FullReads

Our poets are quite apt to get ahead or behind the season with their flowers and birds. It is not often that we catch such a poet as Emerson napping. He knows nature, and he knows the New England fields and woods, as few poets do. One may study our flora and fauna in his pages. He puts in the moose and the “surly bear,” and makes the latter rhyme with “woodpecker:”–

“He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous
beds,
The slight Linnæa hang its twin-born
heads.
. . . . . .
He heard, when in the grove, at
intervals,
With sudden roar the aged pine-tree
falls,–
One crash, the death-hymn of the
perfect tree,
Declares the close of its green
century.”

“They led me through the thicket
damp,
Through brake and fern, the beavers’
camp.”

“He saw the partridge drum in the
woods;
He heard the woodcock’s evening
hymn;
He found the tawny thrushes’ broods;
And the shy hawk did wait for him.”

His “Titmouse” is studied in our winter woods, and his “Humble-Bee” in our summer fields. He has seen farther into the pine-tree than any other poet; his “May-Day” is full of our spring sounds and tokens; he knows the “punctual birds,” and the “herbs and simples of the wood:”–

“Rue, cinque-foil, gill, vervain, and
agrimony,
Blue-vetch, and trillium, hawk-weed,
sassafras,
Milk-weeds and murky brakes, quaint
pipes and sun-dew.”

Here is a characteristic touch:–

“A woodland walk
A quest of river-grapes, a mocking
thrush,
A wild rose, or rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds.”

That “rock-loving columbine” is better than Bryant’s “columbines, in purple dressed,” as our flower is not purple, but yellow and scarlet. Yet Bryant set the example to the poets that have succeeded him of closely studying Nature as she appears under our own skies.

I yield to none in my admiration of the sweetness and simplicity of his poems of nature, and in general of their correctness of observation. They are tender and heartfelt, and they touch chords that no other poet since Wordsworth has touched with so firm a hand. Yet he was not always an infallible observer; he sometimes tripped up on his facts, and at other times he deliberately moulded them, adding to, or cutting off, to suit the purposes of his verse. I will cite here two instances in which his natural history is at fault. In his poem on the bobolink he makes the parent birds feed their young with “seeds,” whereas, in fact, the young are fed exclusively upon insects and worms. The bobolink is an insectivorous bird in the North, or until its brood has flown, and a granivorous bird in the South. In his “Evening Revery” occur these lines:–

“The mother bird hath broken for her
brood
Their prison shells, or shoved them
from the nest,
Plumed for their earliest flight.”

It is not a fact that the mother bird aids her offspring in escaping from the shell. The young of all birds are armed with a small temporary horn or protuberance upon the upper mandible, and they are so placed in the shell that this point is in immediate contact with its inner surface; as soon as they are fully developed and begin to struggle to free themselves, the horny growth “pips” the shell. Their efforts then continue till their prison walls are completely sundered and the bird is free. This process is rendered the more easy by the fact that toward the last the shell becomes very rotten; the acids that are generated by the growing chick eat it and make it brittle, so that one can hardly touch a fully incubated bird’s egg without breaking it. To help the young bird forth would insure its speedy death. It is not true, either, that the parent shoves its young from the nest when they are fully fledged, except possibly in the case of some of the swallows and of the eagle. The young of all our more common birds leave the nest of their own motion, stimulated probably by the calls of the parents, and in some cases by the withholding of food for a longer period than usual.