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sings Burns. I suspect that the English reader of even some of Emerson’s and Lowell’s poems would infer that our blackbird was identical with the British species. I refer to these lines of Emerson:–

“Where arches green the livelong day
Echo the blackbirds’ roundelay;”

and to these lines from Lowell’s “Rosaline:”–

“A blackbird whistling overhead
Thrilled through my brain;”

and again these from “The Fountain of Youth:”–

” ‘T is a woodland enchanted;
By no sadder spirit
Than blackbirds and thrushes
That whistle to cheer it,
All day in the bushes.”

The blackbird of the English poets is like our robin in everything except color. He is familiar, hardy, abundant, thievish, and his habits, manners, and song recall our bird to the life. Our own native blackbirds, the crow blackbird, the rusty grackle, the cowbird, and the red-shouldered starling, are not songsters, even in the latitude allowable to poets; neither are they whistlers, unless we credit them with a “split-whistle,” as Thoreau does. The two first named have a sort of musical cackle and gurgle in spring (as at times both our crow and jay have), which is very pleasing, and to which Emerson aptly refers in these lines from “May-Day:”–

“The blackbirds make the maples ring
With social cheer and jubilee”–

but it is not a song. The note of the starling in the trees and alders along the creeks and marshes is better calculated to arrest the attention of the casual observer; but it is far from being a song or a whistle like that of the European blackbird, or our robin. Its most familiar call is like the word “BAZIQUE,” “BAZIQUE,” but it has a wild musical note which Emerson has embalmed in this line:–

“The redwing flutes his O-KA-LEE.”

Here Emerson discriminates; there is no mistaking his blackbird this time for the European species, though it is true there is nothing fluty or flute-like in the redwing’s voice. The flute is mellow, while the “O-KA-LEE” of the starling is strong and sharply accented. The voice of the thrushes (and our robin and the European blackbird are thrushes) is flute-like. Hence the aptness of this line of Tennyson:–

“The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm,”–

the blackbird being the ouzel, or ouzel-cock, as Shakespeare calls him.

In the line which precedes this, Tennyson has stamped the cuckoo:–

“To left and right,
The cuckoo told his name to all the hills.”

The cuckoo is a bird that figures largely in English poetry, but he always has an equivocal look in American verse, unless sharply discriminated. We have a cuckoo, but he is a great recluse; and I am sure the poets do not know when he comes or goes, while to make him sing familiarly like the British species, as I have known at least one of our poets to do, is to come very wide of the mark. Our bird is as solitary and joyless as the most veritable anchorite. He contributes nothing to the melody or the gayety of the season. He is, indeed, known in some sections as the rain- crow,” but I presume that not one person in ten of those who spend their lives in the country has ever seen or heard him. He is like the showy orchis, or the lady’s-slipper, or the shooting star among plants,– a stranger to all but the few; and when an American poet says cuckoo, he must say it with such specifications as to leave no doubt what cuckoo he means, as Lowell does in his “Nightingale in the Study:”–

“And, hark, the cuckoo, weatherwise,
Still hiding farther onward, wooes you.”

In like manner the primrose is an exotic in American poetry, to say nothing of the snowdrop and the daisy. Its prominence in English poetry can be understood when we remember that the plant is so abundant in England as to be almost a weed, and that it comes early and is very pretty. Cowslip and oxlip are familiar names of varieties of the same plant, and they bear so close a resemblance that it is hard to tell them apart. Hence Tennyson, in “The Talking Oak:”–