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Whitman is less local than the New England poets, and faces more to the West. But he makes himself at home everywhere, and puts in characteristic scenes and incidents, generally compressed into a single line, from all trades and doings and occupations, North, East, South, West, and identifies himself with man in all straits and conditions on the continent. Like the old poets, he does not dwell upon nature, except occasionally through the vistas opened up by the great sciences, as astronomy and geology, but upon life and movement and personality, and puts in a shred of natural history here and there,–the “twittering redstart,” the spotted hawk swooping by, the oscillating sea-gulls, the yellow-crowned heron, the razor-billed auk, the lone wood duck, the migrating geese, the sharp-hoofed moose, the mockingbird “the thrush, the hermit,” etc.,–to help locate and define his position. Everywhere in nature Whitman finds human relations, human responsions. In entire consistence with botany, geology, science, or what not, he endues his very seas and woods with passion, more than the old hamadryads or tritons. His fields, his rocks, his trees, are not dead material, but living companions. This is doubtless one reason why Addington Symonds, the young Hellenic scholar of England, finds him more thoroughly Greek than any other man of modern times.

Our natural history, and indeed all phases of life in this country, is rich in materials for the poet that have yet hardly been touched. Many of our most familiar birds, which are inseparably associated with one’s walks and recreations in the open air, and with the changes of the seasons, are yet awaiting their poet,–as the high-hole, with his golden-shafted quills and loud continued spring call; the meadowlark, with her crescent-marked breast and long-drawn, piercing, yet tender April and May summons forming, with that of the high-hole, one of the three or four most characteristic field sounds of our spring; the happy goldfinch, circling round and round in midsummer with that peculiar undulating flight and calling PER-CHICK’-O-PEE, PER-CHICK’-O-PEE, at each opening and shutting of the wings, or later leading her plaintive brood among the thistle-heads by the roadside; the little indigo- bird, facing the torrid sun of August and singing through all the livelong summer day; the contented musical soliloquy of the vireo, like the whistle of a boy at his work, heard through all our woods from May to September:–

“Pretty green worm, where are you?
Dusky-winged moth, how fare you,
When wind and rain are in the tree?
Cheeryo, cheerebly, chee,
Shadow and sun one are to me.
Mosquito and gnat, beware you,
Saucy chipmunk, how dare you
Climb to my nest in the maple-tree,
And dig up the corn
At noon and at morn?
Cheeryo, cheerebly, chee.”

Or the ph�œbe-bird, with her sweet April call and mossy nest under the bridge or woodshed, or under the shelving rocks; or the brown thrasher–mocking thrush–calling half furtively, half archly from the treetop back in the bushy pastures: “Croquet, croquet, hit it, hit it, come to me, come to me, tight it, tight it, you’re out, you’re out,” with many musical interludes; or the chewink, rustling the leaves and peering under the bushes at you; or the pretty little oven-bird, walking round and round you in the woods, or suddenly soaring above the treetops, and uttering its wild lyrical strain; or, farther south, the whistling redbird, with his crest and military bearing,–these and many others should be full of suggestion and inspiration to our poets. It is only lately that the robin’s song has been put into poetry. Nothing could be happier than this rendering of it by a nameless singer in “A Masque of Poets:”–

“When the willows gleam along the
brooks,
And the grass grows green in sunny
nooks,
In the sunshine and the rain
I hear the robin in the lane
Singing, ‘Cheerily,
Cheer up, cheer up;
Cheerily, cheerily,
Cheer up.’