Poets and Birds: A Criticism

The Birds of Killingworth.

THE author of three articles recently published, The Poets’ Birds (Atlantic Monthly, June, 1882), Foreign Birds and English Poets (Contemporary Review, October, 1882), and Our Birds and their Poets (Harper’s Magazine, February, 1883) brings against British poets the charge that they are almost entirely destitute of that “ universal kindliness toward the speechless world,” that “ sympathy co-extensive with nature,” which he “finds common to all the poets of America.” This is proved, he says, by their ignorance of ornithology, their injustice to birds, and their general neglect of the bird-world.

For any one to be justified in making this charge, he must himself have a knowledge of ornithology sufficient to enable him to approach accuracy in the statement of scientific facts, great familiarity with the poets, and a standard of criticism which should be clearly defined in his own mind, and which he should be able to make fairly intelligible to his readers.

An examination of these articles will enable us to judge to what extent the author’s statements and opinions are entitled to consideration.

“ There are,” he says, “ known to science more than three thousand species of birds.” But Sclater and Salvin make over three thousand and five hundred in the neotropical region alone, including South America, the West Indies, and Central America. And this is less than half the number represented in the private collection of Count Turati, who recently died in Milan, which consisted of specimens belonging to seven thousand two hundred species (Count Salvadori in The Ibis, October, 1881) ; while Gray’s Hand-List, the latest published (1871), contains the names of over eleven thousand then known to science.

Again, our author says, “ The poets have wasted some two thousand exotic birds,” and names six that they have “ utilized.” So, of the more than three thousand known to science, he reckons as belonging to Great Britain about one thousand, or one third of the whole. But the number of British species, according to Harting’s Handbook (1872), is only three hundred and ninety-five (including one hundred and thirty-five rare and accidental visitants), or less than one twenty-eighth of the number recorded by Gray. The writer also gives a “complete list,” seventy-six in all, of the species of British birds found in the eighty poets “carefully examined” by him. A “curious list” he calls it, and a curious list it is. The very first bird which it contains, the albatross, is not a British bird ; nor is the booby; nor are the cock and the peacock, for they are domesticated fowls of nearly all civilized countries, and are not included by British ornithologists among British birds. “ Only seven seabirds,” he says; but in his own enumeration he makes ten. After naming seven, and exclaiming, “ Such are the ocean-birds of the poets! ” he immediately thinks of “sea-mews and seapies.” Then he adds: “ Not another bird is mentioned ! ” but soon after remembers the “ stormy petrel.” But why not also include swans, ducks, and geese, many of which are as really seabirds as loons and cormorants, and some of the gulls? Why not count the sandlark as well as the sea-pie ? Both of them are shore-birds, and both sometimes found inland.

According to Newton, Harting, Coues, and others, the order Rapt ores, birds of prey, contains three families : Vulturidæ, or Cathartidæ, vultures ; Strigidæ, owls ; and Falconidæ, eagles, the osprey, falcons, hawks, kites, buzzards, and harriers.

Of these three great divisions, the writer classes as birds of prey only one family, the Falconidæ. In his first article he speaks of the condor and the lammergeyer as “ wondrous birds of prey;” but in the next article he declares that vultures are not birds of prey, apparently unaware of the fact that the condor and the lammergeyer are vultures, although they are the most distinguished species of the vulture family.

In his first article, our author gives a list of the foreign birds of the poets : the ostrich, the bird of paradise, the pelican, the flamingo, the ibis, and the vulture, — six besides cage-birds. The second, being on foreign birds, he revises the list, and adds to it the condor, the humming-bird, the stork, and the crane. Now ibis, vulture, stork, and crane are generic names, and British ornithologists have recorded one or more species of all these birds among the rare or accidental visitants in Great Britain. Naturalists do not agree about the crocodile bird of Herodotus, as to whether it is the sic-sac plover, as this writer thinks, or the black-headed plover. But since he quotes several poets who have mentioned the bird, why not include it in his enumeration of foreign birds ?

Still another list shows our author’s unique system of classification, that of the “ fearful wild-fowl ” from the “ birdland of fable,” with which the “ poets ' eke out their stock,” namely, “ the simurg and roc, gryphon and phænix, popinjay, heydegre, martlet, and allerion.” The simurg, the roc, the phænix, and the allerion are fabulous birds. Popinjay and the diminutive word martlet are names of real birds. The gryphon is a fabulous animal, a winged quadruped. It is hardly possible that any of the poets can have called it a bird. Spenser compares the red-crosse knight encountering his enemy to a “ gryfon ” encountering a dragon, but speaks of neither the gryfon nor the dragon as a bird. Nor does Milton, in his comparison of the Fiend’s course to that of a gryphon, call the latter a bird.

The list, then, contains names of four instead of eight fabulous birds, one imaginary animal not a bird, two names of real birds, and the word “ heydegre.” I have hesitated about calling heydegre a word, for to my mind it conveys no meaning. I have consulted a number of the latest and best etymological and other dictionaries for a little help, but in vain; and I am forced to believe that its occurrence in poetry cannot have been general enough to warrant any conclusions as to the poets.

The poets, according to the writer, “ sing mysteriously to modern ears of ernes, gleads, and so forth.” Why mysteriously ? Erne and glead are the more common names of the sea-eagle and the kite in some parts of Great Britain; they are in use in good prose, and by some of the best ornithological writers are the names first given in describing the birds. Glead, allied to Anglo-Saxon glidan, to glide, and supposed to have been given to the bird on account of its beautiful sailing motion, is certainly a more poetical word than kite.

The author of these articles is apparently as unfamiliar with poetry as with ornithology. “It is,” he thinks, “ 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.” Cowper nowhere intimates that the swallow sleeps on the wing. He translated a little poem by Madame Guyon on the swallow, in which we find this stanza: —

I have not seen the original, but I infer from the translation that Madame Guyon herself does not mean to say that the swallow sleeps on the wing, but simply to allude to this bird’s remarkable powers of flight, which enable it not only to take its winged food on the wing, but to sustain long-continued exertion in flying, without fatigue.

The writer also tells us that Thomson calls Alexander the Great a vulture. But it is Philip, not Alexander, to whom Thomson refers as “the Macedonian vulture ” that

A little further on we are told that Gray makes the vulture a prey-hunter. Gray makes no allusion to the vulture in connection with its prey. In one of his translations from Propertius, this line occurs : —

Even here the bird is not called a preyhunter.

In his last article, our author says, " The owl and vulture might be quite as ‘ obscene ’ in Evangeline or Mogg Megone as they are in Wordsworth or Cowper.”

Those not familiar with Cowper and Wordsworth will be surprised to learn that there is absolutely nothing in the poems of either of them to suggest such a thought. Cowper has only two references to the owl. One is merely an allusion to the roosting of owls in Yardley Oak. The other shows his kindliness of feeling towards this bird : —

Wordsworth has numerous allusions to the owl, and they show his careful and appreciative observation of it, but in none of them does the epithet “ obscene ” occur, or any word which could be forced into meaning that.

As to the vulture, Cowper nowhere refers to it in his original poems ; in his translations from other poets this bird is spoken of, but even in these it is not called obscene. Wordsworth mentions it only once. In The Excursion, the skeptic asks, —

It will be readily seen from this that the vulture is no more “ obscene " in Wordsworth than in Evangeline, or than in the Prometheus of Longfellow or the Prometheus of Lowell. I think this extract is a fair example of the way the old fable of Prometheus and the vulture has been treated by the poets.

The following references to the poets may not be quite as obviously, but are just as really, misrepresentations. In the article on foreign birds we find a quotation from Milton,

with these comments : —

“ This ‘ embody’d flight ’ of the migrating crane is a poetical image as old as the Iliad, and therefore older; but it is one to which many besides Milton have recourse, as a simile from nature for discipline and mutual reliance. It is a pity that the ‘ mutual wing ’ should be a fiction, for the idea that each bird rests its head on the back of the bird before it, in flight, is a charming one.”

The method of the cranes in flight is not a " poetical image ; ” it is a fact of natural history. Homer alludes to the flight of the crane in migrating only once, and then it is merely to compare the battle-cry of the Trojans to the cry of the cranes. He nowhere makes any allusion to the method of the flight. The “embodied flight” of Pope is, in every case, wholly gratuitous.

It would be hard to find a more comprehensive and truthful description in five lines than Milton has here given of the crane. The passage, however, is purely descriptive. It contains no “simile for discipline or mutual reliance. ” Still, the mutual wing is not a fiction ; and it is a misrepresentation of the poet to attribute to him the absurd opinion which some of the ancients are said to have entertained, that each crane, in flying, rests its head on the back of the one before it. The explanation of the phrase “ mutual wing,” so simple and natural, may be found in actual fact. It is well known that cranes, when migrating, fly in two lines, which meet in front in an acute angle. One of the number takes the lead. “It may be readily observed,” says Lloyd (Scandinavian Adventures), “ that when this individual becomes fatigued with being the first to cleave the air, it falls to the rear, and leaves the next in succession to take its post.” Brehm, in his interesting chapter on migration, gives a similar account. Thus it is that they are seen " with mutual wing easing their flight.”

Speaking of the vulture, the writer says, " Longfellow knows the bird as it is,” and one couplet from Evangeline, he thinks, " goes a long way towards refuting the hideous prejudices of our own poets, who never saw a vulture.” What., pray, was there to prevent Byron or Shelley from seeing a vulture ? Vultures have not disappeared from the land of Homer and Æschylus, or from that country the foundation of whose capital is associated with the " omen of the twelve vultures.” They are found in all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean.

Afterwards we find mention of the vultures " so admirably described in Longfellow’s well-known passage,” and are told that " Longfellow’s vultures are condors.” Longfellow may have seen vultures, but there is no reason to suppose that he was familiar with any species of this bird. Vultures are not more common in Boston and Cambridge than they are in London. If Longfellow ever saw a condor, he probably saw it in the ZoÖlogical Gardens in London. He certainly did not see it in its native haunts, for he never visited South America. But Longfellow’s vultures are not condors. The turkey buzzard is the vulture that frequents " the wonderful land at the base of the Ozark Mountains,” with the description of which the writer seems so much pleased.

In Hiawatha the vulture is used as an illustration, merely. But a vulture whose " quarry in the desert ” is a " sick or wounded bison ” cannot be a condor, for the condors belong to South America, where there are no bisons. And which of Longfellow’s passages describing the vulture " so admirably” is the one " well known ” ? Can the couplet from Evangeline, which is misquoted in the second of these articles, be the passage referred to ?

The writer quotes from the poets many expressions, — the " vulture of trouble,” " vulture revenge,” " vulture oppression,” " vulture destruction,” " vulture folly,” " vulture greed,” and in connection with them two passages in which Shelley has compared " despair,” " hate,” " famine,” " blight,” pestilence,” " war,” " earthquake,” to vultures, adding this note: “Many of these images, probably all, are as old as poetry itself. See Homer and Lucan.”

Truth is as old as the universe, and real likenesses between material and immaterial things have existed as long as the things themselves ; but for likenesses to become poetical images, they must have a definite form. Poetry is the expression of thought and feeling; and Homer did not give a form to most of these likenesses, or even to one of them, in the sense implied by the winter.

Homer represents Sarpedon and Patroclus as rushing against each other to fight, as vultures fight, screaming. Of all the allusions to the vulture in Homer, this is the nearest approach to one of " these images.” Yet here it is not the character of the warriors, nor even the state of mind causing the fight, which is compared to that of vultures. It is the action. The word here translated vultures occurs six times, and is similarly used every time. Persons are compared to vultures as to their appearance or as to what they do : thus when Ulysses and Telemachus meet, they weep more forcibly than vultures cry at the loss of their young.

When Hector said to the dying Patroclus, " Vultures shall devour thee,” he did not call attention to the vulture as a symbol of greed, but to the disgrace which Patroclus would suffer if he should not receive funeral rites ; and his mention of the vulture was only an allusion to the well-known fact that bodies lying exposed in that country became the vultures’ prey. The word here rendered vultures occurs seven times,, and is employed every time with this meaning and in just this way,—never figuratively. But Homer’s reference to birds as preying upon dead bodies is not confined to vultures. More frequently, when alluding to this, he uses a general term meaning birds or birds of prey. Fourteen out of eighteen times that I find the word, it is used only with reference to the fact that birds prey upon the dead. The other four times, as the context shows, the word does not refer to the vulture. Many of the most accurate translators of Homer never render it by the word vulture, though Pope has sometimes done so.

And why is Lucan associated with Homer as one of the oldest representatives of poetry ? Homer probably lived a thousand years before Lucan. According to Herodotus, it must have been more than nine hundred. All the great poets of Greece had been dead four or five hundred years when Lucan was born.

This critic of the poets is not only inaccurate in the statement of facts and unfamiliar with the poets, but he has no standard of criticism. He condemns all the British poets except Tennyson as untrue to nature and unsympathetic. Then one, and another, and another, of those whom he has most severely condemned is made a standard of excellence. For instance, he quotes in support of his general charge of the poets’ ignorance and want of sympathy expressions designed to show their injustice to the vulture, among which are some from Keats and Marvell (not calling the poets by name, however). But he mentions both these poets in such a way as to disprove his own charge, thus: “ When a Marvell actually went out into the fields and observed what he afterward wrote, the world obtained not only poetry, but poetry from the life ; or when a Keats translates into words his own intuitive and tender sympathy with the out-of-doors about him, the result is the poetry of Nature herself.”

Nay, more. In the article designed to show the greater “ tenderness toward the speechless world ” and greater “ fidelity to Nature ” of the American poets, he actually makes British Keats and British Shelley standards of excellence by which the American poets are to be judged, thus: " They [the American poets] are as gentle always as Keats, while in their more general passages they show all Shelley’s appreciation of the harmonious unity in nature.” Now I think there is not another poet whose expressions have been so frequently quoted by our author in support of his general accusation as those of Shelley, although the poet has not always been named.

Again, the writer condemns in British poets what he commends or ignores in American poets. For example, he finds the latter “ attributing melancholy to the notes of birds, as if in recognition of that pathos with which Nature balances so beautifully her great antiphonies;” and “complaints”and “wailing” are appropriate terms for describing the part of the birds in maintaining this balance. But the same terms employed by British poets are indicative of the “ undeserved contumely ” bestowed on the bird by his unsympathetic calumniators, the abusive poets. Holmes’s censure of duck-shooting is recognized as genuine sympathy, but British poets’ condemnation of partridge-shooting is sneered at as sentimentalism.

When Aldrich speaks of a “ thieving robin-redbreast,” or Lowell of that “devil-may-care, the bobolink,”or Whittier of “ robber crows ” and of the “ foul human vulture,” or Emerson of “ ostrich - like forgetfulness,” or Bret Harte of the sea-bird as a “careless vagabond,” or Celia Thaxter of the sea-gulls’ “boding cry; ” or when Holmes calls the bobolink “crack-brained ” and “crazy,” and the sea-gull a “gentleman of leisure, not good for much; ” or when Longfellow speaks of the “ fateful crows,” and of the

calling him lucky

or when he compares the ecstatic outburst of the mocking-bird to the “ revel of frenzied Bacchantes,” wre find the writer expressing no disapproval, but sometimes quoting with approbation these very passages. Yet these expressions are of the same nature as those which he censures in British poets.

The writer also charges British poets with being untruthful, but really he often censures them most severely because they are truthful. The charge of injustice, he thinks, might be considered substantiated from the poets’ reference to birds of prey and sea-fowl alone. The only value of symbols to the poet is in their appropriateness. As a class, the birds of prey have characteristics which render them fit symbols of cruelty, greed, robbery, and violence ; and while the poets have not depicted the unlovely side alone of these birds, it is true that unlovely things do exist. War is unlovely, and all forms of oppression and wrong, and poetry has not ignored them. But the world cannot spare Homer, or Shakespeare, or Milton, or Dante, or one of its genuine poets. The poets’ recognition of the real characteristics of birds of prey is justice, not injustice, to the bird-world. It is no evidence of a want of a “ perfectly healthy sympathy •with nature.” A very striking illustration of this truth is Kingsley’s A Thought from the Rhine, in which eagles are compared to the “ great devourers of the earth.” The poet rouses your compassionate indignation against the great devourers of the earth without lessening your admiration for the eagle.

But our interest is with the poets and their relations to the birds. It is not the mission of the poets to investigate and establish scientiiic facts. Ignorance, like knowledge, is only relative. We call Aristotle, Newton, and Franklin wise ; yet the school-boy of to-day is perfectly familiar with many facts unknown to them. Linnteus named a species of the birds of paradise “ apoda,” footless. We happen to know that these birds have feet, but is it for us to speak of the great naturalist as ignorant ? A poet’s knowledge of natural history ought to be estimated with reference to the advancement of this science in his own age. An examination of British poets will show that their knowledge of natural history has not been derived from classical and other myths and from heraldry, as our author asserts, but that it has fairly kept pace with that of scientists, and that more recently it has been to a great extent the result of personal observation. It will show, moreover, that the British poets have found in the birds an inexhaustible source both for themes and for illustrations.

Poetry partakes of the spirit of the age in which it is produced. Even the masterpieces which delight every age show this. There were among the earlier poets careful observers and genuine lovers of nature. There was Chaucer,

“ who,” says Charles James Fox, “ of all poets seems to have been fondest of the singing of birds; ” and of whom Longfellow writes, —

We do not forget

For the earlier poets, then,

Harting, the author of The Ornithology of Shakespeare, says that “ it is impossible to read all that Shakespeare has written in connection with ornithology without being struck with the extraordinary knowledge which he has displayed for the age in which he lived.” Spenser has made use of birds as illustrations very effectively and with much truth to nature. The not numerous but very fine passages in Milton relating to birds could not have been written by an indifferent observer of nature. Marvell shows in some of his poetry the susceptibility to nature’s influences that is so marked a characteristic of Wordsworth and Emerson. Two hundred and thirtyfive years ago, Herrick thus introduced his Hesperides : —

But the poets of nature are for the most part, undoubtedly, modern poets, going back scarcely one hundred years. If American poets have been more accurate in their observations and more in sympathy with nature than British poets, as a whole, the chief reason is obvious, and it is strange that it should not have been mentioned. A large majority of the British poets, even of those quoted, wrote before there were any distinctively American poets. Bryant, the earliest by several years of the American poets named, published his Thanatopsis less than seventy years ago.

How utterly regardless of the consideration of time our author has been may be seen from this paragraph respecting foreign birds : “ We find only six, and even these are only utilized to perpetuate half a dozen of those ‘pseudoxia’ 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.’ ” One must infer that these poets are our contemporaries. On the contrary, Cowper, the poet of the ostrich, who was nearest to our own time, wrote these lines ninetynine years ago. Garth, the poet of the ibis, was a contemporary of Sir Thomas Browne himself, the author of the Pseudoxia ; while Savage, the poet of the vulture and the pelican, died only twenty-five years after Garth. And yet Savage is actually quoted in proof that poets now perpetuate errors about the pelican, in utter disregard of the fact that Montgomery, the author of The Pelican Island, the beauty and accuracy of which the writer is constrained to acknowledge, lived a century later than Savage. The poet of the bird of paradise is not named, and we are really curious to know what British poet is so ignorant of natural history, and so utterly devoid of common sense, as to intimate that any bird “ hatches its eggs in mid-air,” especially as, according to the writer, the poet belongs to our own time.

But the statement itself is a wholesale misrepresentation of Sir Thomas Browne. The opinion that the pelican feeds her young by opening her own breast is, of all mentioned in the paragraph, the only one that is referred to in the Pseudoxia.

Again, we are told in regard to the poets’ mistakes about the ostrich that “ it was reserved for Lovelace to condense their animadversions into a quatrain of errors.” Reserved by whom ? Not by Cowper and Montgomery, who are also quoted on the ostrich, for Cowper lived a century and a half and Montgomery two centuries after Lovelace.

There are poems which give their authors a specific claim to be noticed in an essay on the poets’ birds, as Grahame’s Birds of Scotland, which presents a series of graphic pictures of individual birds, rivaling, it has been said, those of Alexander Wilson ; and Bishop Mant’s British Months, which contains descriptions, often of great beauty, of nearly twice as many birds as our author found in his eighty poets, — the book which Christopher North wanted to put in his pocket when he should “go a bird-nesting;” and Courthope’s Paradise of Birds, suggested, as its author intimates, by a Greek classic, The Birds of Aristophanes, but a most delightful book to every genuine lover of birds and their poets, however British and however modern he may be. Many of the most beautiful of Charles Tennyson Turner’s sonnets are devoted to birds. To these poets, and to several other especial poets of the birds, our author has made not the slightest reference.

More remarkable than such omissions is the treatment of Wordsworth and Cowper. Examples of the misrepresentations of their poetry have been already noticed. In the case of Wordsworth these misrepresentations do not occur in the article on the birds of British poets, for in that his very existence is not so much as hinted at. This silence might have been interpreted as pardonable reverence for the “ very high priest of nature,” if it had not been for the attempts to belittle him in the succeeding articles. Wordsworth has been dead but little over a quarter of a century, and yet one of his latest biographers says that his poems have already furnished more of the phrases which have long been familiar as household words than those of any other poet, except Shakespeare and Milton. Southey’s remark that “ he might as well attempt to crush Skiddaw ” (referring to Jeffrey’s criticism of Wordsworth) would now be superfluous of even a Jeffrey.

But what apology can be invented for any one so utterly insensible to Cowper’s sweet and simple nature, to his “ large and tender heart,” to his “scrupulous truthfulness,” as to characterize as “ lip-service ” that love for animals which was so great a solace of his life ?

Since the writer has thus disregarded the poets of nature and of the birds, did he limit his: examination to the familiar poems of well-known poets ? Not at all. A familiarity with Shakespeare’s King Lear, Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, Tennyson’s Maud, Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia, Jean Ingelow’s High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, or even Burns’s Flow Gently, Sweet Afton, would have enabled him to increase his list of birds.

And not only are poets of birds thus ignored, but the birds themselves, — the very birds which have been acknowledged favorites of the poets.

The first of these birds to suggest itself is the skylark. “ There is hardly a poet,” says Yarrell, “ who has not made it his theme.” Yet in an essay on the birds of British poets, the skylark is not alluded to, except as one of seventy-six of these birds ; nor the robin, nor the cuckoo, nor the swallow,— except in the passage in which Cowper is accused of saying the swallow sleeps on the wing, — nor the nightingale. But in his chapter on foreign birds the writer intimates that British poets know little of their own nightingales. There is a published list, as I am informed, of one hundred and seventy-eight adjectives which the poets have applied as epithets to this bird. I have not seen the list, but I recall more than eighty British poets who have written of the nightingale, and I have no hesitation in saying that one hundred and seventy-eight falls far below the number of such adjectives. This may not disprove the

charge of ignorance, but it surely disproves another of this writer’s accusations against the poets, that they “ have laid themselves open to the charge of a monotony in error almost amounting to plagiarism.”

The swan is mentioned thus : “ The real beauty of the swan’s life is almost ignored; the imaginary beauty of its death is hackneyed to absurdity.” “ A sterile majority of our bards see in it only the fowl that sings before death.” “ So pressed for similes of beauty are the poets that they have all of them to turn again and again to the peacock’s tail, the turtle’s neck, and the swan’s breast.”

Not only are these charges groundless, but I do not think there is a single object in nature which has been more beautifully described by British poets than the swan. Out of more than ninety poems and poetical extracts referring to the swan, taken at random, I find fourteen which allude to the bird’s singing at death. The most noted of these, I need scarcely say, is The Dying Swan by Tennyson, in regard to which the author of The Bird World says, “ We can hardly regret the existence of a fiction which has led to the enrichment of our literature with so fine a piece of word-harmony.” Tennyson, it will be remembered, is the only poet excepted by the writer from his general accusation.

In Wordsworth’s numerous passages relating to the swan, there is only one reference to its singing at death. In the sonnet suggested by the Phædo of Plato, he speaks of hearing

the “ most melodious requiem ” of the swan. Even a child could not think he accepts the fable as a fact.

Shakespeare illustrates by the swan in fifteen passages, five of which refer to the death-song. Of the seven passages remaining, three are from Shelley, from whom I have taken eight extracts. This leaves four of these allusions to this bird’s death-song, which I have found in nearly eighty poems and extracts taken from more than thirtydifferent poets. Is this what the author means by “ a sterile majority ” ?

I find the bird spoken of as “ noble,” “ stately,” “ kingly,” “ most graceful,” the “ very type of rural elegance.” The “ jetty eyes,” the “ ebon bill,” the “ snowy plumage,” the “ black legs,” the " oary feet,” the “nesting among the reeds,” the “ young dusky cygnets,” the “cygnet’s down,” the manner of protecting the young, and the manifestation of parental affection even to the point of self-sacrifice are all mentioned. Keats evidently intends to class wings of swans among the most delightful of material things when he asks what is

Wordsworth describes the neck as

The “ haughty neck,” the “ sinuous neck elate,” the “ neck of arched snow,” are some of the poets’ designations of the swan’s neck. Tennyson’s Lancelot means no disparagement to it when he presents jewels to the queen, of which to make a

The motions of the swan are characterized by “ grandeur,” “ majesty,” “grace,” and “ majestic grace.”

says Coleridge.

Nor has the breast been neglected in the poet’s descriptions of the swan ; but only twice in the ninety and more poems and extracts do I find it used as the object of comparison. So much for this “ simile of beauty.” The “ wildclanging note-” and the picturesqueness of the swan in flight have not failed of notice.

Whether or not Wordsworth saw

he often saw that vision of beauty in his own region of lakes. More than one of his descriptions he particularly mentions as taken from the daily opportunities he had of observing the habits of two pairs of swans of an old magnificent species, which divided between them the lake of Esthwaite and its inand-out-flowing streams.

Spenser, in his poem written on the marriage of the Earl of Worcester’s daughters, makes use of swans as an illustration in a passage which for beauty can hardly be surpassed in his poems.

A poet of less note than these, Thomas Wade, has described a beautiful landscape, including the sea, on which a thousand swans are sailing, and over which more are flying; but woods and sky and sea, he says in conclusion,

“ seem but humbly tributary
To the white pomp of that vast aviary.”

The following stanzas from The Swans of Wilton are by an anonymous British poet:—

We are also told that “ the swan might, for all the American poets say, never have been Leda’s lover or Venus’s wagoner.” Not once in the more than ninety poems and extracts is the swan spoken of as “ Venus’s wagoner; ” and only once is the bird mentioned in connection with Venus. Wordsworth speaks of

Twice only is the swan alluded to as the lover of Leda, once by Shakespeare and once by Spenser.

Since these passages were not selected, but taken at random, the result is surely an indication whether nature or fable has been the source of inspiration in regard to the swan of the British poets.

In connection with his remarks on the swan, the writer asks, “Is there no poetry in the contemporary kingfisher, that it should never be anything but the brooding halcyon of the past ? ” I offer on the part of a British poet this reply: —

The explanation is very simple of the comparatively few poems on tins “gorgeous blaze,” this “ jeweled beam of emerald light,” this “ sapphire-winged mist,” this “ little hermit, azure-winged, ablaze with jewels,” this “ little gay recluse,” as he is variously designated by British poets ; and it has been given by the poets themselves.

MANT.

COCHRANE.

Coleridge pictures a “ wild and desert stream,” “ gloomy and dark ” from the crowded firs on its shores and stretching across its bed, on whose steep banks the “ shy kingfishers build their nest.” Browning also describes a retreat of the “ glossy kingfisher,” where

In all this we have no hint of the “brooding halcyon of the past;” but we do not find it difficult to pardon Longfellow for this allusion to the fable of Alcyone : —

or a British poet for a similar allusion.

In regard to the eagle, the writer acknowledges that the British poets “ have indeed done splendid justice to this splendid bird, but unfairly, and at the expense of others.” Without stopping now to inquire in what respect splendid justice differs from justice, or whether justice can be done unfairly, we simply ask what the American poets can do more than justice ; for if there is any force in this paragraph, it is in the implied comparison in favor of American poets : “ The eagle is neither the eagle of Rome, Assyria, Persia, nor France ; . . . nor any of the other eagles that fly in mythology, heraldry, and fable. . . . It is simply the best in the sky — Keneu, the great war-eagle ; and just as it was the totem of the red man when he was lord of America, so now it is the totem of the white men who have dispossessed him.”

But what is the great war-eagle ? Not a simple winged object in nature, but a symbol of power and conquest, alike to the Roman, to the Frenchman, and to the red man. And not only had the eagle this general symbolic signification to the Indians as a people, but sometimes also, as it appears, it was a household symbol, and the figure of an eagle was one of the ancestral totems, the coatof-arms of some noble Indian family. This does not make the eagle of American poetry the “best in the sky,” for, according to Longfellow, the figure of a turtle was also a totem ; nor does it make it the “ totem of the white men; ” but it does seem to give it a claim to be considered an eagle of heraldry. The particular eagle here referred to, “ Keneu, the great war-eagle,” is emphatically an eagle of fable. Originally a man, he passed through more metamorphoses than any of Ovid’s heroes, before he was finally changed “to an eagle, — to Keneu, the great war-eagle.”

The writer gives a list of birds 'which he says are unpopular with the poets. The owl is one of these most abused birds. Epithets are quoted by the dozen which “ the bards have slung at the owl,” the first of which is “silent.” Well, “ silence is golden,” especially on the part of a bird which “ shrieks ” and “ gibbers,” and whose shriek is often frightful, as even American poets know. The little Hiawatha was frightened,

And his good grandmother had to soothe him by explaining,

And this answer of Nokomis is the very passage quoted by the writer to show that the owl of American poetry is not an object of terror.

According to an English poet, English mothers soothe their children in the same way : —

And sometimes children are delighted with this screaming of the owl. Wordsworth’s fine passage descriptive of the boy who “ blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, that they might answer him,” and of the mirth that followed, will be readily recalled.

Another of these abusive epithets is “ gray.” Not a bad color, and owls of several species are gray. But one may be suited even as to color. The poets of Great Britain also speak of owls as “ w hite ” and “ mottled ” and “ tawny ” and “ brown.”

But we are told that the owl of British poetry “ salutes the moon with impropriety.” I am afraid the manners of American owls are no better, or seem no better to American poets, for Longfellow speaks of one that “greeted the moon with demoniac laughter.” By a singular coincidence this line occurs in one of the very passages referred to by the writer to illustrate the American poets’ pathetic treatment of birds in relation to night. I need not say that this line is not quoted.

If British poets have called the owl “ dire” and “ unholy,” it is also British poets who have called him “ precious,” “ wise,” a “ sage and holy-bird.” Chaucer puts into his mouth “ Benedicite,” and Byron heard him singing his anthem at Newstead Abbey.

The owl is a bird of night and associated with gloom and darkness, as well as with quiet and peacefulness. Neither British nor American poets have been cognizant of the gloom alone.

As to the magpie, the poets are accused of “ insisting ” that it is a “ disagreeable adjunct to the landscape, and nothing better than

On the contrary, Wordsworth most agreeably associates this bird with the brightness and beauty of spring : —

Again, we find it joining in the general joy manifested after a night of storm :

The magpie is noted for its ingenuity in nest-making, and also for its adroitness in appropriating to its own use whatever it fancies, without regard to ownership. The poets’ mention of any distinguishing trait of this bird is not unjust.

and

The beauty of the bird, its ability to talk, and its usefulness in protecting crops are all recognized by British poets.

Another of the unpopular birds is the jackdaw. But one has only to recall the most familiar of the Ingoldsby Legends, The Jackdaw of Rheims, and Cowper’s translation of Vincent Bourne’s poem on the Jackdaw, to be convinced that this bird has received signal •honor at the hands of at least three British poets.

Of the bittern the writer says, “ The bittern, one of the most strangely poetical of birds, is found useful only as a synonym for discordance and desolation ; and if it had not been for its making strange noises, would not probably have been mentioned at all.”

But is there no poetry in sound ? Why, then, have the poets with such unanimity found this bird’s “strange noises ” so suggestive ? These and his loneliness are what have impressed American as well as British poets.

“ The bittern booms,” says Thoreau.

HOFFMAN.

Our author, by insisting that poets should know the birds of which they write, has effectually answered his own charge against the British poets of neglecting foreign birds. But that is no reason that they should be discredited in respect to what they have written even of foreign birds.

Among the foreign birds that are unpopular are the parrot and the ostrich. “ The parrots,” he says, “ poor wretches, find no friend or even apologist.” Has the author of this charge never read Campbell’s poem on the parrot, founded, it is said, on a real incident, which Campbell learned from the family to which the parrot belonged ? Or could he not recognize in the poet a friend of the parrot ? In that case, it is not surprising that he failed to see in Wordsworth an apologist for this bird : —

“ The ostrich,” he claims, “ is, next to the goose, one of the very wisest of birds. It takes a good horse and a good man to make one Arab of the desert, and it takes three Arabs of the desert to hunt one ostrich — and then they do not kill it as*a rule. ... It is also one of the most careful of parents.” He says, moreover, “ The ostrich is still, with the poets, the silliest of the feathered kind, and formed of God without a parent’s mind.”

The “ poets ” in this case, it will be remembered, are Cowper. The passage reads thus: —

Cowper’s idea of the ostrich could not have been gained from personal observation, and the works on natural history then extant would have furnished but little information on this bird; but he was familiar with a description of the ostrich written three thousand years before, which seems to have escaped the notice of this writer, in which it is stated that she “ leaveth her eggs in the earth, and warmeth them in dust, and forgetteth that the foot may crush them, or that the wild beast may break them. She is hardened against her young ones, as though they were not hers ; her labor is in vain without fear ; because God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath he imparted to her understanding. What time she lifteth up herself on high, she scorneth the horse and his rider.”

Now the author of these lines was familiar with the bird. Among the chief characteristics of the ostrich are a “small head,” a “long and muscular neck,” a “ robust body,” and “ extremely muscular thighs and stout tarsi and feet.” (Mosenthal and Harting’s Ostriches and Ostrich-Farming.)

The brain of the ostrich is small; the neck, body, and limbs very powerful. This physical structure indicates not wisdom by which it can outwit its pursuers, but great strength and swiftness ; and by means of these it is that “ she scorneth the horse and his rider.” Livingstone speaks of the “ folly " of the ostrich in madly rushing into danger, and calls it for this a “ silly bird.” Canon Tristram says that “ stupidity is universally ascribed to the ostrich by the Arabs,” and that “ it deserves, on the whole, the Arab reproach, ‘ stupid as an ostrich.’ ”

In regard to its parental instinct, he says, “ Several hens deposit their eggs in one place, — a hole scraped in the sand. The eggs are then covered over, and left during the heat of the day.” (“ Which leaveth her eggs in the earth, and warmeth them in dust,” says the Old Testament poet.) “ But the ostrich,” says Canon Tristram, “ lays an

immense number of eggs, far more than are ever hatched, and round the covered eggs are to be found many dropped carelessly. ... It is from this habit, most probably, that the want of parental instinct is laid to the charge of the ostrich. At the same time, when surprised by man with the young before they are able to run, the parent bird scuds off alone, and leaves its offspring to their fate. To do otherwise,” he continues, “ would be a self-sacrifice.”

But parental instinct does prompt to self-sacrifice on the part of birds and other animals, for the sake of their young.

Livingstone says, " The ostrich begins to lay her eggs before she has fixed on a spot for a nest, and solitary eggs are thus found lying forsaken all over the country, and become a prey to the jackal.”

In the late Charles John Andersson’s work on Lake Ngami, there is an account of the capture of some young ostriches, which the editor of Cassell’s Book of Birds has quoted as illustrative of the “ affection occasionally displayed by the ostrich for its little family.” As we compare these descriptions with that of the Hebrew poet, we are not surprised at the accuracy of Cowper’s lines, and understand Emerson’s expression, “ ostrich-like forgetfulness.”

“ Greedy is a favorite ostrich-epithet in poetry.” Well, who can say it is not well deserved by a bird that will swallow almost any substance, whether a bunch of keys, bullets hissing hot from the mould, or a whole brood of ducklings ?

The writer thinks it “ almost a pity that the poets did not know the tradition that the ostrich hatches her eggs simply by looking at them.” Southey’s reference to this tradition in his Thalaba shows that it has not been wholly unknown to the poets. “ Beyond alluding to these popular delusions about this wonderful bird, the poets,” we are told, “ can find no use for the ostrich, no opportunity for a compliment.” This, like so many similar statements of the writer, is not correct. For instance, Mary Howitt’s poem describing the bird and the desert, where

contains no reference to these popular delusions, and is at least as worthy of mention as any of the extracts quoted by him.

So also are these lines by a poet who lived several years in Africa :

In the first article, the humming-bird is only one of " some two thousand exotic birds,” which the " poets have wasted.” But it occupies the first place on the list of those of the two thousand species which our author mentions as having been “ all wasted alike.” Soon, however, the writer makes discoveries. The humming-bird can no longer keep its conspicuous position at the head of those two thousand birds. It has been found to be not wholly, but only in part, wasted ; and in the second of these remarkable essays we read that as a bird of beauty, the humming-bird is wasted, while regard is canvassed for it on the fictitious virtue of its song;” and that “ the silent flash of a hummingbird, if once seen, can never be forgotten, nor ever heard.”

True enough, the silent flash of a humming-bird cannot be heard. But does the writer mean to imply that the humming-bird is a silent bird ? What, then, of the buzzing noise which has given to these birds their English name ; “ to which,” observes Martin, “ they owe the epithets of ' murmures,’ ‘ bourdons,’ and ‘ frou-frous,’ given them by the Creoles of the Antilles and Cayenne ; ” and which the authors of the extensive French work on humming-birds, recently published, compare to the buzz of a spinning-wheel and the purring of a cat ? Can that be heard ? Gosse (Birds of Jamaica) speaks of hearing this whirr before seeing the bird. But this is not all. Mr. Gosse and others describe the note of the humming-bird, which is sometimes very curious. Belt, in his interesting account of these birds in Nicaragua, says it was not until he could distinguish the notes of the different species that he found out how full of humming-birds the woods were : he sometimes heard the different chirps of more than a dozen individuals without being able to get a glimpse of one of them. The bird, then, is sometimes “ more heard than seen,” and it is not the poet who says so that is incorrect, but his critic who denies it. More than this, we cannot disbelieve the testimony which we have that some of the humming-birds really sing. Gosse speaks of the song of the Vervain hummingbird as a very sweet melody, continued for ten minutes at a time. Gould, in his Introduction to the Trochilidæ, quotes Mr. Bell, of New York, as saying that he had heard the “ little pygmornis of Panama sing beautifully a soft, shrill, and pretty song.” Other species also are mentioned as having a song.

Without doubt songsters among humming-birds are rare, as are also the poets’ allusions to the song. It will be remembered that when he wrote the first of these essays, the author did not know that a single British poet had mentioned the humming-bird. Perhaps, when he wrote the second, he was hardly qualified to judge whether there was “ little or no beauty in the poets’ treatment ” of the bird. Evidently, when he ventured this statement he had not read all that British poets had written on the humming-bird. I recall numerous poems which should not have been included in this adverse judgment; and at least, poets who were perfectly familiar with the bird (as were Wilson and Chapman) are entitled to have their poems read before they are condemned.

Again, we are told that the poets describe this bird as part bee, or part fly, or part butterfly. Rogers calls it half bird, “ half fly.” The French name for humming-birds is “ oiseauxmouches,” fly-birds. Naturalists constantly make use of flies, bees, and butterflies as objects of comparison for them.

Bates (Naturalist on the Amazons) says that he often shot the hummingbird hawk-moth for the humming-bird, which it resembles so much in appearance, in the manner of flight and of poising itself before a flower, that it required many days’ experience to enable him to avoid the mistake.

The writer has given more space to the vulture than to any other bird. He begins by calling it “ unlovely,” and closes with a description which fully justifies the use of this word, and a request to the poets to “ love him or leave him alone.” We find too a panegyric on the vulture, some general charges against the poets, and many quotations from them, all with the professed design of showing the injustice of British poets towards the vulture. “ The poet’s instinct,” the writer thinks, “ should be towards a universal tenderness.” This he defines as a “ perfectly healthy sympathy with nature, which refuses under any circumstances to call vultures ‘loathsome.’ ” But this universal tenderness, as he explains it, may be inconsistent with truth, and telling the truth about the vulture is no more injustice in poetry than in prose.

“ The poets’ vulture,” we are informed, “ has three aspects, — as a bird of prey (which it is not), a bird of illomen (which it was not), and a bird of general horror.” It has been shown that the vulture is a bird of prey. If the writer means to assert that it does not attack living animals, this is a mistake. There is abundant testimony to show that it does. According to Coues the American vultures attack and overpower live animals, and the turkey buzzard kills young pigs and lambs. The author of Bible Animals says that the Egyptian vulture kills and devours rats, mice, and other pests of hot countries. Thomas Rhymer Jones informs us that some of the vultures prefer killing their own game ; that the lammergeyer, which drives animals over the edge of some cliff, and then devours the shattered remains, is terribly destructive, not only to the flocks that pasture in the Alpine valleys, but to the chamois and other wild quadrupeds ; that children have become its victims ; and that man himself is not safe, if he should incautiously approach their wild retreats. The very name of this bird, lammergeyer, (Lämmer-geier, lamb-vulture), indicates its destructiveness to flocks. Any one who has watched the sheep and goats feeding on the Alpine precipices will have no difficulty in imagining them on cliffs of the Himalayan range, within reach of the prey-hunting lammergeyer. Milton might have represented the vulture as “ ravaging the flocks grazing on the hillsides,” as the writer of these articles says he did; but he did not. This is what he said : —

There is no intimation that the lambs and yeanling kids were attacked while alive. It seems even more probable that they were already dead from a fall, or from exposure on that “ abode of snow.”

The next aspect of the poets’ vulture is “ as a bird of ill-omen.” Our author has not attempted to substantiate this except placing the word “ ominous ” first on a list of objectionable epithets applied by the poets to the vulture. Ominous means both “ auspicious ” and “ inauspicious ; ” and if there is one adjective which vultures can claim as peculiarly theirs, it is “ ominous.” “ Old Rome consulted birds,” and the vulture was one of the birds which “ gave auguries.” But after objecting to the word “ ominous,” the writer inconsistently' claims respect for this bird on the very ground of the “omen of the twelve vultures which the destinies of Rome irresistibly obeyed.” But Romulus did not lay the foundations of Rome on the Palatine Hill because he saw vultures. His brother was the first, by twelve hours, to see vultures, — six of them; and though each claimed the augury in his own favor, the decision was for the brother who saw twelve vultures instead of six. In this very instance, vultures were ominous to both brothers; inauspicious to one of them, auspicious to the other.

Again, the poets’ vulture is a “bird of general horror.” Under this head of general horror is included, I suppose, everything expressed by “ loathsome,” “greedy,” “cruel,” and so forth. To see whether such expressions are “all injustice, because out of sympathy with nature,” let us examine very briefly a few only of the historians of these birds. We are told by Colonel Irby (Ornithology of the Straits of Gibraltar) that the “ Egyptian vulture is probably the foulest feeding bird alive.” Canon Tristram describes it as a “ despicable scavenger,” and as “ most disgusting in habits, odor, and appearance on a close inspection.” “ Their disgusting though useful habits,” says Major Jerdon (Birds of India) “ render them objects of loathing.” In Bishop Stanley’s Familiar History of Birds, we find it stated that, from the nature of their food, they are very disgusting in various ways; that some idea of their voracity may be formed when we are assured that at one meal a vulture contrived to devour a whole albatross. Rev. J. G. Wood (My Feathered Friends) thinks the vulture’s “demeanor is precisely such as would seem suitable to its food,” and speaks of its “ cruel eye ” and “ groveling ” and “ crouching ” attitude. So far from being the result of “ hideous prejudices,” the poets’ epithets often seem to show exact knowledge.

Note a few examples of their accuracy in those passages quoted in proof of their abuse of these birds. Shelley associates vultures with other carrion eaters “ in horrid truce to eat the dead.” Dr. Adams (Wanderings of a Naturalist in India) describes the congregating around the carcass of a horse of “ tawny eagles, Indian and Egyptian vultures, crows, and pariah dogs.”

quotes the writer, still again from Shelley. Canon Tristram says that on great battle-fields vultures congregate in a few hours, even where the bird was scarce before, and that in the Crimean war the whole race from the Caucasus and Asia Minor seemed to have collected to enjoy the unwonted abundance. This recalls another striking passage from the same poet: —

The death-bird of Shelley, our author claims, is the vulture. He has no means of knowing this, except that from its well-known habits the poet could have substituted “vulture” for “death-bird.” If anybody has been unjust to the vulture here, it is not the poet, for he did not name it. However, it is by no means certain that vultures alone are the death-birds of Shelley. Canon Tristram also speaks of watching at one time, “close to a recent battle-field,” a “steady stream of carrion eaters, which had scented the battle from afar, — all the vultures, kites, and ravens of North Arabia rushing to the banquet.”

Once more, we are told by naturalists that this bird’s plumage is not “matted together with the odious substances constantly coming in contact with it,” because the “ nature of its feathers is such that when it shakes them extraneous matter falls off.”

Shelley very concisely says

The poets, then, are not unjust to call the vulture a “ bird of prey,” or “ ominous ; ” even “ loathsome ” seems not to be too strong a term.

The author’s own description of the vulture, the “ shabby-looking fowl of dirty white plumage,” the “ poor dustand-dirt bird,” the “ dull-lived vulture,” “ solemn and shabby and hungry,” is, as far as it goes, a description of the Egyptian vulture, or Pharaoh’s chicken ; and he implies that the vulture of his panegyric, entitled “ from its traditions alone ” to a “ place of dignity,” and in “ actual nature undeniably majestic,” the “ eagle of Holy Writ,” is also Pharaoh’s chicken. What species of vultures have originated the various traditions referred to, I do not know. In flight many of the vultures are majestic. As for the eagle of Scripture, it is believed to be not merely “ as often as not,” but invariably, the vulture; not Pharaoh’s chicken, however, but the griffon vulture. The mere fact that this bird is the eagle of Scripture does not change its character, and is pertinent to the subject of the present inquiry only from the fact that British poets have also noted some of the same traits in the vulture which are spoken of in Scripture. To discover this, we need not go beyond the passages quoted in these articles. One of the characteristics is the care bestowed on the young. In the long extract quoted from Montgomery’s The Pelican Island, there is an allusion to the parental tenderness of the vulture. Again, the eagle is represented in Scripture as “ making her nest on high.” The author of Bible Animals says that nothing but the highest and most inaccessible spots will satisfy the griffon vulture as a place for nesting. Both this and the bearded vulture inhabit the Himalayas, the Imaus of the ancients ; and Milton, two hundred years ago, accurately designated this highest mountain range on the globe as the birthplace of the vulture.

But the most frequent scriptural allusions to the bird are in connection with its prey, and the poets’ treatment of the bird in this respect has already been spoken of.

In the last article, it is claimed that “ the punctuality with which religious associations are availed of ” is “ in a large measure special to American verse,” and some quotations are given from American poets, mostly from Longfellow, illustrating this “ predilection for the religious.” But this is no proof that British poets are without this predilection, or, by giving similar quotations from them, wre might just as easily prove American poets destitute of it. Those familiar with British poetry know how common are such illustrations : of praise, as in Milton : —

of teaching, as in Wordsworth : *

and George Macdonald calls the lark

as

Since Donne named the birds “ heaven’s choristers,” more than two hundred

and fifty years ago, the poets have not ceased to record how they have “ mattens seyd” or “ chirped,” and “ sung their anthems” and “ thankful hymns ; ” how they “ chant their To Deum ” and “ vespers ; ” and how

The very birds, the mention of which by Longfellow seemed to make such an impression upon our author, taught their lessons to English poets long before there were any American poets. More than two centuries ago Herrick was reminded of St. Peter and admonished by the crowing of the cock; and Vaughan, remembering the prophet of old, said

As wre read that “ the raven, taunted with its conduct towards Noah and robbed of the credit of nourishing Elijah, has little to thank British bards for,” we ask where the writer has found his poets. In examining the works of a large number of British poets since Vaughan, including Shakespeare, Milton, Cowper, and Wordsworth, I have found mention of the raven in illustration of the watchful care of Providence ten times at least to one allusion to the bird as the messenger of Noah.

In concluding, our author speaks of “ American poetry as he reads it.” This reminds us of the remark of Mr. Burroughs that “ the poets are the best natural historians, only you must know how to read them.”

The nature of the errors and misrepresentations contained in these essays on poets and birds has been perhaps sufficiently indicated.

Harriet C. W. Stanton.