om the fields or the woods:--

"She sat down below a thorn,
Fine flowers in the valley,
And there has she her sweet babe borne,
And the green leaves they grow rarely."

Or the best lyric pieces, how like they are to certain
bird-songs!--clear, ringing, ecstatic, and suggesting that challenge
and triumph which the outpouring of the male bird contains. (Is not
the genuine singing, lyrical quality essentially masculine?) Keats and
Shelley, perhaps more notably than any other English poets, have the
bird organization and the piercing wild-bird cry. This, of course,
is not saying that they are the greatest poets, but that they have
preeminently the sharp semi-tones of the sparrows and the larks.

But when the general reader thinks of the birds of the poets, he
very naturally calls to mind the renowned birds, the lark and the
nightingale, Old World melodists, embalmed in Old World poetry, but
occasionally appearing on these shores, transported in the verse of some
callow singer.

The very oldest poets, the towering antique bards, seem to make little
mention of the song-birds. They loved better the soaring, swooping birds
of prey, the eagle, the ominous birds, the vultures, the storks and
cranes, or the clamorous sea-birds and the screaming hawks. These
suited better the rugged, warlike character of the times and the simple,
powerful souls of the singers themselves. Homer must have heard the
twittering of the swallows, the cry of the plover, the voice of the
turtle, and the warble of the nightingale; but they were not adequate
symbols to express what he felt or to adorn his theme. Aeschylus saw in
the eagle "the dog of Jove," and his verse cuts like a sword with such a
conception.

It is not because the old bards were less as poets, but that they were
more as men. To strong, susceptible characters, the music of nature is
not confined to sweet sounds. The defiant scream of the hawk circling
aloft, the wild whinny of the loon, the whooping of the crane, the
booming of the bittern, the vulpine bark of the eagle, the loud
trumpeting of the migratory geese sounding down out of the midnight sky;
or by the seashore, the coast of New Jersey or Long Island, the wild
crooning of the flocks of gulls, repeated, continued by the hour,
swirling sharp and shrill, rising and falling like the wind in a storm,
as they circle above the beach or dip to the dash of the waves,--are
much more welcome in certain