There is a jewel which no Indian mines
Can buy, no chymic art can counterfeit;
It makes men rich in greatest poverty,
Makes water wine, turns wooden cups to gold,
The homely whistle to sweet music’s strain:
Seldom it comes, to few from heaven sent,
That much in little, all in naught—Content.[15]
Footnote 15:
The student of French poetical literature will notice the marked
resemblance in expression of a portion of this lovely lyric of
fourteen lines and the following prettily turned _quatorzain_ by a
singer of the sixteenth century:
Ie vis, ie meurs: ie me brule & me noye,
I’ay chaut estreme en endurant froidure:
La vie m’est & trop molle & trop dure.
I’ay grans ennuis entremeslez de ioye:
Tout à un coup ie ris & ie larmoye,
Et en plaisir maint grief tourment i ’endure:
Mon bien s’en va, & à iamais il dure:
Tout en un coup ie seiche & ie verdoye.
Ainsi Amour inconstamment me meine:
Et quand ie pense auoir plus de douleur,
Sans y penser ie me treuue hors de peine.
Puis quand ie croy ma ioye estre certeine,
Et estre au haut de mon desiré heur,
Il me remet en mon premier malheur.
ŒUURES DE LOUIZE LABÉ LIONNOIZE. A Lion par Ian de Tournes, M.D.LVI.
Auec Priuilege du Roy.
The first of the migratory flocks have come. Is it the robins or the
bluebirds first, or the omnipresent song-sparrow scattering his notes
like a shower? Warm as the scarlet of his wings is the greeting of the
starling from his haven in the reeds; and ah! how sweet the carol of the
meadow-lark from the distant fields. Again I hear the warble which the
blackbird dropped when flying over the autumnal stubbles, only it has a
cheeriness that is alone brought forth by sunshine and the lengthening
days. Little flutings and grace notes rise from sheltered thickets and
sunny hollows—assemblages of snow-birds, Canada sparrows, and red-polls
practicing their _Fruehlingslied_. The white-throated sparrow’s silver
strain I hear on every side, the very beat of the spring-tide and song
of the sunshine. Even the voice of the crow has a softer tone. From my
study windows I watch the sable hosts returning to their roost in the
distant wood. I see them slowly filing by during the winter, at the
appointed hour, but less numerously, and seldom audibly. Now they voice
their passage; their shadows cast a sound. From time immemorial they
have occupied a roost in the same wood, their numbers apparently neither
increasing nor diminishing. The first squads fly over early in the
evening, re-enforcements arriving continually until dusk. They come from
all directions, the total assemblage numbering perhaps a thousand. Above
the tree-tops, for half an hour before dark, there ascends a weird
chorus of evening, composed of every shade of corvine _basso_, and
_basso profondo_. Borne from afar on the still evening air, the hoarse
notes come to me mellowed and subdued—a fitting _ave_ of the darkening
day.
Later, the first swallow races by, with the first moth in his bill,
urged on the wider wings of the south wind—the first swallows, rather;
for there is not only one but a score coursing through the ether,
exultant in the freedom of existence. Do they, indeed, drop from the sky
some bland spring morning—spirits of dead children revisiting their
homes—as the fanciful Roman legend has it? How swiftly they cleave the
air with their forked tail and sickle-shaped wings! We marvel at the
soaring of the hawk, balancing himself in an ever-widening and ascending
circle, ever tracing the curve of beauty. We wonder at the agility of
the humming-bird, and his power of suspension in mid-air over a flower.
But the hawk barely flaps a pinion, sustained through some inexplicable
agency in overcoming the natural force of gravity; and the humming-bird
every little while rests from the friction of the air. Is not the
perpetual flight of the swallow, his unceasing motion and incessant
turning upon himself a greater wonder?
I stand on the margin of the stream just before an impending shower,
when a concourse of hirundines is intent upon the capture of its prey.
The surface is dimpled by the constant rising of feeding trout, and
brushed every now and then by a bird drinking on the wing. It is a
favorite haunt of both fly-catchers and swallows, lured by the rich
insect fauna that congregate above the still expanse of water, the
ephemerina dancing their joyous dance of an hour. The stream is scarcely
a rod and a half wide. It is almost overarched with bushes and trees,
and abounds with curves. There are at least forty swallows hawking over
it, all chasing above the glassy surface, ceaselessly coming and going,
swift as missiles sprung from a sling. Yet not a catkin of the alder
tangle or blade of the rushes is so much as grazed by a wing; not a
barbule of one bird ruffled by the feather of another, amid all their
lightning turns and curvatures. It is the same in their chase over a
field when attracted close to the earth by insects. It is the same in
their coursing through the air which I see through my windows, only they
have but their fellows, and no other objects to avoid. Yet even then
their flight is a perpetual wonder.
Sacred to the _penates_ the swallow was rightly held; it were a Vandal
who would harm them. Beloved wherever they roam the sky, Procne has,
nevertheless, been comparatively neglected by the Muse, while Philomela
has received the greater homage. Is not the swallow’s warble sweet,
associated as it is not only with the swallow’s beauty, but with our
very houses and barns and the blue sky that bends above them? Best known
of all individual “pursuers of the sun” is the bird mentioned in the
fifth stanza of the Elegy:
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed;
and his companion of the Winter’s Tale, wheeling between daffodils and
violets. Keats’s line is among the most expressive that have been
written on the bird:
Swallows obeying the south summer’s call.
Hood’s simile is also fine:
Summer is gone on swallow’s wings.
Gay, in The Shepherd’s Walk, has the swallow do graceful duty as a
weather-prophet:
When swallows fleet soar high and sport in air,
He told us that the welkin would be clear.
Athenæus has referred as happily to the bird as any of the old Greek
poets in a fragment, The Song of the Swallow:
The swallow is come, she is come to bring
The laughing hours of the blithesome spring—
The youth of the year and its sunshine bright—
With her back all dark and her breast all white.
From the Fables of Lessing I learn that the swallow was originally as
harmonious and melodious a songster as the nightingale, until, becoming
wearied of dwelling in lonely thickets to be heard and admired only by
peasants and shepherds, she forsook her humble friends and took flight
to the town. But, in the mad rush of the city, men found no time to
listen to her heavenly lay, forgetting which, by and by, instead of
singing she learned to build.
I recall no reference to the swallow, however, comparable to Charles
Tennyson Turner’s, in one of his many lovely sonnets, Wind on the Corn.
Not only the swallow himself is there, wheeling and curveting in all his
buoyant grace, but the wind which accelerates his speed, and the
rippling wheat field he loves to woo. The sonnet must be read in its
entirety, and to recall it calls for no apology; it becomes the more
beautiful the more frequently it is read:
Full often as I rove by path or stile
To watch the harvest ripening in the vale,
Slowly and sweetly, like a growing smile—
A smile that ends in laughter—the quick gale
Upon the breadths of gold-green wheat descends;
While still the swallow, with unbaffled grace,
About his viewless quarry dips and bends—
And all the fine excitement of the chase
Lies in the hunter’s beauty; in the eclipse
Of that brief shadow how the barley’s beard
Tilts at the passing gloom, and wild rose dips
Among the white-tops in the ditches reared;
And hedgerow’s flowery breast of lacework stirs
Faintly in that full wind that rocks the outstanding firs.
Truly Boileau was right in his affirmation—a faultless sonnet is in
itself worth a long poem; and Asselineau—fine sonnets, like all
beautiful things in this world, are without price. No less beautiful is
Turner’s companion sonnet, A Summer Twilight—an _intaglio_ cut in green
jade—where the bat’s flitting shadow, instead of the swallow’s flashing
wing, imparts life and motion to the scene.
The first lady-bugs, called forth by the grateful warmth, have left
their hibernacle. The first wasps and blue-bottle flies are buzzing and
bumping against the south window panes. I catch the first _tremolo_ of
the toads and piercing treble of the _hylodes_.
My first green bullfrog, too, “whom the Muses have ordained to sing for
aye.” Again I hear his grand diapason, just as I heard it last year and
every year before as long as I can remember. Apparently from the same
place in the marsh, amid the pond-weeds and water-plantains, where he
suns himself and dozes by day, and launches his _maestoso_ at night. I
wonder if it is really the same frog, with his great yellow ears and
blinking eyes, and if ever he grows old? It is the old voice from the
old place, more powerful and sonorous than the voices of his fellows.
What a fine time he has of it—slumbering in the ooze throughout the
winter, while I am shaking with the cold; cool and comfortable
throughout the summer, when I am sweltering with the heat; with nothing
to do but bask and bathe, or thrust out his long tongue for the flies
that are foolish enough to think him asleep. I heard him just two days
earlier this year than last, May 14, ten days later than the first
swallow to make his presence known. It is said he must thrice put on his
spectacles ere he permanently deserts his couch in the mire—i.e., look
through the ice three times before he rises with triumphant song. He is
invariably the latest of the spring choristers, and at once his
magnificent _basso_ completes the vernal pastoral.
I wish I might obtain the recipe of his spring bitters. Is it
water-cresses or water-plantain? It is evident he grows younger with
advancing years. “The croaking of frogs,” said Martin Luther, “edifies
nothing at all; it is mere sophistry and fruitless.” But, unlike the
frog, Luther did not relish a Diet of Worms; and I am not sure that the
woodcuts of the old reformer do not resemble the head of my friend of
the swamp, whose melody floats so serenely through the summer dusks.
Horace, generally correct, was wrong with respect to the frog:
... Ranæque palustres
Avertunt somnos.
The frog’s is a somnolent voice if heard at a proper distance. One
should not expect harmony from wind instruments in the first row of the
orchestra chairs. If one’s frogs annoy one, he should remove his swamp
or his house. The orchestra of Nature calls for its bassoon and its
cymbals—the bullfrog and the cicada.
A new poet has recently appeared in the Dominion. Among his many poems
of pronounced freshness and beauty is one on the frog—more strictly
speaking, five poems, for the panegyric consists of five connected
sonnets. Not alone does this graceful lyrist and keen interpreter of
Nature place the frog as the grand diurnal musician of spring, but he
accords him a no less exalted place as a soothing minstrel of the
estival night. I should be guilty of ingratitude to my resonant friend
of the swamp did I not append the fourth sonnet of the musical quintet:
And when day passed and over heaven’s height,
Thin with the many stars and cool with dew,
The fingers of the deep hours slowly drew
The wonder of the ever-healing night,
No grief or loneliness or rapt delight
Or weight of silence ever brought to you
Slumber or rest; only your voices grew
More high and solemn; slowly, with hushed flight,
Ye saw the echoing hours go by, long-drawn,
Nor ever stirred, watching with fathomless eyes
And with your countless clear antiphonies
Filling the earth and heaven, even till dawn,
Last risen, found you with its first pale gleam,
Still with soft throats unaltered in your dream.[16]
Footnote 16:
Among the Millet, and other Poems. By Archibald Lampman. Ottawa: J.
Durie and Son. 1888. Pp. 151.
Clearly Horace was at fault. The Greeks thought better of the musical
piper of the marsh; but it has remained for the Canadian poet to chant
more sweetly of him than Theocritus and Aristophanes.
After the treble of the _hylodes_, suddenly the first bee hums by in
quest of the awaiting flower. The first butterfly flutters past, the
first night-hawk booms, the first bat hunts against the crimson
afterglow, and, behold! it is spring. “The weather of the _Renouveau_,”
old Ronsard hymned it—the miracle of the sunshine, the south wind, and
the shower.
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