its head in the sand, and its desertion of its eggs, the poets can find no use for the ostrich, no opportunity for a compli ment. Yet in this one bird centres much of the poetry of the Arabs, and half the romance of the deserts. Against the peacock there is evidently a grudge,—it may be even a sort of unworthy envy. At any rate, the poets, tedious as courtiers can be in their compliments to "Juno's bird," are often very bitter towards it,—when the goddess is out of the way. Their peacock's legs seem always sticking out of their peacock's feathers. It is gorgeous, they grant willingly, but it uses its splendour to "affront the daylight," and "swagger" over other birds. It is stately. This they readily admit, but its stride easily becomes a "strut" and "perke." Its voice, never pleasant, is made the worst of, as are its legs and feet. One quotation-it is the very finest of all their references to this bird-may stand alone in illustration of the strange reluctance of the poets to give the peacock unqualified praise. It is an admirable passage"That self-applauding bird, the peacock, see; Mark what a sumptuous pharisee is he ! Meridian sunbeams tempt him to unfold His radiant glories, azure, green, and gold; He treads as if, some solemn music near, His measured step was governed by his ear, And seems to say, ‘Ye meaner fowl, give place; I am all splendour, dignity, and grace.' Not so the pheasant on his charms presumes, Though he too has a glory in his plumes; He, Christian-like, retreats with modest mien To the close copse or far sequestered green, And shines without desiring to be seen." The parrot, "an odious libel on the human voice," affords, with its other caged kindred, an easy butt for the poets, who industriously repeat after each other the jests about the "trivial mimic," that, "fraught with antics," "fine and gay, is kept to strut, look big, and talk alway." But 1 why call Poll "a jack-pudding?" Had the poets only know that in the East the parrot is the bird of love, that Kama, the Oriental Cupid, always rides on one, what pretty changes would have been rung on the pretty theme! As it is, Prior no doubt thought it a bold flight of fancy, when. singing Mira's parrot, to say "The queen of beauty shall forsake the dove; e did not know, apparently, that for some thousands of years the parrot had already been "the bird of love" for bif the world. Last on my present list is the vulture. Unlovely, but innocent in nature, it becomes in poetry the incarnation of cruel greed, a thing of crime and blood and horror. I have } wish to beautify the vulture, but, on the other hand, I cannot acquiesce in the poets' terrible indictment. They make it "ominous" and "gloomy," "hungry" and "thirsty" for blood, "greedy," "cruel." It is the "death-bird" of Shelley. Thoughts too vile for utterance are "vulturethoughts" (Shakespeare), and folly too malignant for hope is "vulture-folly" (Shenstone). A "vulture-grasp" (Scott) is that which is wicked and cruel and lustful; a vultureeye" (Mallet, Macaulay), that which gloats over the horrible, or on coming disaster, greedy for its own advantage. therefrom. "The rage of the vulture" (Byron) is a synonym for ferocious and guilty fury; and Shelley gives "victorious wrong" a "vulture-scream.' It symbolises in Granville despair, and in Gay carnage. This is all undeniable poetry, but it is all injustice, because out of sympathy with Nature. And Nature is far more poetical than even the poets. In the previous paragraphs I have touched upon the British poets' inadequate recognition of certain large groups B of indigenous birds (notably the sea-fowl and birds of prey), their complete neglect of "foreign" ornithology, anump their apparent want of sympathy with certain individual species, such as the crow, owl, goose, and raven, which are both domestic and foreign. Under these heads I elimina Ved from the poets' repertory all the most Unpopular birds, this reserving for the present chapter some fifty kinds,1 whi together comprise the professedly Popular Birds of Poetr 1 For the larger half of these, which live in verse only by a single epithet or solitary phrase, a very few lines will suffice to pass them in review. Thus "the mellow bllfinch," that "whistles soft a flute-like note;" "the prudent crane," that "steers an embody'd flight;" the "clamr ing" crake," among the clover hay;" "the sooty" colfi, "that dives merry in the lake;" the "screaming" curl; the "timorous" field-fare (supposed by Scott to nest in Scotland); the goldfinch, "music's gayest child," and reproved by the poets for its pride in its "gaudy" feathers; the greenfinch, "in its green array;" the "dingy" marten, "by children, till of late, held sacred;" the ousel, "peering through a wave," and singing a "sad" ditty; the stork, "in serious assembly," "consulting deep and various;" the "amusive " swift, in "giddy, rapid flight;" and "the soft wren," "light rustling among sere leaves. and twigs." But among the remainder are some important fowlsimportant both from their overwhelming frequency in the poets' pages and from their pertinence to my present purpose. In the previous pages, it will be seen, I have ventured upon a charge against the British poets (down to our contemporaries) that they had neglected Nature, as 1 Viz., bullfinch, crane, corncrake, coot, curlew, fieldfare, goldfinch, greenfinch, marten, ousel, rook, stork, swift, wren, blackbird and thrush, cuckoo, doves, eagles, heron, kingfisher, larks, linnets, nightingale, robin, swan, swallow, sparrow, woodpecker, game-birds. represented in the bird-world, and had not shown themselves in sympathy with her. "Not only," I said, "is their ornithological range too limited, but even within that range their sympathy is inadequate ;" and to illustrate this, I noticed the poets' "waste" of some thousand and odd foreign birds, and of two thirds of their own British species (among them many of the most beautiful and picturesque kinds); their disregard of specific sea-fowl; their prejudice against the raptorial clans; and, finally, their uncalled-for incivility towards certain individual fowls. But as these were their Unpopular birds, and employed designedly for the illustration of the darker sides of life, their prejudices-if it were possible to justify prejudices. of such a kind in a poet-might be considered, in a way, to be thrust upon them by circumstances. But I find that the poets are not less deficient in generous sympathy when they come to speak of their popular species; and this being the case, I consider the variation in poetic tone, observable in American poetry, becomes very noteworthy. Tennyson and Morris are always tender, and therefore true to Nature and "the speechless world;" but with such conspicuous modern, and one or two earlier, exceptions, the whole range of British poetry seems to me to betray a systematised lack of sympathy with the natural world, which is expressed in formulated prejudices. Now, American poetry is always tender to things in fur and feathers; and this, too, with such an engaging pitifulness, that I hope to devote a special chapter to the illustration of this Buddhistic kindliness and its probable explanation. In the meantime, I have the British poets and their treatment of their favourite birds before me. These are (excluding those already reviewed above) the blackbird and thrush, farmyard poultry, game-birds, doves and eagles, nightingale, cuckoo, larks and linnets, robin, swan and swallow, so that this short list includes no fewer than six 1 out of the eight species that we may call the poets "stock-in-trade birds," and the greater proportion, therefore, of their everyday working ornithology. Whenever a dash of the country has to be added to a poem, one or other of these six is sure to be called upon, and every poet therefore keeps on hand a white-necked swan to sing before it dies, and a proud, fierce eagle to stare at the sun and grasp thunder, a melancholy dove (by preference a "turtle ") to bemoan its widowhood, a blithe lark to "upspring," and a lorn nightingale to tell her sorrows to the moon, and a linnet—to make itself generally useful, whenever there are bushes about. But though the poets avail themselves thus liberally of these birds, they do not deal liberally by them. For not only do they offend them by depreciatory errors of factwhich in no way benefit their verse; but they are often singularly inadequate in their general treatment of them-which undeniably injures it. Shelley, by himself, has exhausted the skylark, and the poets, between them, have superadded a beauty to the nightingale and a dignity to the eagle. But with these exceptions, every one of the popular birds has, it seems to me, some ground of complaint. To notice first those who suffer most from neglect-are there no lessons to be taught by the bustard, or the heron, or the osprey, or the stormy petrel? or is there no "soul of beauty" in the kingfisher, and the curlew, and the woodpecker, that the poets should avoid them? Surely the heron, as being solitary, would sometimes give more to a line than "stock-dove," and the curlew, as sadly lamenting, more than "the turtle." Scott had heard the curlews scream, and Burns too, but (except Gilbert White) I would not be certain that any other poet beautifies a line with this bird's picturesque and suggestive name. Or, for wild proud freedom, what 1 Dove, lark, linnet, nightingale, eagle, swan—and the owl and raven noticed in our previous chapter. |