or character of, say, vultures or ostriches. But this being granted, it need not follow that poets should take on trust -on the authority, too, of professed and acknowledged nonsense the most unfavourable views of the natures and habits of those birds. The poet's instinct, I take it, should be towards perpetual kindliness. I do not mean towards that sentimentalism which leads men to wring their hands over partridge-shooting: "Thus the Cyprian goddess weeping, and to gush over "the lesser celandine," but a perfectly healthy sympathy with Nature, which refuses under any circumstances to call vultures "loathsome" and ostriches "unnatural." Yet nearly all the poets who refer to these birds do so in these or in similar terms, and, to add to the original offence of ever entertaining such opinions, they give reasons for doing so. As if it justifies abuse of vultures to say that one "gnawed the liver of Prometheus!" "The sad pelican-subject divine say Marvell. And yet, but for one very notable exception, the poets' pelican might be summed up as an "indulgent desert-bird," that kills herself to feed her young. The absurdity of this might have been supposed immense enough even to strike a poet; but no-one after the other we find them insisting on the mother pelican sacrificing her life in order to give her children a single meal. It was well enough for Savage to say "In the soft pelican is love expressed, Who opens to the young her tender breast." But those who extend this devotion into self-destruction stretch the idea too far. Thus Moore, so often an enemy to sense, sings "No, thy chains as they rankle, thy blood as it runs, The "notable exception" alluded to above is, of course, Montgomery's lengthy poem, "The Pelican Island," in which the "solen pellicon" receives such elaborate delineation as has scarcely fallen to the lot of any other bird in all the range of poetry. For the most part the natural history of the poem is of a high order, and this, too, without detracting materially from the beauty of the passages in which we meet with a very unpoet-like accuracy. This remarkable poem rescues the pelican very effectually from the category of totally neglected birds. Otherwise, it would only have lived in verse as a "desert-bird” (which it is not) that commits suicide out of affection—which it does not. "His crest, an ibis brandishing her beak, And winding in loose folds her spiral neck." Garth's solitary reference to the ibis-a bird upon which rested so much of the superstition of old Egypt-is a striking instance of the curious preferences shown by the poets. The sanctity and mystic potencies of the ibis are among the earliest records of bird-lore, and its absence from poetry can only be accounted for by its corresponding absence from heraldry; Garth's single reference to the bird resulting from his own creation of an imaginary crest. Another illustration of the same caprice as to birds is the complete silence of our poets as to the flamingo, and except again in Montgomery's admirable lines (and an incidental allusion in Shelley) I do not know where I should look for it between Chaucer and Wordsworth. "Wading through marshes where the rank sea-weed On stately legs with far-exploring eye; Watched by their sentinels, whose clarion scream Nor paused till, on some lonely coast alighting, The flamingo is not, of course, a bird that our poets need be expected to know well, seeing how little they know of their own nightingales and doves, but it is well worth noting how, while they ignore such notable birds as the ibis and flamingo, they should conspire to immortalise the "sic-sac" plover. One of the most conspicuous curiosities of natural history is, no doubt, the friendly alliance between Leviathan and the "sic-sac" plover "The bold bird on the banks of the Nile, That picks the teeth of the dire crocodile." Herodotus was the first to tell Europe of this phase of Egyptian crocodile-worship, and there is nothing to add. to his account. The sic-sac, finding the crocodile asleep. with its jaws open, flits round the reptile's head, hawking for insects that infest its maw, and even pecks up those that have settled inside the jaws, the crocodile lying as placid and contented during the soothing operation as a cow when starlings are keeping off flies from her face. Spenser, curiously enough, cites the procedure of the sic-sac as an instance of the small compelling the great, making it enter the jaws of Leviathan as a conqueror rather than a humble minister: "Besides the fruitfull shore of muddie Nile Soon came a little bird called Tedula, Upon his jaws that with black vermine swell; I am not sure that this extension of the natural parable, itself so very poetical, is attended with any advantage. Nor does Moore's translation of it benefit the original fact. "The puny bird that dares with teasing hum is the poet's characteristically inaccurate reference to the sic-sac, for he makes the error of supposing it—from its legendary name of trochilus-to be a "humming" bird. It does not "hum" at all, its one utterance being "sicsac." He then says it is "teasing," when, of course, it is especially comforting to Leviathan, and is present at the banquet by his express invitation. The real point, therefore, and that which the poets carefully avoid, is the existence of such a very curious league and compact, for mutual comfort, between such two incongruous creatures. The stork has very few, but they are all thoroughly appreciative, references; for even Quarles' "chattering" is meant in a complimentary sense-that the bird is sociable and of a chatty kind. They are "by God's appointment" the birds of "Lebanon's aspiring pride of cedars,” and, wherever nesting, are "by liberty and peace carest." Their migrations are considered, perhaps from the size of the birds, to be something more intelligent than ordinary; and, while several poets ask in wonder how the stork can possibly make their plans as they do, one poet boldly attributes to them "human virtues." They are, moreover, the emblems of "true piety" (for the poets still hold with the myth of the young stork carrying its mother about on its back), and of liberty. But why of Liberty they do not explain. GOLDFINCH. Finch of crimson face.-Hurdis: Favourite Village. The gowdspink, music's gayest child.—Burns: Petition. Time was when I was free as air, I perched at will on every spray, My form genteel, my plumage gay, My strains for ever new.-Cowper: Goldfinch. The goldfinch on a thistle head Stood scattering seedlets as she fed.-Ingelow: Scholar. I love to see the little goldfinch pluck The groundsel's feathered seed, and twit and twit, I would not hold him pris'ner for the world. -Hurdis: Village Curate. Whence knew the sprightly gold-pinion'd finch, Of ruddy countenance and wiry beak, And coat of sleekest umber, his fond art To line with locks and pave with neatest love Fast to the blushing apple's forked branch, -Hurdis: Favourite Village. Sometimes goldfinches one by one will drop |