficient in sympathy. This
+accounts in a measure for his coolness, his self-possession, and that
+kind of uncompromising rectitude or inflexibleness that marks his
+career, and that he so lauds in his essays. No man is so little liable
+to be warped or compromised in any way as the unsympathetic man.
+Emerson's ideal is the man who stands firm, who is unmoved, who never
+laughs, or apologizes, or deprecates, or makes concessions, or assents
+through good-nature, or goes abroad; who is not afraid of giving
+offense; "who answers you without supplication in his eye,"--in fact,
+who stands like a granite pillar amid the slough of life. You may
+wrestle with this man, he says, or swim with him, or lodge in the same
+chamber with him, or eat at the same table, and yet he is a thousand
+miles off, and can at any moment finish with you. He is a sheer
+precipice, is this man, and not to be trifled with. You shrinking,
+quivering, acquiescing natures, avaunt! You sensitive plants, you
+hesitating, indefinite creatures, you uncertain around the edges, you
+non-resisting, and you heroes, whose courage is quick, but whose wit is
+tardy, make way, and let the human crustacean pass. Emerson is moulded
+upon this pattern. It is no mush and milk that you get at this table. "A
+great man is coming to dine with me; I do not wish to please him; I wish
+that he should wish to please me." On the lecture stand he might be
+of wood, so far as he is responsive to the moods and feelings of his
+auditors. They must come to him; he will not go to them: but they do not
+always come. Latterly the people have felt insulted, the lecturer showed
+them so little respect. Then, before a promiscuous gathering, and in
+stirring and eventful times like ours, what anachronisms most of his
+lectures are, even if we take the high ground that they are pearls
+before swine! The swine may safely demand some apology of him who offers
+them pearls instead of corn.
+
+Emerson's fibre is too fine for large public uses. He is what he is, and
+is to be accepted as such, only let us _know_ what he is. He does not
+speak to universal conditions, or to human nature in its broadest,
+deepest, strongest phases. His thought is far above the great sea level
+of humanity, where stand most of the world's masters. He is like one of
+those marvelously clear mountain lakes whose water-line runs above
+all the salt seas of the globe. He is very precious, taken at his real
+worth. Why find fault with the isolation and the remoteness in view of
+the sky-like purity and depth?
+
+Still I must go on sounding and exploring him, reporting where I touch
+bottom and where I do not. He reaps great advantage from his want of
+sympathy. The world makes no inroads upon him through this channel. He
+is not distracted by the throng or maybe the mob of emotions that find
+entrance here. He shines like a star undimmed by current events. He
+speaks as from out the interstellar spaces. 'T is vulgar sympathy makes
+mortals of us all, and I think Emerson's poetry finally lacks just that
+human coloring and tone, that flesh tint of the heart, which vulgar
+sympathy with human life as such imparts.
+
+But after we have made all possible deductions from Emerson, there
+remains the fact that he is a living force, and, tried by home
+standards, a master. Wherein does the secret of his power lie? He is
+the prophet and philosopher of young men. The old man and the man of the
+world make little of him, but of the youth who is ripe for him he takes
+almost an unfair advantage. One secret of his charm I take to be the
+instant success with which he transfers our interest in the romantic,
+the chivalrous, the heroic, to the sphere of morals and the intellect.
+We are let into another realm unlooked for, where daring and imagination
+also lead. The secret and suppressed heart finds a champion. To the
+young man fed upon the penny precepts and staple Johnsonianism of
+English literature, and upon what is generally doled out in the schools
+and colleges, it is a surprise; it is a revelation. A new world opens
+before him. The nebulae of his spirit are resolved or shown to be
+irresolvable. The fixed stars of his inner firmament are brought
+immeasurably near. He drops all other books. He will gaze and wonder.
+From Locke or Johnson or Wayland to Emerson is like a change from the
+school history to the Arabian Nights. There may be extravagances and
+some jugglery, but for all that the lesson is a genuine one, and to us
+of this generation immense.
+
+Emerson is the knight-errant of the moral sentiment. He leads, in
+our time and country, one illustrious division, at least, in the holy
+crusade of the affections and the intuitions against the usurpations of
+tradition and theological dogma. He marks the flower, the culmination,
+under American conditions and in the finer air of the New World, of the
+reaction begun by the German philosophers, and passed along by later
+French and English thinkers, of man against circumstance, of
+spirit against form, of the present against the past. What splendid
+affirmation, what inspiring audacity, what glorious egoism, what
+generous brag, what sacred impiety! There is an _eclat_ about his words,
+and a brave challenging of immense odds, that is like an army with
+banners. It stirs the blood like a bugle-call: beauty, bravery, and a
+sacred cause,--the three things that win with us always. The first essay
+is a forlorn hope. See what the chances are: "The world exists for the
+education of each man.... He should see that he can live all history in
+his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to
+be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all
+the geography and all the government of the world; he must transfer the
+point of view from which history is commonly read from Rome and Athens
+and London to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court,
+and, if England or Egypt have anything to say to him, he will try the
+case; if not, let them forever be silent." In every essay that follows,
+there are the same great odds and the same electric call to the youth
+to face them. It is, indeed, as much a world of fable and romance that
+Emerson introduces us to as we get in Homer or Herodotus. It is true,
+all true,--true as Arthur and his knights, or Pilgrim's Progress, and I
+pity the man who has not tasted its intoxication, or who can see nothing
+in it.
+
+The intuitions are the bright band, without armor or shield, that
+slay the mailed and bucklered giants of the understanding. Government,
+institutions, religions, fall before the glance of the hero's eye. Art
+and literature, Shakespeare, Angelo, Aeschylus, are humble suppliants
+before you, the king. The commonest fact is idealized, and the whole
+relation of man to the universe is thrown into a kind of gigantic
+perspective. It is not much to say there is exaggeration; the very start
+makes Mohammed's attitude toward the mountain tame. The mountain _shall_
+come to Mohammed, and, in the eyes of all born readers of Emerson, the
+mountain does come, and comes with alacrity.
+
+Some shrewd judges apprehend that Emerson is not going to last; basing
+their opinion upon the fact, already alluded to, that we outgrow him, or
+pass through him as through an experience that we cannot repeat. He is
+but a bridge to other things; he gets you over. He is an exceptional
+fact in literature, say they, and does not represent lasting or
+universal conditions. He is too fine for the rough wear and tear of
+ages. True, we do not outgrow Dante, or Cervantes, or Bacon; and I doubt
+if the Anglo-Saxon stock at least ever outgrows that king of romancers,
+Walter Scott. These men and their like appeal to a larger audience, and
+in some respects a more adult one, at least one more likely to be found
+in every age and people. Their achievement was more from the common
+level of human nature than are Emerson's astonishing paradoxes. Yet I
+believe his work has the seal of immortality upon it as much as that
+of any of them. No doubt he has a meaning to us now and in this country
+that will be lost to succeeding time. His religious significance will
+not be so important to the next generation. He is being or has been so
+completely absorbed by his times, that readers and hearers hereafter
+will get him from a thousand sources, or his contribution will become
+the common property of the race. All the masters probably had some
+peculiar import or tie to their contemporaries that we at a distance
+miss. It is thought by scholars that we have lost the key, or one key,
+to Dante, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare,--the key or the insight that
+people living under the same roof get of each other.
+
+But, aside from and over and above everything else, Emerson _appeals
+to youth and to genius._ If you have these, you will understand him and
+delight in him; if not, or neither of them, you will make little of him.
+And I do not see why this should not be just as true any time hence as
+at present.
+
+
+
+
+X THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE
+
+                        TO WALT WHITMAN
+
+       "'I, thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin,
+         Hoping to cease not till death.'"
+                                       CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.
+
+
+       "They say that thou art sick, art growing old,
+           Thou Poet of unconquerable health,
+           With youth far-stretching, through the golden wealth
+        Of autumn, to Death's frostful, friendly cold.
+        The never-blenching eyes, that did behold
+           Life's fair and foul, with measureless content,
+           And gaze ne'er sated, saddened as they bent
+        Over the dying soldier in the fold
+           Of thy large comrade love;--then broke the tear!
+        War-dream, field-vigil, the bequeathed kiss,
+           Have brought old age to thee; yet, Master, now,
+        Cease not thy song to us; lest we should miss
+           A death-chant of indomitable cheer,
+        Blown as a gale from God;--oh sing it thou!"
+                                       ARRAN LEIGH (England).
+
+I
+
+Whoever has witnessed the flight of any of the great birds, as the
+eagle, the condor, the sea-gulls, the proud hawks, has perhaps felt that
+the poetic suggestion of the feathered tribes is not all confined to the
+sweet and tiny songsters,--the thrushes, canaries, and mockingbirds of
+the groves and orchards, or of the gilded cage in my lady's chamber.
+It is by some such analogy that I would indicate the character of the
+poetry I am about to discuss, compared with that of the more popular and
+melodious singer,--the poetry of the strong wing and the daring flight.
+
+Well and profoundly has a Danish critic said, in "For Ide og
+Virkelighed" ("For the Idea and the Reality"), a Copenhagen magazine:--
+
+"It may be candidly admitted that the American poet has not the
+elegance, special melody, nor _recherche_ aroma of the accepted poets
+of Europe or his own country; but his compass and general harmony are
+infinitely greater. The sweetness and spice, the poetic _ennui,_ the
+tender longings, the exquisite art-finish of those choice poets are
+mainly unseen and unmet in him,--perhaps because he cannot achieve them,
+more likely because he disdains them. But there is an electric _living
+soul_ in his poetry, far more fermenting and bracing. His wings do not
+glitter in their movement from rich and varicolored plumage, nor are his
+notes those of the accustomed song-birds; but his flight is the flight
+of the eagle."
+
+Yes, there is not only the delighting of the ear with the outpouring of
+sweetest melody and its lessons, but there is the delighting of the eye
+and soul through that soaring and circling in the vast empyrean of "a
+strong bird on pinions free,"--lessons of freedom, power, grace, and
+spiritual suggestion,--vast, unparalleled, _formless_ lessons.
+
+It is now upwards of twenty years since Walt Whitman printed (in 1855)
+his first thin beginning volume of "Leaves of Grass;" and, holding him
+to the test which he himself early proclaimed, namely, "that the proof
+of the poet shall be sternly deferred till his country has absorb'd him
+as affectionately as he has absorb'd it," he is yet on trial, yet
+makes his appeal to an indifferent or to a scornful audience. That his
+complete absorption, however, by his own country and by the world, is
+ultimately to take place, is one of the beliefs that grows stronger and
+stronger within me as time passes, and I suppose it is with a hope to
+help forward this absorption that I write of him now. Only here and
+there has he yet effected a lodgment, usually in the younger and
+more virile minds. But considering the unparalleled audacity of his
+undertaking, and the absence in most critics and readers of anything
+like full-grown and robust aesthetic perception, the wonder really is
+not that he should have made such slow progress, but that he should have
+gained any foothold at all. The whole literary _technique_ of the race
+for the last two hundred years has been squarely against him, laying, as
+it does, the emphasis upon form and scholarly endowments instead of upon
+aboriginal power and manhood.
+
+My own mastery of the poet, incomplete as it is, has doubtless been much
+facilitated by contact--talks, meals, and jaunts--with him, stretching
+through a decade of years, and by seeing how everything in his
+_personnel_ was resumed and carried forward in his literary expression;
+in fact, how the one was a living commentary upon the other. After the
+test of time, nothing goes home like the test of actual intimacy; and to
+tell me that Whitman is not a large, fine, fresh, magnetic personality,
+making you love him and want always to be with him, were to tell me
+that my whole past life is a deception, and all the impression of my
+perceptive faculties a fraud. I have studied him as I have studied
+the birds, and have found that the nearer I got to him the more I saw.
+Nothing about a first-class man can be overlooked; he is to be studied
+in every feature,--in his physiology and phrenology, in the shape of his
+head, in his brow, his eye, his glance, his nose, his ear (the ear is
+as indicative in a man as in a horse), his voice. In Whitman all these
+things are remarkably striking and suggestive. His face exhibits a rare
+combination of harmony and sweetness with strength,--strength like the
+vaults and piers of the Roman architecture. Sculptor never carved a
+finer ear or a more imaginative brow. Then his heavy-lidded, absorbing
+eye, his sympathetic voice, and the impression which he makes of
+starting from the broad bases of the universal human traits. (If Whitman
+was grand in his physical and perfect health, I think him far more so
+now (1877), cheerfully mastering paralysis, penury, and old age.) You
+know, on seeing the man and becoming familiar with his presence, that,
+if he achieve the height at all, it will be from where every man stands,
+and not from some special genius, or exceptional and adventitious
+point. He does not make the impression of the scholar or artist or
+_litterateur,_ but such as you would imagine the antique heroes to
+make,--that of a sweet-blooded, receptive, perfectly normal, catholic
+man, with, further than that, a look about him that is best suggested by
+the word elemental or cosmical. It was this, doubtless, that led Thoreau
+to write, after an hour's interview, that he suggested "something a
+little more than human." In fact, the main clew to Walt Whitman's life
+and personality, and the expression of them in his poems, is to be found
+in about the largest emotional element that has appeared anywhere. This,
+if not controlled by a potent rational balance, would either have tossed
+him helplessly forever, or wrecked him as disastrously as ever storm
+and gale drove ship to ruin. These volcanic emotional fires appear
+everywhere in his books; and it is really these, aroused to intense
+activity and unnatural strain during the four years of the war and his
+persistent labors in the hospitals, that have resulted in his illness
+and paralysis since.
+
+It has been impossible, I say, to resist these personal impressions and
+magnetisms, and impossible with me not to follow them up in the poems,
+in doing which I found that his "Leaves of Grass" was really the _drama
+of himself,_ played upon various and successive stages of nature,
+history, passion, experience, patriotism, and that he had not made,
+nor had he intended to make, mere excellent "poems," tunes, statues, or
+statuettes, in the ordinary sense.
+
+Before the man's complete acceptance and assimilation by America, he
+may have to be first passed down through the minds of critics and
+commentators, and given to the people with some of his rank new quality
+taken off,--a quality like that which adheres to objects in the open
+air, and makes them either forbidding or attractive, as one's mood is
+healthful and robust or feeble and languid. The processes are silently
+at work. Already seen from a distance, and from other atmospheres and
+surroundings, he assumes magnitude and orbic coherence; for in curious
+contrast to the general denial of Whitman in this country (though he
+has more lovers and admirers here than is generally believed) stands
+the reception accorded him in Europe. The poets there, almost without
+exception, recognize his transcendent quality, the men of science his
+thorough scientific basis, the republicans his inborn democracy, and all
+his towering picturesque personality and modernness. Professor Clifford
+says he is more thoroughly in harmony with the spirit and letter of
+advanced scientism than any other living poet. Professor Tyrrell and Mr.
+Symonds find him eminently Greek, in the sense in which to be natural
+and "self-regulated by the law of perfect health" is to be Greek. The
+French "Revue des Deux Mondes" pronounces his war poems the most vivid,
+the most humanly passionate, and the most modern, of all the verse of
+the nineteenth century. Freiligrath translated him into German, and
+hailed him as the founder of a new democratic and modern order of
+poetry, greater than the old. But I do not propose to go over the whole
+list here; I only wish to indicate that the absorption is well commenced
+abroad, and that probably her poet will at last reach America by way of
+those far-off, roundabout channels. The old mother will first masticate
+and moisten the food which is still too tough for her offspring.
+
+When I first fell in with "Leaves of Grass," I was taken by isolated
+passages scattered here and there through the poems; these I seized
+upon, and gave myself no concern about the rest. Single lines in it
+often went to the bottom of the questions that were vexing me. The
+following, though less here than when encountered in the frame of mind
+which the poet begets in you, curiously settled and stratified a certain
+range of turbid, fluctuating inquiry:--
+
+ "There was never any more inception than there is now,--
+  Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
+  And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
+  Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now."
+
+These lines, also, early had an attraction for me I could not define,
+and were of great service:--
+
+ "Pleasantly and well-suited I walk,
+  Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good,
+  The whole universe indicates that it is good,
+  The past and the present indicate that it is good."
+
+In the following episode, too, there was to me something far deeper than
+the words or the story:--
+
+ "The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside;
+  I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the wood-pile;
+  Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
+  And went where he sat on a log, and led him in, and assured him,
+  And brought water and fill'd a tub for his sweated body and
+     bruis'd feet,
+  And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some
+     coarse clean clothes;
+  And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
+  And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles:
+  He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated and pass'd North;
+  (I had him sit next me at table--my firelock lean'd in the corner.)"
+
+But of the book as a whole I could form no adequate conception, and
+it was not for many years, and after I had known the poet himself, as
+already stated, that I saw in it a teeming, rushing globe well worthy my
+best days and strength to surround and comprehend.
+
+One thing that early took me in the poems was (as before alluded to) the
+tremendous personal force back of them, and felt through them as the
+sun through vapor; not merely intellectual grasp or push, but a warm,
+breathing, towering, magnetic Presence that there was no escape from.
+
+Another fact I was quick to perceive, namely, that this man had almost
+in excess a quality in which every current poet was lacking,--I mean the
+faculty of being in entire sympathy with actual nature, and the objects;
+and shows of nature, and of rude, abysmal man; and appalling directness
+of utterance therefrom, at first hand, without any intermediate agency
+or modification.
+
+The influence of books and works of art upon an author may be seen in
+all respectable writers. If knowledge alone made literature, or culture
+genius, there would be no dearth of these things among the moderns. But
+I feel bound to say that there is something higher and deeper than the
+influence or perusal of any or all books, or all other productions of
+genius,--a quality of information which the masters can never impart,
+and which all the libraries do not hold. This is the absorption by an
+author, previous to becoming so, of the spirit of nature, through
+the visible objects of the universe, and his affiliation with them
+subjectively and objectively. Not more surely is the blood quickened and
+purified by contact with the unbreathed air than is the spirit of man
+vitalized and made strong by intercourse with the real things of the
+earth. The calm, all-permitting, wordless spirit of nature,--yet so
+eloquent to him who hath ears to hear! The sunrise, the heaving sea,
+the woods and mountains, the storm and the whistling winds, the gentle
+summer day, the winter sights and sounds, the night and the high dome of
+stars,--to have really perused these, especially from childhood onward,
+till what there is in them, so impossible to define, finds its full mate
+and echo in the mind,--this only is the lore which breathes the breath
+of life into all the rest. Without it, literary productions may have the
+superb beauty of statues, but with it only can they have the beauty of
+life.
+
+I was never troubled at all by what the critics called Whitman's want
+of art, or his violation of art. I saw that he at once designedly swept
+away all which the said critics have commonly meant by that term. The
+dominant impression was of the living presence and voice. He would have
+no curtains, he said, not the finest, between himself and his reader;
+and in thus bringing me face to face with his subject I perceived he
+not only did not escape conventional art, but I perceived an enlarged,
+enfranchised art in this very abnegation of art. "When half-gods go,
+whole gods arrive." It was obvious to me that the new style gained more
+than it lost, and that in this fullest operatic launching forth of the
+voice, though it sounded strange at first, and required the ear to get
+used to it, there might be quite as much science, and a good deal more
+power, than in the tuneful but constricted measures we were accustomed
+to.
+
+To the eye the page of the new poet presented about the same contrast
+with the page of the popular poets that trees and the free, unbidden
+growths of nature do with a carefully clipped hedge; and to the spirit
+the contrast was about the same. The hedge is the more studiedly and
+obviously beautiful, but, ah! there is a kind of beauty and satisfaction
+in trees that one would not care to lose. There are symmetry and
+proportion in the sonnet, but to me there is something I would not
+exchange for them in the wild swing and balance of many free and
+unrhymed passages in Shakespeare; like the one, for instance, in which
+these lines occur:--
+
+       "To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
+        And blown with restless violence round
+        About the pendent world."
+
+Here is the spontaneous grace and symmetry of a forest tree, or a
+soughing mass of foliage.
+
+And this passage from my poet I do not think could be improved by the
+verse-maker's art:--
+
+ "This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded
+     heaven,
+  And I said to my Spirit, _When we become the enfolders of those orbs
+     and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be
+     fill'd and satisfied then?_
+  And my Spirit said, No, _we but level that lift, to pass and continue
+     beyond."_
+
+Such breaking with the routine poetic, and with the grammar of verse,
+was of course a dangerous experiment, and threw the composer absolutely
+upon his intrinsic merits, upon his innately poetic and rhythmic
+quality. He must stand or fall by these alone, since he discarded all
+artificial, all adventitious helps. If interior, spontaneous rhythm
+could not be relied on, and the natural music and flexibility of
+language, then there was nothing to shield the ear from the pitiless
+hail of words,--not one softly padded verse anywhere.
+
+All poets, except those of the very first order, owe immensely to the
+form, the art, the stereotyped metres, and stock figures they find ready
+to hand. The form is suggestive,--it invites and aids expression, and
+lends itself readily, like fashion, to conceal, or extenuate, or eke
+out poverty of thought and feeling in the verse. The poet can "cut and
+cover," as the farmer says, in a way the prose-writer never can, nor one
+whose form is essentially prose, like Whitman's.
+
+I, too, love to see the forms worthily used, as they always are by the
+master; and I have no expectation that they are going out of fashion
+right away. A great deal of poetry that serves, and helps sweeten one's
+cup, would be impossible without them,--would be nothing when separated
+from them. It is for the ear, and for the sense of tune and of carefully
+carved and modeled forms, and is not meant to arouse the soul with the
+taste of power, and to start off on journeys for itself. But the great
+inspired utterances, like the Bible,--what would they gain by being cast
+in the moulds of metrical verse? In all that concerns art, viewed from
+any high standpoint,--proportion, continence, self-control, unfaltering
+adherence to natural standards, subordination of parts, perfect
+adjustment of the means to the end, obedience to inward law, no
+trifling, no levity, no straining after effect, impartially attending to
+the back and loins as well as to the head, and even holding toward his
+subject an attitude of perfect acceptance and equality,--principles
+of art to which alone the great spirits are amenable,--in all these
+respects, I say, this poet is as true as an orb in astronomy.
+
+To his literary expression pitched on scales of such unprecedented
+breadth and loftiness, the contrast of his personal life comes in with a
+foil of curious homeliness and simplicity. Perhaps never before has
+the absolute and average _commonness of humanity_ been so steadily and
+unaffectedly adhered to. I give here a glimpse of him in Washington on
+a Navy Yard horse-car, toward the close of the war, one summer day at
+sundown. The car is crowded and suffocatingly hot, with many passengers
+on the rear platform, and among them a bearded, florid-faced man,
+elderly but agile, resting against the dash, by the side of the young
+conductor, and evidently his intimate friend. The man wears a broad-brim
+white hat. Among the jam inside, near the door, a young Englishwoman, of
+the working class, with two children, has had trouble all the way with
+the youngest, a strong, fat, fretful, bright babe of fourteen or fifteen
+months, who bids fair to worry the mother completely out, besides
+becoming a howling nuisance to everybody. As the car tugs around Capitol
+Hill the young one is more demoniac than ever, and the flushed and
+perspiring mother is just ready to burst into tears with weariness and
+vexation. The car stops at the top of the hill to let off most of the
+rear platform passengers, and the white-hatted man reaches inside, and,
+gently but firmly disengaging the babe from its stifling place in the
+mother's arms, takes it in his own, and out in the air. The astonished
+and excited child, partly in fear, partly in satisfaction at the change,
+stops its screaming, and, as the man adjusts it more securely to his
+breast, plants its chubby hands against him, and, pushing off as far
+as it can, gives a good long look squarely in his face,--then, as if
+satisfied, snuggles down with its head on his neck, and in less than a
+minute is sound and peacefully asleep without another whimper, utterly
+fagged out. A square or so more and the conductor, who has had an
+unusually hard and uninterrupted day's work, gets off for his first
+meal and relief since morning. And now the white-hatted man, holding
+the slumbering babe, also acts as conductor the rest of the distance,
+keeping his eye on the passengers inside, who have by this time thinned
+out greatly. He makes a very good conductor, too, pulling the bell to
+stop or to go on as needed, and seems to enjoy the occupation. The babe
+meanwhile rests its fat cheeks close on his neck and gray beard, one of
+his arms vigilantly surrounding it, while the other signals, from time
+to time, with the strap; and the flushed mother inside has a good half
+hour to breathe, and to cool and recover herself.
+
+
+
+II
+
+No poem of our day dates and locates itself as absolutely as "Leaves of
+Grass;" but suppose it had been written three or four centuries ago,
+and had located itself in mediaeval Europe, and was now first brought
+to light, together with a history of Walt Whitman's simple and
+disinterested life, can there be any doubt about the cackling that would
+at once break out in the whole brood of critics over the golden egg that
+had been uncovered? This reckon would be a favorite passage with all:--
+
+ "You sea! I resign myself to you also--I guess what you mean;
+  I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers;
+  I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me;
+  We must have a turn together--I undress--hurry me out of sight of
+     the land;
+  Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse;
+  Dash me with amorous wet--I can repay you.
+
+ "Sea of stretch'd ground-swells!
+  Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths!
+  Sea of the brine of life! sea of unshovel'd yet always ready graves!
+  Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea!
+  I am integral with you--I too am of one phase, and of all phases."
+
+This other passage would afford many a text for the moralists and
+essayists:--
+
+ "Of persons arrived at high positions, ceremonies, wealth, scholarship,
+     and the like;
+  To me, all that those persons have arrived at sinks away from them,
+     except as it results to their Bodies and Souls,
+  So that often, to me, they appear gaunt and naked,
+  And often, to me, each one mocks the others, and mocks himself
+     or herself,
+  And of each one, the core of life, namely happiness, is full of
+     the rotten excrement of maggots;
+  And often, to me, those men and women pass unwittingly the true
+     realities of life, and go toward false realities,
+  And often, to me, they are alive after what custom has served
+     them, but nothing more,
+  And often, to me, they are sad, hasty, unwaked somnambules,
+     walking the dusk."
+
+Ah, Time, you enchantress! what tricks you play with us! The old
+is already proved,--the past and the distant hold nothing but the
+beautiful.
+
+Or let us take another view. Suppose Walt Whitman had never existed, and
+some bold essayist, like Mr. Higginson or Matthew Arnold, had projected
+him in abstract, outlined him on a scholarly ideal background,
+formulated and put in harmless critical periods the principles of art
+which he illustrates, and which are the inevitable logic of his
+poems,--said essayist would have won great applause. "Yes, indeed, that
+were a poet to cherish; fill those shoes and you have a god."
+
+How different a critic's account of Shakespeare from Shakespeare
+himself,--the difference between the hewn or sawed timber and the living
+tree! A few years ago we had here a lecturer from over seas, who gave to
+our well-dressed audiences the high, moral, and intellectual statement
+of the poet Burns. It was very fine, and people were greatly pleased,
+vastly more so, I fear, than they were with Burns himself. Indeed, I
+could not help wondering how many of those appreciative listeners had
+any original satisfaction in the Scotch poet at first hand, or would
+have accepted him had he been their neighbor and fellow-citizen. But as
+he filtered through the scholarly mind in trickling drops, oh, he was so
+sweet!
+
+Everybody stirred with satisfaction as the lecturer said: "When
+literature becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the smooth grooves
+of fashion, and copies and copies again, something must be done; and
+to give life to that dying literature a man must be found _not educated
+under its influence."_ I applauded with the rest, for it was a bold
+saying; but I could not help thinking how that theory, brought home
+to ourselves and illustrated in a living example, would have sent that
+nodding millinery and faultless tailory flying downstairs, as at an
+alarm of fire.
+
+One great service of Walt Whitman is that he exerts a tremendous
+influence to bring the race up on this nether side,--to place the
+emotional, the assimilative, the sympathetic, the spontaneous, intuitive
+man, the man of the fluids and of the affections, flush with
+the intellectual man. That we moderns have fallen behind here is
+unquestionable, and we in this country more than the Old World peoples.
+All the works of Whitman, prose and verse, are embosomed in a sea of
+emotional humanity, and they float deeper than they show; there is far
+more in what they necessitate and imply than in what they say.
+
+It is not so much of fatty degeneration that we are in danger in
+America, but of calcareous. The fluids, moral and physical, are
+evaporating; surfaces are becoming encrusted, there is a deposit of
+flint in the veins and arteries, outlines are abnormally sharp and hard,
+nothing is held in solution, all is precipitated in well-defined ideas
+and opinions.
+
+But when I think of the type of character planted and developed by my
+poet, I think of a man or a woman rich above all things in the genial
+human attributes, one "nine times folded" in an atmosphere of tenderest,
+most considerate humanity,--an atmosphere warm with the breath of a
+tropic heart, that makes your buds of affection and of genius start and
+unfold like a south wind in May. Your intercourse with such a character
+is not merely intellectual; it is deeper and better than that. Walter
+Scott carried such a fund of sympathy and goodwill that even the animals
+found fellowship with him, and the pigs understood his great heart.
+
+It was the large endowment of Whitman, in his own character in this
+respect, that made his services in the army hospitals during the war
+so ministering and effective, and that renders his "Drum-Taps" the
+tenderest and most deeply yearning and sorrowful expression of the human
+heart in poetry that ever war called forth. Indeed, from my own point
+of view, there is no false or dangerous tendency among us, in life or in
+letters, that this poet does not offset and correct. Fret and chafe as
+much as we will, we are bound to gravitate, more or less, toward this
+mountain, and feel its bracing, rugged air.
+
+Without a certain self-surrender there is no greatness possible in
+literature, any more than in religion, or in anything else. It is always
+a trait of the master that he is not afraid of being compromised by
+the company he keeps. He is the central and main fact in any company.
+Nothing so lowly but he will do it reverence; nothing so high but he
+can stand in its presence. His theme is the river, and he the ample and
+willing channel. Little natures love to disparage and take down; they
+do it in self-defense; but the master gives you all, and more than your
+due. Whitman does not stand aloof, superior, a priest or a critic: he
+abandons himself to all the strong human currents; he enters into and
+affiliates with every phase of life; he bestows himself royally upon
+whoever and whatever will receive him. There is no competition between
+himself and his subject; he is not afraid of over-praising, or making
+too much of the commonest individual. What exalts others exalts him.
+
+We have had great help in Emerson in certain ways,--first-class service.
+He probes the conscience and the moral purpose as few men have done, and
+gives much needed stimulus there. But, after him, the need is all the
+more pressing for a broad, powerful, opulent, human personality to
+absorb these ideals, and to make something more of them than fine
+sayings. With Emerson alone we are rich in sunlight, but poor in
+rain and dew,--poor, too, in soil, and in the moist, gestating earth
+principle. Emerson's tendency is not to broaden and enrich, but to
+concentrate and refine.
+
+Then, is there not an excessive modesty, without warrant in philosophy
+or nature, dwindling us in this country, drying us up in the viscera? Is
+there not a decay--a deliberate, strange abnegation and dread--of sane
+sexuality, of maternity and paternity, among us, and in our literary
+ideals and social types of men and women? For myself, I welcome any
+evidence to the contrary, or any evidence that deeper and counteracting
+agencies are at work, as unspeakably precious. I do not know where this
+evidence is furnished in such ample measure as in the pages of
+Walt Whitman. The great lesson of nature, I take it, is that a sane
+sensuality must be preserved at all hazards, and this, it seems to me,
+is also the great lesson of his writings. The point is fully settled in
+him that, however they may have been held in abeyance or restricted to
+other channels, there is still sap and fecundity, and depth of virgin
+soil in the race, sufficient to produce a man of the largest mould and
+the most audacious and unconquerable egotism, and on a plane the last to
+be reached by these qualities; a man of antique stature, of Greek fibre
+and gripe, with science and the modern added, without abating one jot or
+tittle of his native force, adhesiveness, Americanism, and democracy.
+
+As I have already hinted, Whitman has met with by far his amplest
+acceptance and appreciation in Europe. There is good reason for this,
+though it is not what has been generally claimed, namely, that the
+cultivated classes of Europe are surfeited with respectability, half
+dead with _ennui_ and routine, and find an agreeable change in the
+daring unconventionality of the new poet. For the fact is, it is not the
+old and jaded minds of London, or Paris, or Dublin, or Copenhagen, that
+have acknowledged him, but the fresh, eager, young minds. Nine tenths of
+his admirers there are the sturdiest men in the fields of art, science,
+and literature.
+
+In many respects, as a race, we Americans have been pampered and
+spoiled; we have been brought up on sweets. I suppose that, speaking
+literally, no people under the sun consume so much confectionery, so
+much pastry and cake, or indulge in so many gassy and sugared drinks.
+The soda-fountain, with its syrups, has got into literature, and
+furnishes the popular standard of poetry. The old heroic stamina of our
+ancestors, that craved the bitter but nourishing home-brewed, has died
+out, and in its place there is a sickly cadaverousness that must be
+pampered and cosseted. Among educated people here there is a mania for
+the bleached, the double-refined,--white houses, white china, white
+marble, and white skins. We take the bone and sinew out of the flour
+in order to have white bread, and are bolting our literature as fast as
+possible.
+
+It is for these and kindred reasons that Walt Whitman is more read
+abroad than in his own country. It is on the rank, human, and
+emotional side--sex, magnetism, health, physique,--that he is so
+full. Then his receptivity and assimilative powers are enormous, and
+he demands these in his reader. In fact, his poems are physiological as
+much as they are intellectual. They radiate from his entire being,
+and are charged to repletion with that blended quality of mind and
+body--psychic and physiologic--which the living form and presence send
+forth. Never before in poetry has the body received such ennoblement.
+The great theme is IDENTITY, and identity comes through the body; and
+all that pertains to the body, the poet teaches, is entailed upon
+the spirit. In his rapt gaze, the body and the soul are one, and what
+debases the one debases the other. Hence he glorifies the body. Not more
+ardently and purely did the great sculptors of antiquity carve it in the
+enduring marble than this poet has celebrated it in his masculine and
+flowing lines. The bearing of his work in this direction is invaluable.
+Well has it been said that the man or the woman who has "Leaves of
+Grass" for a daily companion will be under the constant, invisible
+influence of sanity, cleanliness, strength, and a gradual severance from
+all that corrupts and makes morbid and mean.
+
+In regard to the unity and construction of the poems, the reader
+sooner or later discovers the true solution to be, that the dependence,
+cohesion, and final reconciliation of the whole are in the Personality
+of the poet himself. As in Shakespeare everything is strung upon the
+plot, the play, and loses when separated from it, so in this poet every
+line and sentence refers to and necessitates the Personality behind it,
+and derives its chief significance therefrom. In other words, "Leaves of
+Grass" is essentially a dramatic poem, a free representation of man in
+his relation to the outward world,--the play, the interchanges between
+him and it, apart from social and artificial considerations,--in which
+we discern the central purpose or thought to be for every man and woman
+his or her Individuality, and around that, Nationality. To show rather
+than to tell,--to body forth as in a play how these arise and blend; how
+the man is developed and recruited, his spirit's descent; how he walks
+through materials absorbing and conquering them; how he confronts the
+immensities of time and space; where are the true sources of his power,
+the soul's real riches,--that which "adheres and goes forward and is not
+dropped by death;" how he is all defined and published and made certain
+through his body; the value of health and physique; the great solvent,
+Sympathy,--to show the need of larger and fresher types in art and in
+life, and then how the state is compacted, and how the democratic idea
+is ample and composite, and cannot fail us,--to show all this, I
+say, not as in a lecture or a critique, but suggestively and
+inferentially,--to work it out freely and picturesquely, with endless
+variations, with person and picture and parable and adventure, is the
+lesson and object of "Leaves of Grass." From the first line, where the
+poet says,
+
+       "I loafe and invite my Soul,"
+
+to the last, all is movement and fusion,--all is clothed in flesh and
+blood. The scene changes, the curtain rises and falls, but the theme is
+still Man,--his opportunities, his relations, his past, his future, his
+sex, his pride in himself, his omnivorousness, his "great hands," his
+yearning heart, his seething brain, the abysmal depths that underlie him
+and open from him, all illustrated in the poet's own character,--he the
+chief actor always. His personality directly facing you, and with its
+eye steadily upon you, runs through every page, spans all the details,
+and rounds and completes them, and compactly holds them. This gives the
+form and the art conception, and gives homogeneousness.
+
+When Tennyson sends out a poem, it is perfect, like an apple or a peach;
+slowly wrought out and dismissed, it drops from his boughs holding
+a conception or an idea that spheres it and makes it whole. It is
+completed, distinct, and separate,--might be his, or might be any man's.
+It carries his quality, but it is a thing of itself, and centres and
+depends upon itself. Whether or not the world will hereafter consent,
+as in the past, to call only beautiful creations of this sort _poems,_
+remains to be seen. But this is certainly not what Walt Whitman does,
+or aims to do, except in a few cases. He completes no poems apart and
+separate from himself, and his pages abound in hints to that effect:--
+
+ "Let others finish specimens--I never finish specimens;
+  I shower them by exhaustless laws, as Nature does, fresh
+     and modern continually."
+
+His lines are pulsations, thrills, waves of force, indefinite dynamics,
+formless, constantly emanating from the living centre, and they carry
+the quality of the author's personal presence with them in a way that is
+unprecedented in literature.
+
+Occasionally there is a poem or a short piece that detaches itself,
+and assumes something like ejaculatory and statuesque proportion, as
+"O Captain, my Captain," "Pioneers," "Beat, Beat, Drums," and others in
+"Drum-Taps;" but all the great poems, like "Walt Whitman," "Song of
+the Open Road," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "To Working Men,"
+"Sleep-Chasings," etc., are out-flamings, out-rushings, of the pent
+fires of the poet's soul. The first-named poem, which is the seething,
+dazzling sun of his subsequent poetic system, shoots in rapid succession
+waves of almost consuming energy. It is indeed a central orb of fiercest
+light and heat, swept by wild storms of emotion, but at the same time
+of sane and beneficent potentiality. Neither in it nor in either of
+the others is there the building-up of a fair verbal structure,
+a symmetrical piece of mechanism, whose last stone is implied and
+necessitated in the first.
+
+"The critic's great error," says Heine, "lies in asking, 'What ought
+the artist to do?' It would be far more correct to ask, 'What does the
+artist intend?'"
+
+It is probably partly because his field is so large, his demands
+so exacting, his method so new (necessarily so), and from the whole
+standard of the poems being what I may call an astronomical one, that
+the critics complain so generally of want of form in him. And the
+critics are right enough, as far as their objection goes. There is no
+deliberate form here, any more than there is in the forces of nature.
+Shall we say, then, that nothing but the void exists? The void is filled
+by a Presence. There is a controlling, directing, overarching will
+in every page, every verse, that there is no escape from. Design and
+purpose, natural selection, growth, culmination, are just as pronounced
+as in any poet.
+
+There is a want of form in the unfinished statue, because it is
+struggling into form; it is nothing without form; but there is no want
+of form in the elemental laws and effusions,--in fire, or water, or
+rain, or dew, or the smell of the shore or the plunging waves. And may
+there not be the analogue of this in literature,--a potent, quickening,
+exhilarating quality in words, apart from and without any consideration
+of constructive form? Under the influence of the expansive, creative
+force that plays upon me from these pages, like sunlight or gravitation,
+the question of form never comes up, because I do not for one moment
+escape the eye, the source from which the power and action emanate.
+
+I know that Walt Whitman has written many passages with reference far
+more to their position, interpretation, and scanning ages hence, than
+for current reading. Much of his material is too near us; it needs time.
+Seen through the vista of long years, perhaps centuries, it will assume
+quite different hues. Perhaps those long lists of trades, tools, and
+occupations would not be so repellent if we could read them, as we read
+Homer's catalogue of the ships, through the retrospect of ages. They are
+justified in the poem aside from their historic value, because they
+are alive and full of action,--panoramas of the whole mechanical and
+industrial life of America, north, east, south, west,--bits of scenery,
+bird's-eye views, glimpses of moving figures, caught as by a flash,
+characteristic touches indoors and out, all passing in quick succession
+before you. They have in the fullest measure what Lessing demands in
+poetry,--the quality of ebbing and flowing action, as distinct from the
+dead water of description; they are thoroughly dramatic, fused, pliant,
+and obedient to the poet's will. No glamour is thrown over them, no wash
+of sentiment; and if they have not the charm of novelty and distance,
+why, that is an accident that bars them in a measure to us, but not to
+the future. Very frequently in these lists or enumerations of objects,
+actions, shows, there are sure to occur lines of perfect description:--
+
+ "Where the heifers browse--where geese nip their food with short
+     jerks;
+  Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome
+     prairie;
+  Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles
+     far and near;
+  Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon;
+  Where the katydid works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree
+     over the well."
+
+ "Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown
+     apprentices,
+  The swing of their axes on the square-hew'd log, shaping it toward
+     the shape of a mast,
+  The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine,
+  The butter-color'd chips flying off in great flakes and slivers,
+  The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy costumes."
+
+ "Always these compact lands--lands tied at the hips with the belt
+     stringing the huge oval lakes."
+
+ "Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez'd!--the diverse!
+     the compact!"
+
+Tried by the standards of the perfect statuesque poems, these pages will
+indeed seem strange enough; but viewed as a part of the poetic
+compend of America, the swift gathering-in, from her wide-spreading,
+multitudinous, material life, of traits and points and suggestions that
+belong here and are characteristic, they have their value. The poet
+casts his great seine into events and doings and material progress,
+and these are some of the fish, not all beautiful by any means, but all
+terribly alive, and all native to these waters.
+
+In the "Carol of Occupations" occur, too, those formidable inventories
+of the more heavy and coarsegrained trades and tools that few if any
+readers have been able to stand before, and that have given the scoffers
+and caricaturists their favorite weapons. If you detach a page of these
+and ask, "Is it poetry? have the 'hog-hook,' the 'killing-hammer,' 'the
+cutter's cleaver,' 'the packer's maul,' met with a change of heart, and
+been converted into celestial cutlery?" I answer, No, they are as barren
+of poetry as a desert is of grass; but in their place in the poem, and
+in the collection, they serve as masses of shade or neutral color in
+pictures, or in nature, or in character,--a negative service, but still
+indispensable. The point, the moral of the poem, is really backed up
+and driven home by this list. The poet is determined there shall be
+no mistake about it. He will not put in the dainty and pretty things
+merely,--he will put in the coarse and common things also, and he swells
+the list till even his robust muse begins to look uneasy. Remember, too,
+that Whitman declaredly writes the lyrics of America, of the masses,
+of democracy, and of the practical labor of mechanics, boatmen, and
+farmers:--
+
+ "The sum of all known reverence I add up in you, whoever you are;
+  All doctrines, all politics and civilization, exude from you;
+  All sculpture and monuments, and anything inscribed anywhere, are
+     tallied in you;
+  The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records
+     reach, is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same:
+  If you were  not  breathing and walking here, where would they
+     all be?
+  The most renown'd poems would be ashes, orations and plays would
+     be vacuums.
+
+ "All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;
+ (Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of
+     the arches and cornices?)
+
+ "All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded by the
+     instruments;
+  It is not the violins and the cornets--it is not the oboe, nor
+     the beating drums--nor the score of the baritone singer singing
+     his sweet romanza--nor that of the men's chorus, nor that of
+     the women's chorus,
+  It is nearer and farther than they."
+
+Out of this same spirit of reverence for man and all that pertains
+essentially to him, and the steady ignoring of conventional and social
+distinctions and prohibitions, and on the same plane as the universal
+brotherhood of the poems, come those passages in "Leaves of Grass" that
+have caused so much abuse and fury,--the allusions to sexual acts and
+organs,--the momentary contemplation of man as the perpetuator of his
+species. Many good judges, who have followed Whitman thus far, stop here
+and refuse their concurrence. But if the poet has failed in this part,
+he has failed in the rest. It is of a piece with the whole. He has felt
+in his way the same necessity as that which makes the anatomist or
+the physiologist not pass by, or neglect, or falsify, the loins of his
+typical personage. All the passages and allusions that come under this
+head have a scientific coldness and purity, but differ from science, as
+poetry always must differ, in being alive and sympathetic, instead of
+dead and analytic. There is nothing of the forbidden here, none of those
+sweet morsels that we love to roll under the tongue, such as are found
+in Byron and Shakespeare, and even in austere Dante. If the fact is not
+lifted up and redeemed by the solemn and far-reaching laws of maternity
+and paternity, through which the poet alone contemplates it, then it
+is irredeemable, and one side of our nature is intrinsically vulgar and
+mean.
+
+Again: Out of all the full-grown, first-class poems, no matter what
+their plot or theme, emerges a sample of Man, each after its kind, its
+period, its nationality, its antecedents. The vast and cumbrous Hindu
+epics contribute their special types of both man and woman, impossible
+except from far-off Asia and Asian antiquity. Out of Homer, after all
+his gorgeous action and events, the distinct personal identity, the
+heroic and warlike chieftain of Hellas only permanently remains. In the
+same way, when the fire and fervor of Shakespeare's plots and passions
+subside, the special feudal personality, as lord or gentleman, still
+towers in undying vitality. Even the Sacred Writings themselves,
+considered as the first great poems, leave on record, out of all the
+rest, the portraiture of a characteristic Oriental Man. Far different
+from these (and yet, as he says, "the same old countenance pensively
+looking forth," and "the same red running blood"), "Leaves of Grass"
+and "Two Rivulets" also bring their contribution; nay, behind every page
+_that_ is the main purport,--to outline a New World Man and a New
+World Woman, modern, complete, democratic, not only fully and nobly
+intellectual and spiritual, but in the same measure physical, emotional,
+and even fully and nobly carnal.
+
+An acute person once said to me, "As I read and re-read these poems, I
+more and more think their inevitable result in time must be to produce
+
+       'A race of splendid and savage _old men,_'
+
+of course dominated by moral and spiritual laws, but with volcanoes of
+force always alive beneath the surface."
+
+And still again: One of the questions to be put to any poem assuming a
+first-class importance among us--and I especially invite this inquiry
+toward "Leaves of Grass"--is, How far is this work consistent with, and
+the outcome of, that something which secures to the race ascendency,
+empire, and perpetuity? There is in every dominant people a germ, a
+quality, an expansive force, that, no matter how it is overlaid, gives
+them their push and their hold upon existence,--writes their history
+upon the earth, and stamps their imprint upon the age. To what extent is
+your masterpiece the standard-bearer of this quality,--helping the race
+to victory? helping me to be more myself than I otherwise would?
+
+
+
+III
+
+Not the least of my poet's successes is in his thorough assimilation of
+the modern sciences, transmuting them into strong poetic nutriment, and
+in the extent to which all his main poems are grounded in the deepest
+principles of modern philosophical inquiry.
+
+Nearly all the old literatures may be said to have been founded upon
+fable, and upon a basis and even superstructure of ignorance, that,
+however charming it may be, we have not now got, and could not keep if
+we had. The bump of wonder and the feeling of the marvelous,--a kind
+of half-pleasing fear, like that of children in the dark or in the
+woods,--were largely operative with the old poets, and I believe are
+necessary to any eminent success in this field; but they seem nearly to
+have died out of the modern mind, like organs there is no longer any
+use for. The poetic temperament has not yet adjusted itself to the new
+lights, to science, and to the vast fields and expanses opened up in
+the physical cosmos by astronomy and geology, and in the spiritual or
+intellectual world by the great German metaphysicians. The staple of
+a large share of our poetic literature is yet mainly the result of the
+long age of fable and myth that now lies behind us. "Leaves of Grass"
+is, perhaps, the first serious and large attempt at an expression in
+poetry of a knowledge of the earth as one of the orbs, and of man as
+a microcosm of the whole, and to give to the imagination these new and
+true fields of wonder and romance. In it fable and superstition are at
+an end, priestcraft is at an end, skepticism and doubt are at an end,
+with all the misgivings and dark forebodings that have dogged the human
+mind since it began to relax its hold upon tradition and the past; and
+we behold man reconciled, happy, ecstatic, full of reverence, awe, and
+wonder, reinstated in Paradise,--the paradise of perfect knowledge and
+unrestricted faith.
+
+It needs but a little pondering to see that the great poet of the future
+will not be afraid of science, but will rather seek to plant his feet
+upon it as upon a rock. He knows that, from an enlarged point of view,
+there is no feud between Science and Poesy, any more than there is
+between Science and Religion, or between Science and Life. He sees that
+the poet and the scientist do not travel opposite but parallel roads,
+that often approach each other very closely, if they do not at times
+actually join. The poet will always pause when he finds himself in
+opposition to science; and the scientist is never more worthy the name
+than when he escapes from analysis into synthesis, and gives us living
+wholes. And science, in its present bold and receptive mood, may be said
+to be eminently creative, and to have made every first-class thinker and
+every large worker in any aesthetic or spiritual field immeasurably
+its debtor. It has dispelled many illusions, but it has more than
+compensated the imagination by the unbounded vistas it has opened up
+on every hand. It has added to our knowledge, but it has added to our
+ignorance in the same measure: the large circle of light only reveals
+the larger circle of darkness that encompasses it, and life and being
+and the orbs are enveloped in a greater mystery to the poet to-day than
+they were in the times of Homer or Isaiah. Science, therefore, does not
+restrict the imagination, but often compels it to longer flights.
+The conception of the earth as an orb shooting like a midnight meteor
+through space, a brand cast by the burning sun with the fire at its
+heart still unquenched, the sun itself shooting and carrying the whole
+train of worlds with it, no one knows whither,--what a lift has science
+given the imagination in this field! Or the tremendous discovery of the
+correlation and conservation of forces, the identity and convertibility
+of heat and force and motion, and that no ounce of power is lost,
+but forever passed along, changing form but not essence, is a poetic
+discovery no less than a scientific one. The poets have always felt
+that it must be so, and, when the fact was authoritatively announced by
+science, every profound poetic mind must have felt a thrill of pleasure.
+Or the nebular hypothesis of the solar system,--it seems the conception
+of some inspired madman, like William Blake, rather than the cool
+conclusion of reason, and to carry its own justification, as great
+power always does. Indeed, our interest in astronomy and geology is
+essentially a poetic one,--the love of the marvelous, of the sublime,
+and of grand harmonies. The scientific conception of the sun is
+strikingly Dantesque, and appalls the imagination. Or the hell of fire
+through which the earth has passed, and the aeons of monsters from which
+its fair forms have emerged,--from which of the seven circles of the
+Inferno did the scientist get his hint? Indeed, science everywhere
+reveals a carnival of mightier gods than those that cut such fantastic
+tricks in the ancient world. Listen to Tyndall on light, or to Youmans
+on the chemistry of a sunbeam, and see how fable pales its ineffectual
+fires, and the boldest dreams of the poets are eclipsed.
+
+The vibratory theory of light and its identity with the laws of sound,
+the laws of the tides and the seasons, the wonders of the spectroscope,
+the theory of gravitation, of electricity, of chemical affinity, the
+deep beneath deep of the telescope, the world within world of the
+microscope,--in these and many other fields it is hard to tell whether
+it is the scientist or the poet we are listening to. What greater magic
+than that you can take a colorless ray of light, break it across a
+prism, and catch upon a screen all the divine hues of the rainbow?
+
+In some respects science has but followed out and confirmed the dim
+foreshadowings of the human breast. Man in his simplicity has called the
+sun father and the earth mother. Science shows this to be no fiction,
+but a reality; that we are really children of the sun, and that every
+heart-beat, every pound of force we exert, is a solar emanation. The
+power with which you now move and breathe came from the sun just as
+literally as the bank-notes in your pocket came from the bank.
+
+The ancients fabled the earth as resting upon the shoulders of Atlas,
+and Atlas as standing upon a turtle; but what the turtle stood upon was
+a puzzle. An acute person says that science has but changed the terms
+of the equation, but that the unknown quantity is the same as ever. The
+earth now rests upon the sun,--in his outstretched palm; the sun rests
+upon some other sun, and that upon some other; but what they all finally
+rest upon, who can tell? Well may Tennyson speak of the "fairy tales of
+science," and well may Walt Whitman say:--
+
+ "I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the
+     reasons of things;
+  They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen."
+
+But, making all due acknowledgments to science, there is one danger
+attending it that the poet alone can save us from,--the danger that
+science, absorbed with its great problems, will forget Man. Hence the
+especial office of the poet with reference to science is to endow
+it with a human interest. The heart has been disenchanted by having
+disclosed to it blind, abstract forces where it had enthroned personal
+humanistic divinities. In the old time, man was the centre of the
+system; everything was interested in him, and took sides for or against
+him. There were nothing but men and gods in the universe. But in the
+results of science the world is more and more, and man is less and
+less. The poet must come to the rescue, and place man again at the top,
+magnify him, exalt him, reinforce him, and match these wonders from
+without with equal wonders from within. Welcome to the bard who is not
+appalled by the task, and who can readily assimilate and turn into
+human emotions these vast deductions of the savants! The minor poets do
+nothing in this direction; only men of the largest calibre and the most
+heroic fibre are adequate to the service. Hence one finds in Tennyson a
+vast deal more science than he would at first suspect; but it is under
+his feet; it is no longer science, but faith, or reverence, or poetic
+nutriment. It is in "Locksley Hall," "The Princess," "In Memoriam,"
+"Maud," and in others of his poems. Here is a passage from "In
+Memoriam:"--
+
+                                   "They say,
+        The solid earth whereon we tread
+
+       "In tracts of fluent heat began,
+           And grew to seeming-random forms,
+           The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
+        Till at the last arose the man;
+
+       "Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime,
+           The herald of a higher race,
+           And of himself in higher place
+        If so he type this work of time
+
+       "Within himself, from more to more;
+           Or, crown'd with attributes of woe,
+           Like glories, move his course, and show
+        That life is not as idle ore,
+
+       "But iron dug from central gloom,
+           And heated hot with burning fears,
+           And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
+        And batter'd with the shocks of doom
+
+       "To shape and use. Arise and fly
+           The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
+           Move upward, working out the beast,
+        And let the ape and tiger die."
+
+Or in this stanza behold how the science is disguised or turned into the
+sweetest music:--
+
+       "Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
+           Yon orange sunset waning slow;
+        From fringes of the faded eve,
+           O happy planet, eastward go;
+           Till over thy dark shoulder glow
+        Thy silver sister-world, and rise
+        To glass herself in dewy eyes
+           That watch me from the glen below."
+
+A recognition of the planetary system, and of the great fact that
+the earth moves eastward through the heavens, in a soft and tender
+love-song!
+
+But in Walt Whitman alone do we find the full, practical absorption, and
+re-departure therefrom, of the astounding idea that the earth is a star
+in the heavens like the rest, and that man, as the crown and finish,
+carries in his moral consciousness the flower, the outcome, of all this
+wide field of turbulent unconscious nature. Of course in his handling it
+is no longer science, or rather it is science dissolved in the fervent
+heat of the poet's heart, and charged with emotion. "The words of true
+poems," he says, "are the tufts and final applause of science." Before
+Darwin or Spencer he proclaimed the doctrine of evolution:--
+
+ "I am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over,
+  And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
+  And call anything close again when I desire it.
+
+ "In vain the speeding and shyness;
+  In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach;
+  In vain the mastodon retreats beneath his own powder'd bones;
+  In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes;
+  In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsters
+     lying low."
+
+In the following passage the idea is more fully carried out, and man
+is viewed through a vista which science alone has laid open; yet how
+absolutely a work of the creative imagination is revealed:--
+
+ "I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I am incloser of things
+     to be.
+  My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs;
+  On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the
+     steps;
+  All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount.
+
+ "Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me;
+  Afar down I see the huge first Nothing--I know I was even there;
+  I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
+  And took my time, and took no hurt from the foetid carbon.
+
+ "Long I was hugg'd close--long and long,
+  Immense have been the preparations for me,
+  Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me,
+  Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful
+     boatmen;
+  For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings;
+  They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
+
+ "Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me;
+  My embryo has never been torpid--nothing could overlay it,
+  For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
+  The long low strata piled to rest it on,
+  Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
+  Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited
+     it with care;
+  All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight
+     me:
+  Now on this spot I stand with my robust Soul."
+
+I recall no single line of poetry in the language that fills my
+imagination like that beginning the second stanza:--
+
+       "Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me."
+
+One seems to see those huge Brocken shadows of the past sinking and
+dropping below the horizon like mountain peaks, as he presses onward on
+his journey. Akin to this absorption of science is another quality in
+my poet not found in the rest, except perhaps a mere hint of it now and
+then in Lucretius,--a quality easier felt than described. It is a tidal
+wave of emotion running all through the poems, which is now and then
+crested with such passages as this:--
+
+ "I am he that walks with the tender and growing night;
+  I call to the earth and sea, half held by the night.
+
+ "Press close, bare-bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic,
+     nourishing night!
+  Night of south winds! night of the large, few stars!
+  Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night.
+
+ "Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breath'd earth!
+  Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
+  Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains, misty topt!
+  Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with
+     blue!
+  Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!
+  Earth of the limpid gray of clouds, brighter and clearer for my
+     sake!
+  Far-swooping, elbow'd earth! rich, apple-blossom'd earth!
+  Smile, for your lover comes!"
+
+Professor Clifford calls it "cosmic emotion,"--a poetic thrill and
+rhapsody in contemplating the earth as a whole,--its chemistry and
+vitality, its bounty, its beauty, its power, and the applicability
+of its laws and principles to human, aesthetic, and art products. It
+affords the key to the theory of art upon which Whitman's poems are
+projected, and accounts for what several critics call their sense of
+magnitude,--"something of the vastness of the succession of objects in
+Nature."
+
+ "I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those
+     of the earth!
+  I swear there can be no theory of any account, unless it corroborate
+     the theory of the earth!
+  No politics, art, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account,
+     unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
+  Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude
+     of the earth."
+
+Or again, in his "Laws for Creation:"--
+
+ "All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the
+     compact truth of the world,
+  There shall be no subject too pronounced--All works shall illustrate
+     the divine law of indirections."
+
+Indeed, the earth ever floats in this poet's mind as his mightiest
+symbol,--his type of completeness and power. It is the armory from which
+he draws his most potent weapons. See, especially, "To the Sayers of
+Words," "This Compost," "The Song of the Open Road," and "Pensive on her
+Dead gazing I heard the Mother of all."
+
+The poet holds essentially the same attitude toward cosmic humanity,
+well illustrated in "Salut au Monde:"--
+
+ "My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the
+     whole earth;
+  I have look'd for equals and lovers, and found them ready for me
+     in all lands;
+  I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.
+
+ "O vapors! I think I have risen with you and moved away to distant
+     continents, and fallen down there for reasons;
+  I think I have blown with you, O winds;
+  O waters, I have finger'd every shore with you."
+
+Indeed, the whole book is leavened with vehement Comradeship. Not only
+in the relations of individuals to each other shall loving good-will
+exist and be cultivated,--not only between the different towns and
+cities, and all the States of this indissoluble, compacted Union,--but
+it shall make a tie of fraternity and fusion holding all the races and
+peoples and countries of the whole earth.
+
+Then the National question. As Whitman's completed works now stand, in
+their two volumes, it is certain they could only have grown out of the
+Secession War; and they will probably go to future ages as in literature
+the most characteristic identification of that war,--risen from
+and portraying it, representing its sea of passions and progresses,
+partaking of all its fierce movements and perturbed emotions, and yet
+sinking the mere military parts of that war, great as those were, below
+and with matters far greater, deeper, more human, more expanding, and
+more enduring.
+
+I must not close this paper without some reference to Walt Whitman's
+prose writings, which are scarcely less important than his poems. Never
+has Patriotism, never has the antique Love of Country, with even
+doubled passion and strength, been more fully expressed than in these
+contributions. They comprise two thin volumes,--now included in "Two
+Rivulets,"--called "Democratic Vistas" and "Memoranda during the War;"
+the former exhibiting the personality of the poet in more vehement
+and sweeping action even than do the poems, and affording specimens of
+soaring vaticination and impassioned appeal impossible to match in the
+literature of our time. The only living author suggested is Carlyle; but
+so much is added, the _presence_ is so much more vascular and human, and
+the whole page so saturated with faith and love and democracy, that even
+the great Scotchman is overborne. Whitman, too, radiates belief, while
+at the core of Carlyle's utterances is despair. The style here is
+eruptive and complex, or what Jeremy Taylor calls _agglomerative,_ and
+puts the Addisonian models utterly to rout,--a style such as only the
+largest and most Titanic workman could effectively use. A sensitive lady
+of my acquaintance says reading the "Vistas" is like being exposed to
+a pouring hailstorm,--the words fairly bruise her mind. In its literary
+construction the book is indeed a shower, or a succession of showers,
+multitudinous, wide-stretching, down-pouring,--the wrathful bolt and the
+quick veins of poetic fire lighting up the page from time to time. I
+can easily conceive how certain minds must be swayed and bent by some
+of these long, involved, but firm and vehement passages. I cannot deny
+myself the pleasure of quoting one or two pages. The writer is referring
+to the great literary relics of past times:--
+
+"For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand,--those
+forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn through all the
+nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs; Hindus, with hymn and
+apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet, with spirituality, as in
+flames of lightning, conscience like red-hot iron, plaintive songs and
+screams of vengeance for tyrannies and enslavement; Christ, with bent
+head, brooding love and peace, like a dove; Greek, creating eternal
+shapes of physical and aesthetic proportion; Roman, lord of satire, the
+sword, and the codex,--of the figures, some far off and veiled, others
+near and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre,
+not a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the great painters,
+architects, musicians; rich Shakespeare, luxuriant as the sun, artist
+and singer of Feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous colors,
+owner thereof, and using them at will;--and so to such as German Kant
+and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the ages, sit again,
+impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods. Of these, and the like
+of these, is it too much, indeed, to return to our favorite figure,
+and view them as orbs, moving in free paths in the spaces of that other
+heaven, the cosmic intellect, the Soul?
+
+"Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in your atmospheres, grown
+not for America, but rather for her foes, the Feudal and the old--while
+our genius is democratic and modern. Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe
+your breath of life into our New World's nostrils--not to enslave us as
+now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own--perhaps (dare
+we to say it?) to dominate, even destroy what you yourselves have left!
+On your plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, will I mete and
+measure for our wants to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards,
+with unconditional, uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic
+despots of the west!"
+
+Here is another passage of a political cast, but showing the same great
+pinions and lofty flight:--
+
+"It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts of
+imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with lines of blood, and
+many a deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous
+imperfection,--saying, Lo! the roads, the only plans of development,
+long, and varied with all terrible balks and ebullitions. You said in
+your soul, I will be empire of empires, overshadowing all else, past and
+present, putting the history of Old World dynasties, conquests, behind
+me as of no account,--making a new history, the history of Democracy,
+making old history a dwarf,--I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating
+time. If these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the
+determinations of your Soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and already
+specimens of the cost. Behold the anguish of suspense, existence itself
+wavering in the balance, uncertain whether to rise or fall; already,
+close behind you and around you, thick winrows of corpses on
+battlefields, countless maimed and sick in hospitals, treachery among
+Generals, folly in the Executive and Legislative departments, schemers,
+thieves everywhere,--cant, credulity, make-believe everywhere. Thought
+you greatness was to ripen for you, like a pear? If you would have
+greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages, centuries,--must
+pay for it with a proportionate price. For you, too, as for all lands,
+the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth,
+the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion,
+the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the
+ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunder-storms, deaths, births,
+new projections, and invigorations of ideas and men."
+
+The "Memoranda during the War" is mainly a record of personal
+experiences, nursing the sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals:
+most of it is in a low key, simple, unwrought, like a diary kept for
+one's self; but it reveals the large, tender, sympathetic soul of the
+poet even more than his elaborate works, and puts in practical form that
+unprecedented and fervid comradeship which is his leading element. It is
+printed almost verbatim, just as the notes were jotted down at the time
+and on the spot. It is impossible to read it without the feeling of
+tears, while there is elsewhere no such portrayal of the common soldier,
+and such appreciation of him, as is contained in its pages. It is
+heart's blood, every word of it, and along with "Drum-Taps" is the only
+literature of the war thus far entirely characteristic and worthy of
+serious mention. There are in particular two passages in the "Memoranda"
+that have amazing dramatic power, vividness, and rapid action, like some
+quick painter covering a large canvas. I refer to the account of
+the assassination of President Lincoln, and to that of the scenes in
+Washington after the first battle of Bull Run. What may be called
+the mass-movement of Whitman's prose style--the rapid marshaling
+and grouping together of many facts and details, gathering up, and
+recruiting, and expanding as the sentences move along, till the force
+and momentum become like a rolling flood, or an army in echelon on the
+charge--is here displayed with wonderful effect.
+
+Noting and studying what forces move the world, the only sane
+explanation that comes to me of the fact that such writing as these
+little volumes contain has not, in this country especially, met with its
+due recognition and approval, is that, like all Whitman's works, they
+have really never yet been published at all in the true sense,--have
+never entered the arena where the great laurels are won. They have been
+printed by the author, and a few readers have found them out, but to all
+intents and purposes they are unknown.
+
+I have not dwelt on Whitman's personal circumstances, his age (he is
+now, 1877, entering his fifty-ninth year), paralysis, seclusion, and the
+treatment of him by certain portions of the literary classes, although
+these have all been made the subjects of wide discussion of late, both
+in America and Great Britain, and have, I think, a bearing under the
+circumstances on his character and genius. It is an unwritten tragedy
+that will doubtless always remain unwritten. I will but mention an
+eloquent appeal of the Scotch poet, Robert Buchanan, published in London
+in March, 1876, eulogizing and defending the American bard, in his
+old age, illness, and poverty, from the swarms of maligners who still
+continue to assail him. The appeal has this fine passage:--
+
+"He who wanders through the solitudes of far-off Uist or lonely Donegal
+may often behold the Golden Eagle sick to death, worn with age or
+famine, or with both, passing with weary waft of wing from promontory
+to promontory, from peak to peak, pursued by a crowd of rooks and crows,
+which fall back screaming whenever the noble bird turns his indignant
+head, and which follow frantically once more, hooting behind him,
+whenever he wends again upon his way."
+
+Skipping many things I should yet like to touch upon,--for this paper is
+already too long,--I will say in conclusion that, if any reader of mine
+is moved by what I have here written to undertake the perusal of "Leaves
+of Grass," or the later volume, "Two Rivulets," let me yet warn him
+that he little suspects what is before him. Poetry in the Virgilian,
+Tennysonian, or Lowellian sense it certainly is not. Just as the living
+form of man in its ordinary garb is less beautiful (yet more beautiful)
+than the marble statue; just as the living woman and child that may have
+sat for the model is less beautiful (yet more so) than one of Raphael's
+finest Madonnas, or just as a forest of trees addresses itself less
+directly to the feeling of what is called art and form than the house or
+other edifice built from them; just as you, and the whole spirit of our
+current times, have been trained to feed on and enjoy, not Nature or
+Man, or the aboriginal forces, or the actual, but pictures, books, art,
+and the selected and refined,--just so these poems will doubtless first
+shock and disappoint you. Your admiration for the beautiful is never the
+feeling directly and chiefly addressed in them, but your love for the
+breathing flesh, the concrete reality, the moving forms and shows of the
+universe. A man reaches and moves you, not an artist. Doubtless, too, a
+certain withholding and repugnance has first to be overcome, analogous
+to a cold sea plunge; and it is not till you experience the reaction,
+the after-glow, and feel the swing and surge of the strong waves,
+that you know what Walt Whitman's pages really are. They don't give
+themselves at first,--like the real landscape and the sea, they are all
+indirections. You may have to try them many times; there is something
+of Nature's rudeness and forbiddingness, not only at the first, but
+probably always. But after you have mastered them by resigning yourself
+to them, there is nothing like them anywhere in literature for vital
+help and meaning. The poet says:--
+
+ "The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,
+  That scorn the best I can do to relate them."
+
+And the press of your mind to these pages will certainly start new and
+countless problems that poetry and art have never before touched, and
+that afford a perpetual stimulus and delight.
+
+It has been said that the object of poetry and the higher forms of
+literature is to escape from the tyranny of the real into the freedom of
+the ideal; but what is the ideal unless ballasted and weighted with the
+real? All these poems have a lofty ideal background; the great laws
+and harmonies stretch unerringly above them, and give their vista
+and perspective. It is because Whitman's ideal is clothed with rank
+materiality, as the soul is clothed with the carnal body, that his poems
+beget such warmth and desire in the mind, and are the reservoirs of so
+much power. No one can feel more than I how absolutely necessary it is
+that the facts of nature and experience be born again in the heart
+of the bard, and receive the baptism of the true fire before they be
+counted poetical; and I have no trouble on this score with the author
+of "Leaves of Grass." He never fails to ascend into spiritual meanings.
+Indeed, the spirituality of Walt Whitman is the chief fact after all,
+and dominates every page he has written.
+
+Observe that this singer and artist makes no _direct_ attempt to be
+poetical, any more than he does to be melodious or rhythmical. He
+approaches these qualities and results as it were from beneath, and
+always indirectly; they are drawn to him, not he to them; and if they
+appear absent from his page at first, it is because we have been looking
+for them in the customary places on the outside, where he never puts
+them, and have not yet penetrated the interiors. As many of the fowls
+hide their eggs by a sort of intuitive prudery and secretiveness,
+Whitman always half hides, or more than half hides, his thought, his
+glow, his magnetism, his most golden and orbic treasures.
+
+Finally, as those men and women respect and love Walt Whitman best who
+have known him longest and closest personally, the same rule will apply
+to "Leaves of Grass" and the later volume, "Two Rivulets." It is indeed
+neither the first surface reading of those books, nor perhaps even the
+second or third, that will any more than prepare the student for the
+full assimilation of the poems. Like Nature, and like the Sciences, they
+suggest endless suites of chambers opening and expanding more and more
+and continually.
+
+
+INDEX
+
+    [Transcribist's note:  Index has been shortened to names
+    of authors and to birds, with scientific names.]
+
+  Aeschylus
+  Akers, Elizabeth.
+  Apuleius.
+  Audubon, John Jaines.
+
+  Bacon, Francis.
+  Benton, Myron.
+  Bible.
+  Bittern, American (_Botaurus lentiginosus_).
+  Bjoernson, Bjoernstjerne.
+  Blackbird, cow, or cowbird (_Molothrus ater_).
+  Blackbird, European.
+  Bluebird (_Sialia sialis_).
+  Bobolink (_Dolichonyx oryzivorus_).
+  Bryant, William Cullen.
+  Buchanan, Robert.
+  Bunting, snow, or snowflake (_Passerina nivalis_).
+  Burke, Edmund.
+  Burns, Robert.
+  Byron, Lord.
+
+  Cardinal. See Grosbeak, cardinal.
+  Carlyle, Thomas.
+  Cedar-bird, or cedar waxwing (_Ampelis cedrorum_).
+  Chat, yellow-breasted (_Icteria virens_).
+  Chewink, or towhee (_Pipilo erythrophthalmus_).
+  Chickadee (_Parus atricapillus_).
+  Cicada.
+  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.
+  Cowper, William.
+  Crow, American (_Corvis brachyrhynchos_).
+  Cuckoo, American.
+  Cuckoo, European.
+  Dante.
+  Darwin, Charles.
+  Dove, mourning (_Zenaidura macroura_).
+
+  Eagle.
+  Emerson, Ralph Waldo.
+  Everett, Edward.
+
+  Flagg, Wilson.
+  Flicker. See High-hole.
+  Flycatcher, great crested (_Myiarchus crinitus_).
+  Frogs. See Hyla.
+
+  Gilder, Richard Watson.
+  Grasshopper of Greek poetry.
+  Grosbeak, cardinal, or cardinal (_Cardinalis cardinalis_).
+  Grosbeak, pine (_Pinicola enucleator leucura_).
+  Grouse, ruffed (_Bonasa umbellus_).
+
+  Hamerton, Philip Gilbert.
+  Hawk.
+  High-hole, or yellow-hammer, or golden-shafted woodpecker, or
+     flicker (_Colaptes auratus luteus_).
+  Hogg, James.
+  Homer.
+  Hood, Thomas.
+  Hornets, black.
+  Hudson River valley.
+  Hummingbird, ruby-throated (_Trochilus colubris_).
+  Hyla, green.
+  Hyla, Pickering's.
+
+  Ingelow, Jean.
+
+  Jefferson, Thomas.
+  Jonson, Ben.
+
+  Keats, John.
+  Kingbird (_Tyrannus tyrannus_).
+
+  Lamb, Charles.
+  Lark.  See Skylark.
+  Lark, shore or horned (_Otocoris alpestris_).
+  Lathrop, George Parson.
+  Lincoln, Abraham.
+  Lizard.
+  Locust.
+  Logan, John.
+  Loon (_Gavia imber_).
+  Lowell, James Russell.
+  Lyly, John.
+
+  Macaulay, Thomas Babington.
+  Meadowlark (_Sturnella magna_).
+  Michael Angelo.
+  Milton, John.
+  Mockingbird (_Mimus polyglottos_).
+
+  Oriole, Baltimore (_Icterus galbula_).
+  Oven-bird, or golden-crowned thrush (_Seiurus aurocapillus_).
+  Owl.
+
+  Partridge. See Grouse, ruffed.
+  Pewee, wood (_Contopus virens_).
+  Phaedrus.
+  Phoebe-bird (_Sayornis phoebe_).
+  Pigeon, passenger (_Ectopistes migratorius_).
+  Pipit, American, or titlark (_Anthus pensilvanicus_).
+  Pipit, Sprague's (_Anthus spragueii_).
+  Pope, Alexander.
+
+  Quail, or bob-white (_Colinus virginianus_).
+
+  Redpoll (_Acanthis linaria_).
+  Robin, American (_Merula migratoria_).
+
+  Sandpiper, spotted, or "tip-up" (_Actitis macularia_).
+  Sandpipers.
+  Shelley, Percy Bysshe.
+
+  Snake.
+  Snake, garter.
+  Socrates.
+  Solomon.
+  Sparrow, social or chipping (_Spizella socialis_).
+  Sparrow, song (_Melospiza cinerea melodia_).
+  Sparrow, tree or Canada (_Spizella monticola_).
+  Sparrow, vesper (_Pooecetes gramineus_).
+  Sparrow, white-crowned (_Zonotrichia leucophrys_).
+  Sparrow, white-throated (_Zonotrichia albicollis_).
+  Spenser.
+  Strawberry.
+  Sugar-berry.
+  Swallow, barn (_Hirundo erythrogastra_).
+  Swallow, chimney, or chimney swift (_Chaetura pelagica_).
+  Swallow, cliff (Petrochellidon lunifrons).
+  Swift, chimney.  See Swallow.
+
+  Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe.
+  Tennyson, Alfred.
+  Thaxter, Celia.
+  Thomson, James.
+  Thoreau, Henry D..
+  Thrasher, brown, or long-tailed thrush (_Toxostoma rufum_).
+  Thrush, golden-crowned. See Ovenbird.
+  Thrush, hermit (_Hylocichla guttata pallasii_).
+  Thrush, wood (_Hylocichla mustelina_).
+  Tip-up. See Sandpiper, spotted.
+  Titlark. See Pipit, American.
+  Townee. See Chewink.
+  Trowbridge, John T.
+  Turgenieff.
+  Turner, J. M. W.
+  Turtles.
+
+  Warbler, pine (_Dendroica vigorsii_).
+  Water-thrush.
+  Whip-poor-will (_Antrostomus vociferous_).
+  Whitman, Walt.
+  Whittier, John Greenleaf.
+  Wilde, Richard Henry.
+  Wilson, Alexander.
+  Woodchuck.
+  Woodpecker, downy (_Dryobates pubescens medianus_).
+  Woodpecker, golden-shafted. See High-hole.
+  Woodpecker, hairy (_Dryobates villosus_).
+  Woodpecker, red-headed (_Melanerpes erythrocephalus_).
+  Wordsworth, William.
+  Wren, house (_Troglodytes aedon_).
+
+  Yellow-hammer. See High-hole.
+  Yellow-throat, Maryland, or northern yellow-throat (_Geothlypis
+     trichas brachidactyla_).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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