Birds and Poets : with Other Papers Part 4

"Up and away for life! be fleet!-- The frost-king ties my fumbling feet, Sings in my ears, my hands are stones, Curdles the blood to the marble bones, Tugs at the heart-strings, numbs the sense, And hems in life with narrowing fence.

Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep,-- The punctual stars will vigil keep,-- Embalmed by purifying cold; The wind shall sing their dead march old, The snow is no ign.o.ble shroud, The moon thy mourner, and the cloud.

"Softly,--but this way fate was pointing, 'T was coming fast to such anointing, When piped a tiny voice hard by, Gay and polite, a cheerful cry, _Chick-chickadeedee!_ saucy note, Out of sound heart and merry throat, As if it said 'Good day, good sir!

Fine afternoon, old pa.s.senger!

Happy to meet you in these places, Where January brings few faces.'

"This poet, though he lived apart, Moved by his hospitable heart, Sped, when I pa.s.sed his sylvan fort, To do the honors of his court, As fits a feathered lord of land; Flew near, with soft wing grazed my hands Hopped on the bough, then darting low, Prints his small impress on the snow, Shows feats of his gymnastic play, Head downward, clinging to the spray.

"Here was this atom in full breath, Hurling defiance at vast death; This sc.r.a.p of valor just for play Fronts the north-wind in waistcoat gray, As if to shame my weak behavior; I greeted loud my little savior, 'You pet! what dost here? and what for?

In these woods, thy small Labrador, At this pinch, wee San Salvador!

What fire burns in that little chest, So frolic, stout, and self-possest?

Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine; Ashes and jet all hues outshine.

Why are not diamonds black and gray, To ape thy dare-devil array?

And I affirm, the s.p.a.cious North Exists to draw thy virtue forth.

I think no virtue goes with size; The reason of all cowardice Is, that men are overgrown, And, to be valiant, must come down To the t.i.tmouse dimension.'

"I think old Caesar must have heard In northern Gaul my dauntless bird, And, echoed in some frosty wold, Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold.

And I will write our annals new And thank thee for a better clew.

I, who dreamed not when I came here To find the antidote of fear, Now hear thee say in Roman key, _Poean! Veni, vidi, vici."_

A late bird-poem, and a good one of its kind, is Celia Thaxter's "Sandpiper," which recalls Bryant's "Water-Fowl" in its successful rendering of the spirit and atmosphere of the scene, and the distinctness with which the lone bird, flitting along the beach, is brought before the mind. It is a woman's or a feminine poem, as Bryant's is characteristically a man's.

The sentiment or feeling awakened by any of the aquatic fowls is preeminently one of loneliness. The wood duck which your approach starts from the pond or the marsh, the loon neighing down out of the April sky, the wild goose, the curlew, the stork, the bittern, the sandpiper, awaken quite a different train of emotions from those awakened by the land-birds. They all have clinging to them some reminiscence and suggestion of the sea. Their cries echo its wildness and desolation; their wings are the shape of its billows.

Of the sandpipers there are many varieties, found upon the coast and penetrating inland along the rivers and water-courses, one of the most interesting of the family, commonly called the "tip-up," going up all the mountain brooks and breeding in the sand along their banks; but the characteristics are the same in all, and the eye detects little difference except in size.

The walker on the beach sees it running or flitting before him, following up the breakers and picking up the aquatic insects left on the sands; and the trout-fisher along the farthest inland stream likewise intrudes upon its privacy. Flitting along from stone to stone seeking its food, the hind part of its body "teetering" up and down, its soft gray color blending it with the pebbles and the rocks, or else skimming up or down the stream on its long, convex wings, uttering its shrill cry, the sandpiper is not a bird of the sea merely; and Mrs. Thaxter's poem is as much for the dweller inland as for the dweller upon the coast:--

THE SANDPIPER

Across the narrow beach we flit, One little sandpiper and I; And fast I gather, bit by bit, The scattered driftwood bleached and dry.

The wild waves reach their hands for it, The wild wind raves, the tide runs high, As up and down the beach we flit,-- One little sandpiper and I.

Above our heads the sullen clouds Scud black and swift across the sky; Like silent ghosts in misty shrouds Stand out the white lighthouses high.

Almost as far as eye can reach I see the close-reefed vessels fly, As fast we flit along the beach,-- One little sandpiper and I.

I watch him as he skims along, Uttering his sweet and mournful cry; He starts not at my fitful song, Or flash of fluttering drapery; He has no thought of any wrong; He scans me with a fearless eye.

Stanch friends are we, well tried and strong, The little sandpiper and I.

Comrade, where wilt thou be to-night When the loosed storm breaks furiously?

My driftwood fire will burn so bright!

To what warm shelter canst thou fly?

I do not fear for thee, though wroth The tempest rushes through the sky; For are we not G.o.d's children both, Thou, little sandpiper, and I?

Others of our birds have been game for the poetic muse, but in most cases the poets have had some moral or pretty conceit to convey, and have not loved the bird first. Mr. Lathrop preaches a little in his pleasant poem, "The Sparrow," but he must some time have looked upon the bird with genuine emotion to have written the first two stanzas:--

"Glimmers gay the leafless thicket Close beside my garden gate, Where, so light, from post to wicket, Hops the sparrow, blithe, sedate: Who, with meekly folded wing, Comes to sun himself and sing.

"It was there, perhaps, last year, That his little house he built; For he seems to perk and peer, And to twitter, too, and tilt The bare branches in between, With a fond, familiar mien."

The bluebird has not been overlooked, and Halleek, Longfellow, and Mrs.

Sigourney have written poems upon him, but from none of them does there fall that first note of his in early spring,--a note that may be called the violet of sound, and as welcome to the ear, heard above the cold, damp earth; as is its floral type to the eye a few weeks later Lowell's two lines come nearer the mark:--

"The bluebird, shifting his light load of song From post to post along the cheerless fence."

Or the first swallow that comes twittering up the southern valley, laughing a gleeful, childish laugh, and awakening such memories in the heart, who has put him in a poem? So the hummingbird, too, escapes through the finest meshes of rhyme.

The most melodious of our songsters, the wood thrush and the hermit thrush,--birds whose strains, more than any others, express harmony and serenity,--have not yet, that I am aware, had reared to them their merited poetic monument, unless, indeed, Whitman has done this service for the hermit thrush in his "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn." Here the threnody is blent of three chords, the blossoming lilac, the evening star, and the hermit thrush, the latter playing the most prominent part throughout the composition. It is the exalting and spiritual utterance of the "solitary singer" that calms and consoles the poet when the powerful shock of the President's a.s.sa.s.sination comes upon him, and he flees from the stifling atmosphere and offensive lights and conversation of the house,--

"Forth to hiding, receiving night that talks not, Down to the sh.o.r.es of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness, To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still."

Numerous others of our birds would seem to challenge attention by their calls and notes. There is the Maryland yellowthroat, for instance, standing in the door of his bushy tent, and calling out as you approach, _"which way, sir! which way, sir!"_ If he says this to the ear of common folk, what would he not say to the poet? One of the peewees says _"stay there!"_ with great emphasis. The cardinal grosbeak calls out _"what cheer" "what cheer;"_ " the bluebird says _"purity," "purity," "purity;"_ the brown thrasher, or ferruginous thrush, according to Th.o.r.eau, calls out to the farmer planting his corn, _"drop it," "drop it," "cover it up," "cover it up"_ The yellow-breasted chat says _"who," "who"_ and _"tea-boy"_ What the robin says, caroling that simple strain from the top of the tall maple, or the crow with his hardy haw-haw, or the pedestrain meadowlark sounding his piercing and long-drawn note in the spring meadows, the poets ought to be able to tell us. I only know the birds all have a language which is very expressive, and which is easily translatable into the human tongue.

II TOUCHES OF NATURE

I

WHEREVER Nature has commissioned one creature to prey upon another, she has preserved the balance by forewarning that other creature of what she has done. Nature says to the cat, "Catch the mouse," and she equips her for that purpose; but on the selfsame day she says to the mouse, "Be wary,--the cat is watching for you." Nature takes care that none of her creatures have smooth sailing, the whole voyage at least. Why has she not made the mosquito noiseless and its bite itchless? Simply because in that case the odds would be too greatly in its favor. She has taken especial pains to enable the owl to fly softly and silently, because the creatures it preys upon are small and wary, and never venture far from their holes. She has not shown the same caution in the case of the crow, because the crow feeds on dead flesh, or on grubs and beetles, or fruit and grain, that do not need to be approached stealthily. The big fish love to cat up the little fish, and the little fish know it, and, on the very day they are hatched, seek shallow water, and put little sandbars between themselves and their too loving parents.

How easily a bird's tail, or that of any fowl, or in fact any part of the plumage, comes out when the hold of its would-be capturer is upon this alone; and how hard it yields in the dead bird! No doubt there is relaxation in the former case. Nature says to the pursuer, "Hold on,"

and to the pursued, "Let your tail go." What is the tortuous, zigzag course of those slow-flying moths for but to make it difficult for the birds to snap them up? The skunk is a slow, witless creature, and the fox and lynx love its meat; yet it carries a bloodless weapon that neither likes to face.

I recently heard of an ingenious method a certain other simple and slow-going creature has of baffling its enemy. A friend of mine was walking in the fields when he saw a commotion in the gra.s.s a few yards off. Approaching the spot, he found a snake--the common garter snake--trying to swallow a lizard. And how do you suppose the lizard was defeating the benevolent designs of the snake? By simply taking hold of its own tail and making itself into a hoop. The snake went round and round, and could find neither beginning nor end. Who was the old giant that found himself wrestling with Time? This little snake had a tougher customer the other day in the bit of eternity it was trying to swallow.

The snake itself has not the same wit, because I lately saw a black snake in the woods trying to swallow the garter snake, and he had made some headway, though the little snake was fighting every inch of the ground, hooking his tail about sticks and bushes, and pulling back with all his might, apparently not liking the look of things down there at all. I thought it well to let him have a good taste of his own doctrines, when I put my foot down against further proceedings.

This arming of one creature against another is often cited as an evidence of the wisdom of Nature, but it is rather an evidence of her impartiality. She does not care a fig more for one creature than for another, and is equally on the side of both, or perhaps it would be better to say she does not care a fig for either. Every creature must take its chances, and man is no exception. We can ride if we know how and are going her way, or we can be run over if we fall or make a mistake. Nature does not care whether the hunter slay the beast or the beast the hunter; she will make good compost of them both, and her ends are prospered whichever succeeds.

"If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pa.s.s, and turn again."

What is the end of Nature? Where is the end of a sphere? The sphere balances at any and every point. So everything in Nature is at the top, and yet no _one_ thing is at the top.

She works with reference to no measure of time, no limit of s.p.a.ce, and with an abundance of material, not expressed by exhaustless. Did you think Niagara a great exhibition of power? What is that, then, that withdraws noiseless and invisible in the ground about, and of which Niagara is but the lifting of the finger?

Nature is thoroughly selfish, and looks only to her own ends. One thing she is bent upon, and that is keeping up the supply, multiplying endlessly and scattering as she multiplies. Did Nature have in view our delectation when she made the apple, the peach, the plum, the cherry?

Undoubtedly; but only as a means to her own private ends. What a bribe or a wage is the pulp of these delicacies to all creatures to come and sow their seed! And Nature has taken care to make the seed indigestible, so that, though the fruit be eaten, the germ is not, but only planted.

G.o.d made the crab, but man made the pippin; but the pippin cannot propagate itself, and exists only by violence and usurpation. Bacon says, "It is easier to deceive Nature than to force her," but it seems to me the nurserymen really force her. They cut off the head of a savage and clap on the head of a fine gentleman, and the crab becomes a Swaar or a Baldwin. Or is it a kind of deception practiced upon Nature, which succeeds only by being carefully concealed? If we could play the same tricks upon her in the human species, how the great geniuses could be preserved and propagated, and the world stocked with them! But what a frightful condition of things that would be! No new men, but a tiresome and endless repet.i.tion of the old ones,--a world perpetually stocked with Newtons and Shakespeares!

We say Nature knows best, and has adapted this or that to our wants or to our const.i.tution,--sound to the ear, light and color to the eye; but she has not done any such thing, but has adapted man to these things.

The physical cosmos is the mould, and man is the molten metal that is poured into it. The light fashioned the eye, the laws of sound made the ear; in fact, man is the outcome of Nature and not the reverse.

Creatures that live forever in the dark have no eyes; and would not any one of our senses perish and be shed, as it were, in a world where it could not be used?