Birds and Poets | Page 6

With thy voice is loud,
As, when Night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed."
Wordsworth has written two poems upon the lark, in one of which he calls the bird "pilgrim of the sky." This is the one quoted by Emerson in "Parnassus." Here is the concluding stanza:--
"Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;?A privacy of glorious light is thine,?Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood?Of harmony, with instinct more divine;?Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam,?True to the kindred points of heaven and home."
The other poem I give entire:--
"Up with me! up with me into the clouds!
For thy song, Lark, is strong;?Up with me, up with me into the clouds!
Singing, singing,?With clouds and sky about thee ringing,
Lift me, guide me till I find?That spot which seems so to thy mind!
"I have walked through wilderness dreary,
And to-day my heart is weary;?Had I now the wings of a Faery
Up to thee would I fly.?There is madness about thee, and joy divine
In that song of thine;?Lift me, guide me high and high?To thy banqueting-place in the sky.
"Joyous as morning?Thou art laughing and scorning;?Thou hast a nest for thy love and thy rest,?And, though little troubled with sloth,?Drunken Lark! thou wouldst be loth?To be such a traveler as I.
Happy, happy Liver!?With a soul as strong as a mountain river,?Pouring out praise to the Almighty Giver,?Joy and jollity be with us both!
"Alas! my journey, rugged and uneven,?Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind;?But hearing thee, or others of thy kind,?As full of gladness and as free of heaven,?I, with my fate contented, will plod on,?And hope for higher raptures, when life's day is done."
But better than either--better and more than a hundred pages--is Shakespeare's simple line,--
"Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings,"
or John Lyly's, his contemporary,--
"Who is't now we hear??None but the lark so shrill and clear;?Now at heaven's gate she claps her wings,?The morn not waking till she sings."
We have no well-known pastoral bird in the Eastern States that answers to the skylark. The American pipit or titlark and the shore lark, both birds of the far north, and seen in the States only in fall and winter, are said to sing on the wing in a similar strain. Common enough in our woods are two birds that have many of the habits and manners of the lark--the water-thrush and the goldencrowned thrush, or oven-bird. They are both walkers, and the latter frequently sings on the wing up aloft after the manner of the lark. Starting from its low perch, it rises in a spiral flight far above the tallest trees, and breaks out in a clear, ringing, ecstatic song, sweeter and more richly modulated than the skylark's, but brief, ceasing almost before you have noticed it; whereas the skylark goes singing away after you have forgotten him and returned to him half a dozen times.
But on the Great Plains, of the West there; is a bird whose song resembles the skylark's quite closely and is said to be not at all inferior. This is Sprague's pipit, sometimes called the Missouri skylark, an excelsior songster, which from far up in the?transparent blue rains down its notes for many minutes together. It is, no doubt, destined to figure in the future poetical literature of the West.
Throughout the northern and eastern parts of the Union the lark would find a dangerous rival in the bobolink, a bird that has no European prototype, and no near relatives anywhere, standing quite alone, unique, and, in the qualities of hilarity and musical tintinnabulation, with a song unequaled. He has already a secure place in general literature, having been laureated by no less a poet than Bryant, and invested with a lasting human charm in the sunny page of Irving, and is the only one of our songsters, I believe, that the mockingbird cannot parody or imitate. He affords the most marked example of exuberant pride, and a glad, rollicking, holiday spirit, that can be seen among our birds. Every note expresses complacency and glee. He is a beau of the first pattern, and, unlike any other bird of my acquaintance, pushes his gallantry to the point of wheeling gayly into the train of every female that comes along, even after the season of courtship is over and the matches are all settled; and when she leads him on too wild a chase, he turns, lightly about and breaks out with a song is precisely analogous to a burst of gay and self-satisfied laughter, as much as to say, _"Ha! ha!