moods than any and all mere bird-melodies,
in keeping as they are with the shaggy and untamed features of ocean
and woods, and suggesting something like the Richard Wagner music in the
ornithological orchestra.

"Nor these alone whose notes
Nice-fingered art must emulate in vain,
But cawing rooks, and kites that swim sublime
In still repeated circles, screaming loud,
The jay, the pie, and even the boding owl,
That hails the rising moon, have charms for me,"

says Cowper. "I never hear," says Burns in one of his letters, "the
loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild
mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in an autumnal morning,
without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or
poetry."

Even the Greek minor poets, the swarm of them that are represented in
the Greek Anthology, rarely make affectionate mention of the birds,
except perhaps Sappho, whom Ben Jonson makes speak of the nightingale
as--

"The dear glad angel of the spring."

The cicada, the locust, and the grasshopper are often referred to, but
rarely by name any of the common birds. That Greek grasshopper must
have been a wonderful creature. He was a sacred object in Greece, and
is spoken of by the poets as a charming songster. What we would say of
birds the Greek said of this favorite insect. When Socrates and Phaedrus
came to the fountain shaded by the plane-tree, where they had their
famous discourse, Socrates said: "Observe the freshness of the spot, how
charming and very delightful it is, and how summer-like and shrill
it sounds from the choir of grasshoppers." One of the poets in the
Anthology finds a grasshopper struggling in a spider's web, which he
releases with the words:--

"Go safe and free with your sweet voice of song."

Another one makes the insect say to a rustic who had captured him:--

"Me, the Nymphs' wayside minstrel whose sweet note
O'er sultry hill is heard, and shady grove to float."

Still another sings how a grasshopper took the place of a broken string
on his lyre, and "filled the cadence due."

"For while six chords beneath my fingers cried,
He with his tuneful voice the seventh supplied;
The midday songster of the mountain set
His pastoral ditty to my canzonet;
And when he sang, his modulated throat
Accorded with the lifeless string I smo