"The robin sings as of old from the
limb!
The catbird croons in the lilac-bush!
Through the dim arbor, himself more
dun,
Silently hops the hermit thrush."
Among trees Lowell has celebrated the oak, the pine, the birch; and
among flowers; the violet and the dandelion. The last, I think, is
the most pleasing of these poems:--
"Dear common flower, that grow'st
beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless
gold,
First pledge of blithesome May."
The dandelion is indeed, in our latitude, the pledge of May. It
comes when the grass is short, and the fresh turf sets off its
"ring of gold" with admirable effect; hence we know the poet is a
month or more out of the season when, in "Al Fresco," he makes it
bloom with the buttercup and the clover:--
"The dandelions and buttercups
Gild all the lawn; the drowsy bee
Stumbles among the clover-tops,
And summer sweetens all but me."
Of course the dandelion blooms occasionally throughout the whole
summer, especially where the grass is kept short, but its proper
season, when it "gilds all the lawn," is, in every part of the
country, some weeks earlier than the tall buttercup and the clover.
These bloom in June in New England and New York, and are
contemporaries of the daisy. In the meadows and lawns, the
dandelion drops its flower and holds aloft its sphere of down,
touching the green surface as with a light frost, long before the
clover and the buttercup have formed their buds. In "Al Fresco" our
poet is literally in clover, he is reveling in the height of the
season, the full tide of summer is sweeping around him, and he has
riches enough without robbing May of her dandelions. Let him say,--
"The daisies and the buttercups
Gild all the lawn."
I smile as I note that the woodpecker proves a refractory bird to
Lowell, as well as to Emerson:--
Emerson rhymes it with bear,
Lowell rhymes it with hear,
One makes it woodpeckair,
The other, woodpeckear.
But its hammer is a musical one, and the poets do well to note it.
Our most pleasing drummer upon dry limbs among the woodpeckers is
the yellow-bellied. His measured, deliberate tap, heard in the
stillness of the primitive woods, produces an effect that no bird-
song is capable of.
Tennyson is said to have very poor eyes, but there seems to be no
defect in the vision with which he sees nature, while he often hits
the nail on the head in a way that would indicate the surest sight.
True, he makes the swallow hunt the bee, which, for aught I know,
the swallow may do in England. Our purple martin has been accused
of catching the honey-bee, but I doubt his guilt. But those of our
swallows that correspond to the British species, the barn swallow,
the cliff swallow, and the bank swallow, subsist upon very small
insects. But what a clear-cut picture is that in the same poem
("The Poet's Song"):--
"The wild hawk stood, with the down on
his beak,
And stared, with his foot on the
prey."