te."

While we are trying to introduce the lark in this country, why not try
this Pindaric grasshopper also?

It is to the literary poets and to the minstrels of a softer age that
we must look for special mention of the song-birds and for poetical
rhapsodies upon them. The nightingale is the most general favorite, and
nearly all the more noted English poets have sung her praises. To the
melancholy poet she is melancholy, and to the cheerful she is cheerful.
Shakespeare in one of his sonnets speaks of her song as mournful, while
Martial calls her the "most garrulous" of birds. Milton sang:--

"Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly,
Most musical, most melancholy,
Thee, chantress, oft the woods among
I woo, to hear thy evening song."

To Wordsworth she told another story:--

"O nightingale! thou surely art
A creature of ebullient heart;
These notes of thine,--they pierce and pierce,--
Tumultuous harmony and fierce!
Thou sing'st as if the god of wine
Had helped thee to a valentine;
A song in mockery and despite
Of shades, and dews, and silent night,
And steady bliss, and all the loves
Now sleeping in these peaceful groves."

In a like vein Coleridge sang:--

"'T is the merry nightingale
That crowds and hurries and precipitates
With fast, thick warble his delicious notes."

Keats's poem on the nightingale is doubtless more in the spirit of the
bird's strain than any other. It is less a description of the song and
more the song itself. Hood called the nightingale

"The sweet and plaintive Sappho of the dell."

I mention the nightingale only to point my remarks upon its American
rival, the famous mockingbird of the Southern States, which is also a
nightingale,--a night-singer,--and which no doubt excels the Old World
bird in the variety and compass of its powers. The two birds belong to
totally distinct families, there being no American species which answers
to the European nightingale, as there are that answer to the robin,
the cuckoo, the blackbird, and numerous others. Philomel has the color,
manners, and habits of a thrush,--our hermit thrush,--but it is not a
thrush at all, but a warbler. I gather from the books that its song is
protracted and full rather than melodious,--a capricious, long-continued
warble, doubling and redoubling, rising and falling, issuing f