THE POETS' BIRDS.

PART I

The hosts of birds that wing the liquid air (Dryden); The glossy kind (Thomson); The plumy people: The plumy race (Thomson); Plumy tribes (Grahame); Light tenants of the empty air; tenants of the sky (Thomson); Winged dwellers on the leas (Grahame); Featheredchoir (Akenside, Gay, Watts); Plumy songsters (Savage); The feathered throng, who pay their quitrents with a song (Green); Lovely minstrels of the fields (Watts); The feathered people of the boughs (Mackay); Commoners of air (Burns); Free guests of earth and sky (Hemans); The feathered tribe (Wilson); The woodland choir (Grahame); The wanderers of heaven (Thomson); Tribes of the air (Hemans); Poets of the vernal groves (Armstrong); Companions of the spring (Dryden); Feathered minstrels (Clare); Summer birds (Cowper, Shelley); Painted birds (Shelley); Winged foresters (Cunningham); Tuneful choir (Crabbe); Happy tenants of the shade (Cowley).

THEIR friends have claimed for the poets that they are the chief ministers and high priests of Nature. They are said to be in exceptional communion with her; to be her "interpreters," her "favourites," and her "children." Indeed, the poets have repeatedly claimed as much for themselves

"Where's the poet? Show him, show him,
Muses Nine, that I may know him.

'Tis the man who with a man

Is an equal, be he king

Or poorest of the beggar-clan,

Or any other wondrous thing

That may be 'twixt ape and Plato;
'Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren or eagle, finds the way to
All its instincts. He hath heard

The lion roaring, and can tell
What his horny throat expresseth;
And to him the tiger's yell
Comes articulate, and presseth

On his ear like mother tongue."

But, none the less, I fear that much might be found in English poetry to support any one who should say that, as a class, the bards are not only inadequately informed as to the ordinary objects in nature, but curiously unfair towards those which they profess to understand.

This holds good only of British poets, Tennyson excepted; for the poetry of America marks a perfectly new departure from the stereotyped, artificial, and unsympathetic treatment of natural objects which characterises British verse. America, perhaps, is too large to tolerate prejudices, or it may be that a specific variation in the intellectual conditions of the West develops a corresponding variation in the poetic tone. Her poets cannot go to an antique heraldry for grotesque fancies about beasts which heralds had never heard of, nor to classical myths for whimsical ideas about birds which were unknown to Greece and Rome. They are protected, therefore, to a certain extent, from any "hereditary taint" of prejudice, and have fewer temptations than European poets towards the logicians' "fallacy from antiquity." But this does not suffice to explain that universal kindliness towards "the speechless world" which is conspicuous in the works of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Bryant, and Whittier; that tender gospel of sympathy, of which Buddha was the Messiah, and Edwin Arnold is the latest evangelist. Now this sympathy, coextensive with Nature, which I find common to all the poets of America, is one of the rarest of traits in the poets of England. The latter, it seems to me (and I have carefully examined two hundred volumes of their verse), are

seldom in true accord with Nature, and seldom, therefore, in her fullest confidence.

Science, as an American writer has said, is unsatisfactory, inasmuch as it does not permit sentiment in its treatment of natural objects; but even conceding the essayist to be right, it is also certain that poetry is hardly more satisfactory when it shows an unnecessary disregard of scientific facts. All who love the poetry in Nature better than the poetry out of it will admit this.

Poetical license of course excuses much, and in homage to the true aim of poetry almost anything may be condoned. But even poetical license must confess to laws, and, like Nature herself in her most wayward moods, must never permit the extension of an idea except in the direction of its natural progression. It must be produced in a straight line only. There must be no kinks in it, no eccentric liberties taken. When Nature made a bat she availed herself of a lawful license; but when poets call the bat "a bird," they go beyond the justifiable. If a bard is not content with. merely saying that the eagle stares at the sun, but goes on to add that its sight pierces through the sun and beyond it, his extension is in a straight line; or if another, describing the raven riding on the crest of the swiftly-moving storm, speaks of it as hastening the storm, there is an admissible and pleasing prolongation, so to speak, of the original idea. But when the vulture, because it is opposed to the dove in general character, is made (as by Savage) to chase the dove and catch it; or when, the sea having becoming calm, the sea-gulls begin (as in Mallet) to "warble," we resent the liberty taken by the bard, for it is eccentric, and out of the regular plane of Nature's procedure.

It will no doubt be also pleaded, in justification of poetical license, that the writers are often only pursuing "points of high prescription," and following up old tradition. The plea is admissible, for no one can be displeased with any effort to

preserve the delightful fancies of antiquity. But the poets should sometimes save themselves by an aiunt, or at all events they should not go beyond the original myth. It is a poor compliment to the fable of the bird of paradise, that it sleeps on the wing, to stretch the same privilege as Cowper does to the swallow; nor is it respectful to the legend of the pelican to exaggerate her act into one of self-destruction. She fed her young from her breast, so tradition pretended, to save them from starvation. But she did not obviously give them "her life's blood," for that would have precipitated the very catastrophe which the poor mother tried so painfully to avert. Now these, I take it, are abuses of tradition, and opposed to that tender reverent trusteeship of old-world bird-lore which we look for in the poets. Let them, by all means, perpetuate the pretty "wisdom of the ancients." But they must not add to it for their present purpose, nor take from it to suit their text.

Nor again, when following the fictions of Greece and Rome, does it look well in a poet that he should have no gold of his own to set their jewels in. The swan on the water is a thing of surpassing grace, yet what a sterile majority of our bards see in it only the fowl that sings before death! Is there no poetry in the contemporary kingfisher, that it should never be anything but the "brooding halcyon" of the past? Yet it would be as hard to find a poet who mentions the kingfisher in nature as one who does not mention it in fable. The real beauty of the swan's life is almost ignored; the imaginary beauty of its death is hackneyed to absurdity.

Taking the bird-world alone, it is extraordinary with what direct loss of power and beauty the poets seem to neglect the opportunities which Nature offers them for simile and illustration, ornamental epithet, or moral analogy. There are known to science more than three thousand species of

But poetry takes ken of a bare hundred, and of

even these a third are so casually mentioned that, virtually, they are useless to the text, and, so far as they contribute any special significance, force, or beauty, almost any other birds might have taken their places. The treasures of the tropics are absolutely ignored, and, in fact, Asia, Africa, and America might not exist, for all the advantage their birdwealth has been to British poets; while Europe, except where its species are British species also, is similarly neglected. Taking foreign birds, we find only six-the ostrich, bird of paradise, pelican, flamingo, ibis, and vulture,—and even these are only utilised to perpetuate half a dozen of those "pseudodoxia" which Sir Thomas Browne tried to demolish two centuries ago. The ostrich is still, with the poets, the "silliest of the feathered kind, and formed of God without a parent's mind;" the bird of paradise, not having recovered its legs yet, sleeps on the wing, and hatches its eggs in mid-air; the ibis still brandishes its "spiral neck at snakes;" the pelican goes on "opening to her young her tender breast;" and the vulture continues to "spring from the cliff upon the passing dove." Such, then, may be said to be the sum of the English poets' study of foreign bird-life and except in the case of cage-birds, such as cockatoos, macaws, canaries, parrots—the aggregate of the beauty they can find in the lessons taught and similes pointed by many hundreds of feathered things. The humming-birds, poems each one of them; the magnificent hornbills, miracles of plumage; the sun-birds, a very regalia of feathered gems; the astonishing trogons and their painted kin; the glittering lories and toucans, creatures of paradise; the pheasants of Asia, cast in gold and silver, and jewelled on every feather; the multitude of beautiful water-fowl that haunt the great rivers of the world, the Amazon and Nile and Ganges streams; the wondrous birds of prey, the condors and lammergeyers of Alp and Andes, -all are wasted alike. Yet surely, if only for their surpassing beauty of plumage and