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also Lowell again in this line:–

“The thin-winged swallow skating on
the air;”

and Virgil:–

“Swallows twitter on the chimney
tops.”

Longfellow is perhaps less close and exact in his dealings with nature than any of his compeers, although he has written some fine naturalistic poems, as his “Rain in Summer,” and others. When his fancy is taken, he does not always stop to ask, Is this so? Is this true? as when he applies the Spanish proverb, “There are no birds in last year’s nests,” to the nests beneath the eaves; for these are just the last year’s nests that do contain birds in May. The cliff swallow and the barn swallow always reoccupy their old nests, when they are found intact; so do some other birds. Again, the hawthorn, or whitethorn, field-fares, belong to English poetry more than to American. The ash in autumn is not deep crimsoned, but a purplish brown. “The ash her purple drops forgivingly,” says Lowell in his “Indian-Summer Reverie.” Flax is not golden, lilacs are purple or white and not flame-colored, and it is against the law to go trouting in November. The pelican is not a wader any more than a goose or a duck is, and the golden robin or oriole is not a bird of autumn. This stanza from “The Skeleton in Armor” is a striking one:–

“As with his wings aslant,
Sails the fierce cormorant,
Seeking some rocky haunt,
With his prey laden,
So toward the open main,
Beating to sea again,
Through the wild hurricane,
Bore I the maiden.”

But unfortunately the cormorant never does anything of the kind; it is not a bird of prey: it is web-footed, a rapid swimmer and diver, and lives upon fish, which it usually swallows as it catches them. Virgil is nearer to fact when he says:–

“When crying cormorants forsake the sea
And, stretching to the covert, wing their way.”

But cormorant with Longfellow may stand for any of the large rapacious birds, as the eagle or the condor. True, and yet the picture is a purely fanciful one, as no bird of prey SAILS with his burden; on the contrary, he flaps heavily and laboriously, because he is always obliged to mount. The stress of the rhyme and metre are of course in this case very great, and it is they, doubtless, that drove the poet into this false picture of a bird of prey laden with his quarry. It is an ungracious task, however, to cross- question the gentle Muse of Longfellow in this manner. He is a true poet if there ever was one, and the slips I point out are only like an obscure feather or two in the dove carelessly preened. The burnished plumage and the bright hues hide them unless we look sharply.

Whittier gets closer to the bone of the New England nature. He comes from the farm, and his memory is stored with boyhood’s wild and curious lore, with

“Knowledge never learned of schools,
Of the wild bee’s morning chase,
Of the wild flower’s time and place,
Flight of fowl and habitude
Of the tenants of the wood;
How the tortoise bears his shell,
How the woodchuck digs his cell,
And the ground-mole sinks his well;
How the robin feeds her young;
How the oriole’s nest is hung;
Where the whitest lilies blow,
Where the freshest berries grow,
Where the ground-nut trails its vine,
Where the wood-grape’s clusters shine;
Of the black wasp’s cunning way,
Mason of his walls of clay,
And the architectural plans
Of gray hornet artisans!”

The poet is not as exact as usual when he applies the epithet “painted” to the autumn beeches, as the foliage of the beech is the least painty of all our trees; nor when he speaks of