Part 18 (1/1)
Perhaps the poet in Mr Burroughs is nowhere more plainly seen than in his descriptions of bird life, yet how accurately he gives their salient points; he represents the bird as an object in natural history, but ah! howa bird as Ellery Channing described one, as so with ”a few feathers, a hole at one end and a point at the other, and a pair of wings”! We see the bird Mr Burroughs sees; we hear the one he hears Long before I had thewith hiht to the slow, divine chant of the hermit thrush, I had heard it inin ”Wake-Robin” It does, indeed, seem to be ”the voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one attains to in his best ht, the pomp of cities and the pride of civilization of a truth seem trivial and cheap
What a near, human interest our author makes us feel in the birds, hoatch their courtshi+ps, hoe peer into their nests, and how lively is our solicitude for their helpless young swung in their ”procreant cradles,” beset on all sides by foes that fly and creep and glide! And not only does hejoyously to the ear, while all nature sings blithely to the eye We see the bird, not as a ht blue, belly white, breast ruddy brown, s black,” as the textbooks have it, but as a thing of life and beauty: ”Yonder bluebird with the earth tinge on his breast and the sky tinge on his back,--did he co when he told us so softly and plaintively that, if we pleased, spring had co this matchless description of the bluebird that does not feel the retreat of winter, that does not feel his pulse quicken with the pro, that does not feel that the bird did, indeed, come down out of heaven, the heaven of hope and proh the skies are still bleak, and the winds still cold? Who, indeed, except those prosaic beings who are blind and deaf to the s in life?
”I heard a bluebird this et momentarily her hearer's incapacity for enthusiasm ”Well, and did it sound any different from what it did last year, and the year before, and the year before that?” inquired in measured, world-wearied tones the dampener of ardors No, my poor friend, it did not And just because it sounded the sas since life was young, it touched a chord in one's heart thatyou poor, indeed, if this dear fa once more
THE END