Loves Meinie | Page 6

in our motive of examination will entirely alter the
result. To paint birds that we may show how minutely we can paint, is
among the most contemptible occupations of art. To paint them, that
we may show how beautiful they are, is not indeed one of its highest,
but quite one of its pleasantest and most useful; it is a skill within the
reach of every student of average capacity, and which, so far as
acquired, will assuredly both make their hearts kinder, and their lives
happier.
Without further preamble, I will ask you to look to-day, more carefully
than usual, at your well-known favorite, and to think about him with
some precision.
16. And first, Where does he come from? I stated that my lectures were
to be on English and Greek birds; but we are apt to fancy the robin all
our own. How exclusively, do you suppose, he really belongs to us?
You would think this was the first point to be settled in any book about
him. I have hunted all my books through, and can't tell you how much
he is our own, or how far he is a traveler.
And, indeed, are not all our ideas obscure about migration itself? You
are broadly told that a bird travels, and how wonderful it is that it finds
its way; but you are scarcely ever told, or led to think, what it really
travels for--whether for food, for warmth, or for seclusion--and how the
traveling is connected with its fixed home. Birds have not their town
and country houses,--their villas in Italy, and shooting boxes in
Scotland. The country in which they build their nests is their proper

home,--the country, that is to say, in which they pass the spring and
summer. Then they go south in the winter, for food and warmth; but in
what lines, and by what stages? The general definition of a migrant in
this hemisphere is a bird that goes north to build its nest, and south for
the winter; but, then, the one essential point to know about it is the
breadth and latitude of the zone it properly inhabits,--that is to say, in
which it builds its nest; next, its habits of life, and extent and line of
southing in the winter; and finally, its manner of traveling.
17. Now, here is this entirely familiar bird, the robin. Quite the first
thing that strikes me about it, looking at it as a painter, is the small
effect it seems to have had on the minds of the southern nations. I trace
nothing of it definitely, either in the art or literature of Greece or Italy. I
find, even, no definite name for it; you don't know if Lesbia's "passer"
had a red breast, or a blue, or a brown. And yet Mr. Gould says it is
abundant in all parts of Europe, in all the islands of the Mediterranean,
and in Madeira and the Azores. And then he says--(now notice the
puzzle of this),--"In many parts of the Continent it is a migrant, and,
contrary to what obtains with us, is there treated as a vagrant, for there
is scarcely a country across the water in which it is not shot down and
eaten."
"In many parts of the Continent it is a migrant." In what parts--how
far--in what manner?
18. In none of the old natural history books can I find any account of
the robin as a traveler, but there is, for once, some sufficient reason for
their reticence. He has a curious fancy in his manner of traveling. Of all
birds, you would think he was likely to do it in the cheerfulest way, and
he does it in the saddest. Do you chance to have read, in the Life of
Charles Dickens, how fond he was of taking long walks in the night
and alone? The robin, en voyage, is the Charles Dickens of birds. He
always travels in the night, and alone; rests, in the day, wherever day
chances to find him; sings a little, and pretends he hasn't been
anywhere. He goes as far, in the winter, as the north-west of Africa;
and in Lombardy, arrives from the south early in March; but does not
stay long, going on into the Alps, where he prefers wooded and wild

districts. So, at least, says my Lombard informant.
I do not find him named in the list of Cretan birds; but even if often
seen, his dim red breast was little likely to make much impression on
the Greeks, who knew the flamingo, and had made it, under the name
of Phoenix or Phoenicopterus, the center of their myths of scarlet birds.
They broadly embraced the general aspect of the smaller and more
obscure species, under the