God's birdlet knows
Nor care nor toil;
Nor weaves it painfully
An everlasting nest;
Through the long night on the twig it slumbers;
When rises the red sun,
To the voice of God listens birdie,
And it starts and it sings.
When spring, nature's beauty,
And the burning summer have passed,
And the fog and the rain
By the late fall are brought,
Men are wearied, men are grieved;
But birdie flies into distant lands,
Into warm climes, beyond the blue sea,--
Flies away until the spring.
15. For a poem of this class this is a veritable gem; for not only is
its theme a thing of beauty, but it is a thing of tender beauty. Who is
there among my hearers that can contemplate this birdlet, this wee child
of God, as the poet hath contemplated it, and not feel a gentleness, a
tenderness, a meltedness creep into every nook and corner of his being?
But the lyric beauty of the form, and the tender emotion roused in our
hearts by this poem, form by no means its greatest merit. To me the
well-nigh inexpressible beauty of these lines lies in the spirit which
shineth from them,--the spirit of unreserved trust in the fatherhood of
God. "When fog and rain by the late fall are brought, men are wearied,
men are grieved, but birdie--" My friends, the poet has written here a
commentary on the heavenly words of Christ, which may well be read with
immeasurable profit by our wiseacres of supply-and-demand economy, and
the consequence-fearing Associated or Dissociated Charity. For if I
mistake not, it was Christ that uttered the strangely unheeded words,
"Be not anxious for the morrow.... Behold the birds of the heaven, that
they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns, and your
heavenly Father feedeth them." Fine words these, to be read reverently
from the pulpit on Sunday, but to be laughed at in the counting-room and
in the charity-office on Monday. But the singer was stirred by this
trustfulness of birdie, all the more beautiful because unconscious, and
accordingly celebrates it in lines of well-nigh unapproachable
tenderness and grace!
16. There is, however, one realm of creation yet grander and nobler than
that visible to the eye of the body. Higher than the visible stands the
invisible; and when the soul turns from the contemplation of the outward
universe to the contemplation of the inward universe, to the
contemplation of affection and aspiration, its flight must of necessity
be higher. Hence the high rank of those strains of song which the soul
gives forth when stirred by affection, by love to the children of God,
whether they be addressed by Wordsworth to a butterfly, by Burns to a
mouse, or by Byron to a friend. You have in English eight brief lines
which for this kind of song are a model from their simplicity,
tenderness, and depth.