alvador!
What fire burns in that little chest,
So frolic, stout, and self-possest?
Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine;
Ashes and jet all hues outshine.
Why are not diamonds black and gray,
To ape thy dare-devil array?
And I affirm, the spacious North
Exists to draw thy virtue forth.
I think no virtue goes with size;
The reason of all cowardice
Is, that men are overgrown,
And, to be valiant, must come down
To the titmouse dimension.'

. . . . . . . .

"I think old Caesar must have heard
In northern Gaul my dauntless bird,
And, echoed in some frosty wold,
Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold.
And I will write our annals new
And thank thee for a better clew.
I, who dreamed not when I came here
To find the antidote of fear,
Now hear thee say in Roman key,
_Poean! Veni, vidi, vici."_

A late bird-poem, and a good one of its kind, is Celia Thaxter's
"Sandpiper," which recalls Bryant's "Water-Fowl" in its successful
rendering of the spirit and atmosphere of the scene, and the
distinctness with which the lone bird, flitting along the beach, is
brought before the mind. It is a woman's or a feminine poem, as Bryant's
is characteristically a man's.

The sentiment or feeling awakened by any of the aquatic fowls is
preeminently one of loneliness. The wood duck which your approach starts
from the pond or the marsh, the loon neighing down out of the April
sky, the wild goose, the curlew, the stork, the bittern, the sandpiper,
awaken quite a different train of emotions from those awakened by
the land-birds. They all have clinging to them some reminiscence and
suggestion of the sea. Their cries echo its wildness and desolation;
their wings are the shape of its billows.

Of the sandpipers there are many varieties, found upon the coast and
penetrating inland along the rivers and water-courses, one of the most
interesting of the family, commonly called the "tip-up," going up all
the mountain brooks and breeding in the sand along their banks; but
the characteristics are the same in all, and the eye detects little
difference except in size.

The walker on the beach sees it running or flitting before him,
following up the breakers and picking up the aquatic insects left on the
sands; and the trout-fisher along the farthest inland stream likewi