little orchestra of lyric and
ornithologic song. He might have kept it by him till the longer growing of
his critical beard, and then, if still a devotee at that singular shrine,
have expanded it into a volume or two explanatory of the imagination,
animus and metre of his favorite bard.

The feathered warblers have always been popular with the featherless, who
are indebted to them for no end of similes and suggestions. What would
poetry be without the skylark, the nightingale, the dove and the eagle? It
is far yet from having exhausted them. It cannot be said to have approached
them in the right way--on the most eloquent and interesting side. It
forgets that each species of bird stands by itself, and has its special
life and history as truly as man. We counted thirty-nine kinds in a grove
the centre whereof was our delightful abode for two-thirds of the past
summer, each endowed with its separate outfit of language, ways and means
of living, tastes and political and social notions. In each, moreover,
individualism showed itself--if not to our apprehension as articulately,
yet as indubitably, as among the race which considers them to have been all
created for its amusement and advantage. It does not take long, superficial
as is our acquaintance with their vernacular and the workings of their
little brains, to single out particular specimens, and perceive that no two
"birds of a feather" are exactly alike. A particular robin will rule the
roost, and assert successfully for his mate the choice of resting-places
above competing redbreasts. It is a particular catbird, identified, it may
be, by a missing feather in his tail, that heads the foray on our
strawberries and cherries. We recognize afar off either of the pair of
"flickers," or yellow-shafted woodpeckers, which have set up their penates
in the heart of the left-hand garden gatepost. The wren whose modest
tabernacle occupies the top of the porch pilaster we have little difficulty
in "spotting" when we meet her in a joint stroll along the lawn-fence. Her
ways are not as the ways of other wrens. She has a somewhat different style
of diving into the ivy and exploring the syringa. A new generation of doves
has grown up since the lilacs were in bloom, and nothing is easier than to
distinguish the old and young of the two or three separate families till
all leave the grass and the gravel together and hie to the stubble-fields
beyond our ken. Of the one mocking bird who made n