FullReads

“The daisies and the buttercups
Gild all the lawn.”

I smile as I note that the woodpecker proves a refractory bird to Lowell, as well as to Emerson:–

Emerson rhymes it with bear,
Lowell rhymes it with hear,
One makes it woodpeckair,
The other, woodpeckear.

But its hammer is a musical one, and the poets do well to note it. Our most pleasing drummer upon dry limbs among the woodpeckers is the yellow-bellied. His measured, deliberate tap, heard in the stillness of the primitive woods, produces an effect that no bird- song is capable of.

Tennyson is said to have very poor eyes, but there seems to be no defect in the vision with which he sees nature, while he often hits the nail on the head in a way that would indicate the surest sight. True, he makes the swallow hunt the bee, which, for aught I know, the swallow may do in England. Our purple martin has been accused of catching the honey-bee, but I doubt his guilt. But those of our swallows that correspond to the British species, the barn swallow, the cliff swallow, and the bank swallow, subsist upon very small insects. But what a clear-cut picture is that in the same poem (“The Poet’s Song”):–

“The wild hawk stood, with the down on
his beak,
And stared, with his foot on the
prey.”

It takes a sure eye, too, to see

“The landscape winking thro’ the
heat”–

or to gather this image:–

“He has a solid base of temperament;
But as the water-lily starts and slides
Upon the level in little puffs of wind,
Though anchor’d to the bottom, such
is he;”

or this:–

“Arms on which the standing muscle
sloped,
As slopes a wild brook o’er a little
stone,
Running too vehemently to break
upon it,”–

and many other gems that abound in his poems. He does not cut and cover in a single line, so far as I have observed. Great caution and exact knowledge underlie his most rapid and daring flights. A lady told me that she was once walking with him in the fields, when they came to a spring that bubbled up through shifting sands in a very pretty manner, and Tennyson, in order to see exactly how the spring behaved, got down on his hands and knees and peered a long time into the water. The incident is worth repeating as showing how intently a great poet studies nature.

Walt Whitman says he has been trying for years to find a word that would express or suggest that evening call of the robin. How absorbingly this poet must have studied the moonlight to hit upon this descriptive phrase:–

“The vitreous pour of the full moon
just tinged with blue;”

how long have looked upon the carpenter at his bench to have made this poem:–

“The tongue of his fore-plane whistles
its wild ascending lisp;”

or how lovingly listened to the nocturne of the mockingbird to have turned it into words in “A Word out of the Sea “! Indeed, no poet has studied American nature more closely than Whitman has, or is more cautious in his uses of it. How easy are his descriptions!–

“Behold the daybreak!
The little light fades the immense
and diaphanous shadows!”

“The comet that came unannounced
Out of the north, flaring in
heaven.”

“The fan-shaped explosion.”

“The slender and jagged threads of
lightning, as sudden and fast amid
the din they chased each other
across the sky.”

“Where the heifers browse–where
geese nip their food with short
jerks;
Where sundown shadows lengthen
over the limitless and lonesome
prairie;
Where herds of buffalo make a
crawling spread of the square miles
far and near;
Where the hummingbird shimmers–
where the neck of the long-lived
swan is curving and winding;
Where the laughing-gull scoots by the
shore when she laughs her near
human laugh;
Where band-neck’d partridges roost
in a ring on the ground with their
heads out.”