"A woodland walk
A quest of river-grapes, a mocking
thrush,
A wild rose, or rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds."
That "rock-loving columbine" is better than Bryant's "columbines,
in purple dressed," as our flower is not purple, but yellow and
scarlet. Yet Bryant set the example to the poets that have
succeeded him of closely studying Nature as she appears under our
own skies.
I yield to none in my admiration of the sweetness and simplicity of
his poems of nature, and in general of their correctness of
observation. They are tender and heartfelt, and they touch chords
that no other poet since Wordsworth has touched with so firm a
hand. Yet he was not always an infallible observer; he sometimes
tripped up on his facts, and at other times he deliberately moulded
them, adding to, or cutting off, to suit the purposes of his verse.
I will cite here two instances in which his natural history is at
fault. In his poem on the bobolink he makes the parent birds feed
their young with "seeds," whereas, in fact, the young are fed
exclusively upon insects and worms. The bobolink is an
insectivorous bird in the North, or until its brood has flown, and
a granivorous bird in the South. In his "Evening Revery" occur
these lines:--
"The mother bird hath broken for her
brood
Their prison shells, or shoved them
from the nest,
Plumed for their earliest flight."
It is not a fact that the mother bird aids her offspring in
escaping from the shell. The young of all birds are armed with a
small temporary horn or protuberance upon the upper mandible, and
they are so placed in the shell that this point is in immediate
contact with its inner surface; as soon as they are fully developed
and begin to struggle to free themselves, the horny growth "pips"
the shell. Their efforts then continue till their prison walls are
completely sundered and the bird is free. This process is rendered
the more easy by the fact that toward the last the shell becomes
very rotten; the acids that are generated by the growing chick eat
it and make it brittle, so that one can hardly touch a fully
incubated bird's egg without breaking it. To help the young bird
forth would insure its speedy death. It is not true, either, that
the parent shoves its young from the nest when they are fully
fledged, except possibly in the case of some of the swallows and of
the eagle. The young of all our more common birds leave the nest
of their own motion, stimulated probably by the calls of the
parents, and in some cases by the withholding of food for a longer
period than usual.
As an instance where Bryant warps the facts to suit his purpose,
take his poems of the "Yellow Violet" and "The Fringed Gentian." Of
this last flower he says:--
"Thou waitest late and com'st alone,
When woods are bare and birds are
flown,
And frosts and shortening days
portend
The aged year is near his end."
The fringed gentian belongs to September, and, when the severer
frosts keep away, it runs over into October. But it does not come
alone, and the woods are not bare. The closed gentian comes at the
same time, and the blue and purple asters are in all their glory.
Goldenrod, turtle-head, and other fall flowers also abound. When
the woods are bare, which does not occur in New England till in or
near November, the fringed gentian has long been dead. It is in
fact killed by the first considerable frost. No, if one were to go
botanizing, and take Bryant's poem for a guide, he would not bring
home any fringed gentians with him. The only flower he would find
would be the witch-hazel. Yet I never see this gentian without
thinking of Bryant's poem, and feeling that he has brought it
immensely nearer to us.
Bryant's poem of the "Yellow Violet" has all his accustomed
simplicity and pensiveness, but his love for the flower carries him
a little beyond the facts; he makes it sweet-scented,--
"Thy faint perfume
Alone is in the virgin air;"
and he makes it the first flower of spring. I have never been able
to detect any perfume in the yellow species (VIOLA ROTUNDIFOLIA).
This honor belongs alone to our two white violets, VIOLA BLANDA and
VIOLA CANADENSIS.