"Up with me! up with me into the clouds!
For thy song, Lark, is strong;
Up with me, up with me into the clouds!
Singing, singing,
With clouds and sky about thee ringing,
Lift me, guide me till I find
That spot which seems so to thy mind!
"I have walked through wilderness dreary,
And to-day my heart is weary;
Had I now the wings of a Faery
Up to thee would I fly.
There is madness about thee, and joy divine
In that song of thine;
Lift me, guide me high and high
To thy banqueting-place in the sky.
"Joyous as morning
Thou art laughing and scorning;
Thou hast a nest for thy love and thy rest,
And, though little troubled with sloth,
Drunken Lark! thou wouldst be loth
To be such a traveler as I.
Happy, happy Liver!
With a soul as strong as a mountain river,
Pouring out praise to the Almighty Giver,
Joy and jollity be with us both!
"Alas! my journey, rugged and uneven,
Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind;
But hearing thee, or others of thy kind,
As full of gladness and as free of heaven,
I, with my fate contented, will plod on,
And hope for higher raptures, when life's day is done."
But better than either--better and more than a hundred pages--is
Shakespeare's simple line,--
"Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings,"
or John Lyly's, his contemporary,--
"Who is't now we hear?
None but the lark so shrill and clear;
Now at heaven's gate she claps her wings,
The morn not waking till she sings."
We have no well-known pastoral bird in the Eastern States that answers
to the skylark. The American pipit or titlark and the shore lark, both
birds of the far north, and seen in the States only in fall and winter,
are said to sing on the wing in a similar strain. Common enough in our
woods are two birds that have many of the habits and manners of the
lark--the water-thrush and the golden-crowned thrush, or oven-bird. They
are both walkers, and the latter frequently sings on the wing up aloft
after the manner of the lark. Starting from its low perch, it rises in
a spiral flight far above the tallest trees, and breaks out in a clear,
ringing, ecstatic song, sweeter and more richly modulated than the
skylark's, but brief, ceasing almost before you have noticed it; whereas
the skylark goes singing away after you have forgotten him and returned
to him half a dozen times.
But on the Great Plains, of the West there; is a bird whose song
resembles the skylark's quite closely and is said to be not at all
inferior. This is Sprague's pipit, sometimes called the Missouri
skylark, an excelsior songster, which from far up in the transparent
blue rains down its notes for many minutes together. It is, no doubt,
destined to figure in the future poetical literature of the West.
Throughout the northern and eastern parts of the Union the lark would
find a dangerous rival in the bobolink, a bird that has no European
prototype, and no near relatives anywhere, standing quite alone, unique,
and, in the qualities of hilarity and musical tintinnabulation, with
a song unequaled. He has already a secure place in general literature,
having been laureated by no less a poet than Bryant, and invested with a
lasting human charm in the sunny page of Irving, and is the only one of
our songsters, I believe, that the mockingbird cannot parody or imitate.
He affords the most marked example of exuberant pride, and a glad,
rollicking, holiday spirit, that can be seen among our birds. Every note
expresses complacency and glee. He is a beau of the first pattern, and,
unlike any other bird of my acquaintance, pushes his gallantry to the
point of wheeling gayly into the train of every female that comes along,
even after the season of courtship is over and the matches are all
settled; and when she leads him on too wild a chase, he turns, lightly
about and breaks out with a song is precisely analogous to a burst of
gay and self-satisfied laughter, as much as to say, _"Ha! ha! ha! I
must have my fun, Miss Silverthimble, thimble, thimble, if I break every
heart in the meadow, see, see, see!"_
At the approach of the breeding season the bobolink undergoes a complete
change; his form changes, his color changes, his flight changes. From
mottled brown or brindle he becomes black and white, earning, in some
localities, the shocking name of "skunk bird;" his small, compact form
becomes broad and conspicuous, and his ordinary flight is laid aside for
a mincing, affected gait, in which he seems to use only the very tips of
his wings. It is very noticeable what a contrast he presents to his mate
at this season, not only in color but in manners, she being as shy and
retiring as he is forward and hilarious. Indeed, she seems disagreeably
serious and indisposed to any fun or jollity, scurrying away at his
approach, and apparently annoyed at every endearing word and look. It
is surprising that all this parade of plumage and tinkling of cymbals
should be gone through with and persisted in to please a creature so
coldly indifferent as she really seems to be. If Robert O'Lincoln has
been stimulated into acquiring this holiday uniform and this musical
gift by the approbation of Mrs. Robert, as Darwin, with his sexual
selection principle, would have us believe, then there must have been
a time when the females of this tribe were not quite so chary of their
favors as they are now. Indeed, I never knew a female bird of any kind
that did not appear utterly indifferent to the charms of voice and
plumage that the male birds are so fond of displaying. But I am inclined
to believe that the males think only of themselves and of outshining
each other, and not at all of the approbation of their mates, as, in an
analogous case in a higher species, it is well known whom the females
dress for, and whom they want to kill with envy!
I know of no other song-bird that expresses so much self-consciousness
and vanity, and comes so near being an ornithological coxcomb. The
red-bird, the yellowbird, the indigo-bird, the oriole, the cardinal
grosbeak, and others, all birds of brilliant plumage and musical
ability, seem quite unconscious of self, and neither by tone nor act
challenge the admiration of the beholder.
By the time the bobolink reaches the Potomac, in September, he has
degenerated into a game-bird that is slaughtered by tens of thousands in
the marshes. I think the prospects now are of his gradual extermination,
as gunners and sportsmen are clearly on the increase, while the limit of
the bird's productivity in the North has no doubt been reached long ago.
There are no more meadows to be added to his domain there, while he is
being waylaid and cut off more and more on his return to the South.
It is gourmand eat gourmand, until in half a century more I expect the
blithest and merriest of our meadow songsters will have disappeared
before the rapacity of human throats.
But the poets have had a shot at him in good time, and have preserved
some of his traits. Bryant's poem on this subject does not compare with
his lines "To a Water-Fowl,"--a subject so well suited to the peculiar,
simple, and deliberate motion of his mind; at the same time it is fit
that the poet who sings of "The Planting of the Apple-Tree" should
render into words the song of "Robert of Lincoln." I subjoin a few
stanzas:--