feathered thing have the British Isles ever had to compare with the bustard? Yet, except as a course in Prior's dinner, I have not met with it among the bards. The coot, an ugly name, perhaps, is significant of sequestered water-ways and all the stillness of undisturbed pools-artists delight in it-but, except Scott and Burns, no poets use it. Or, as expressing all the spirit of the warm stillness of the summer evening, what is so vivid as the corncrake's name? Yet how often shall we find it outside of Scotch clover in the poems of Burns and Grahame? Or, as expressing the quiet gloom. of the woodland in the moth-time, what more striking than the word "night-jar?" Yet only once (in Gilbert White, a naturalist) do we find it, finely supplementing the worn-out old owl. Fortunately for the kingfisher, it is also "the halcyon," or it might have been as infrequent as that fantastic dryad, the woodpecker, one of the most poetical of English birds. We have volumes about the obtrusive (and delightful) skylark, but barely a page about its peerless kinsman, the modest and exquisite wood-lark. It is the most beautiful songster that we can call English, and the one and only bird to whom the nightingale himself cannot give a note or presume to suggest a beauty. In short, without going further into the inquiry, I confess it very difficult to admit that "sensibility to natural beauty" is an essential for the production of poetry; and, while allowing that the possession of imagination may supersede in great part the necessity for observation, that it emancipates the poet from many trammels, that it often transfigures and beautifies the prosaic, that it does all this, and very much more, I am reluctant to concede to the poets the prerogative of ignoring, or the privilege of misinterpreting, the suggestions of Nature. She sings too plainly and too truly to be misunderstood or improved upon. Everybody in the British Isles knows "the lyric blackbird," and has at one time or another admired its "carol" as being "blithe," and heard it "warble clear and strong. But the poets, with that exceptional sympathy with Nature which they claim, might almost have been expected to express in their verse some larger measure of admiration than the vulgar thus easily attain to. They know it as a "summer bird," and have observed it in the "thorny brake," "the woodland,” and “"the vale." But is it not a spring and an autumn, and, above all, a winter bird too-thereby setting the vagrant nightingale an example? And does it not beautify with its winning ways and rich song the orchard, and shrubbery, and lawn, as well as those wild places which the nightingale and other songsters haunt? Surely, from their divine resources the poets might have had a better word to say for this lovely bird, which flutes as exquisitely to the brick-and-mortar heart of London as to its own fragrant thicket; this pet of the poor, that may be heard shaking out its voice from the garret-window of a slum like some evangelist from a happier life, until the impure air seems to lift from about its cage and the full-throated captive makes a clear blue sky above itself and calls up all the gracious pomp of the woodlands round it. The blackbird is the very model of what a poet himself should be. Yet the poets, though consistent and kindly towards this bird, are commonplace and inadequate. Its name, "the merle," is itself a sweet symphony, and often helps the bards to a grace, while every line borrows an echo of melody from the mere reference to its song. With the thrush, also, most British poets are on intimate terms. This beautiful bird, however, seems to be too often only the other half of the blackbird as it were, its counterfoil and complement. The blackbird throws a thrush shadow. The mavis' song is chiefly admired as in antiphony to the merle's. But I am not at all sure that this relative subordination is fair to either individual. In Nature, it is true, blackbirds and thrushes" are very constantly 66 together, and so far the poets are justified, but lovers of Nature will as soon acquiesce in the immersion of the thrush in the blackbird, or vice versa, as in the consumption of either as food. Was ever the sweet myrtle so wickedly abused as in Sardinia, where they use it as a pickle for thrushes! No bird, or family of birds, has given more beautiful lines, similes, illustrations, metaphors, and ideas than the pleiad of "the doves;" yet the poets know absolutely nothing about them. As domestic poultry-" pigeons "they saw they were greedy, quarrelsome, and wanton; but the wild bird was a complete secret to them. They speak of it as a solitary fowl, generally a widow, of most melancholy disposition, that lives under a sense of grievous injuries received, and goes in fear of her life, being perpetually "pounced "2 by something or other. When mated she is an exemplar to the woods of chastity; when widowed, a model to the whole world of constancy and fidelity to the memory of the deceased. She is usually "silver;" but her neck frequently glows with iridescent tints, perpetually changing, and she is otherwise distinguished by a "homely song." Her chief characteristic is her solitariness; and "forlorn," "widowed," "melancholy," "pensive," "moaning," "dolorous," "plaining," "wailfu"," "miserable," "wretched," "sobbing," and "mournfully hoarse" are sufficient to illustrate this. Next comes the idea of her constancy in affection-it is needless to accummulate epithets and, indeed, it is distinctly stated again and again that this constancy is only to be found in dovesespecially "turtles." What a 66 turtle is, the poets cannot agree. Some 1 Ring-dove, wood-dove, wood-pigeon, stock-dove, cushat, turtledove, pigeon. The Pleiades "pounced " by Orion were changed into doves and sent up out of harm's way among the stars. make it the male of "the dove," others the female of the "stock-dove," and others again the male or female of the ring-dove; while the stock-dove and ring-dove are similarly mis-mated in bewildering combinations, the general result being as delightful a confusion of three wholly distinct species of birds as even poets could wish for. Of the rest of the poets' dove fictions-how they had no galls, and were thus "serenely mild;" how they built nests of exceptional cosiness; how "clowns" cruelly carry away these nests in their hands (the delicious idea of it!); how vultures chase them, and so forth-I have not space to speak. But, after all, does not "dove," the Christabel of the birds, rhyme delightfully with "love?" and where, after all, are we to expect to find pretty errors perpetuated if not in the Unnatural History of the poets. But it is a pity the poets did not know that a dove's "nest" was about as cosy as a box of matches spilt on a mantelpiece. Next on my present list comes the eagle; but if I begin, where shall I end? The poetical literature of "Columbia's bird" will fill a solid volume. Indeed, the very word in itself is so beautiful, that I can easily understand the poets delighting in its use. And what a splendid thing it grows, this eagle, under their inspired pens! So splendid, indeed, that Nature borrows the supreme epithet of its name"eagle skies," "eagle-baffling mountains," "eagle tempests "the cloud borrows its wings, the sun its eyes. It towers over-head "the feathered king" and "bird of Jove," "royal," "wide-ruling," "imperial," "thunder-grasping," "Olympian," "lord of land and sea." It is the captain of nations, and has Victory for a slave. It lends its dignifying name to majesty and to science, to religion, philosophy, history, and song. It symbolises triumph and dominion, and is the emblem of pride and of noble ambition, of chivalry, of fame, and of Freedom! Its flight is the supreme comparison for strength and speed, for distance and for height. Discord in nature reaches its climax when the slumber of the eagle is disturbed, Under the shadow of its pinions is an universal silence, a deferential peace. Yet even here, if I may do so without seeming to be profane, I would lodge a protest against the poets who make the eagle "Whom Madhava bestrides When high on eagle's plumes he rides ” eat human corpses. That it eats carrion is well knownthe gods themselves were sordid when they stooped to earth but once make the eagle the boon-companion of the vulture, the hyena, and the jackal, and all sympathy with the great bird is choked. I would also venture to remonstrate with Shelley, the poet of freedom and the eagle, for speaking of it as feeding on flower seeds. The poet wished to account for the growth of some vegetable stuff on the pinnacle of a crag of prodigious height. He would not admit that any other bird but the eagle could have flown to such a height, and therefore (knowing that birds are one of the recognised agencies in nature for the diffusion of seeds) he says that the day was "so calm That scarce the feathery weed Sown by some eagle on the topmost stone Nor should the eagle be called "lily white." At worst it is golden. The nightingale, in itself a poem, has hatched hundreds -so many, indeed, that the subject overwhelms me. Some of these are notoriously of exquisite beauty, and yet there has been enough fustian written about the bird to make Keats' "eyes dissolve in woe" and Milton "roar." Do poets ever read each other? From the monotony of their repetitions about nightingales alone, I should be inclined. |