NATURE NAMES IN AMERICA 75 



a meaning to the reader that it never before possessed, and its history 

 will have a meaning when he finds it in the writings of the old world 

 authors. Those of us who are in the middle years of life can remember 

 when our juvenile nature literature was almost entirely English and 

 we became more intimately acquainted with the robin-redbreast and 

 the nightingale, the skylark and the thrush, than we did with our own 

 native birds, whose names were often quite unknown to us. The 

 writings of the English poets and authors from Chaucer down are full 

 of allusions to birds and flowers with which most of us have grown 

 familiar by name only. Shelley's ' Skylark ' and Keats' ' Ode to a 

 Nightingale ' have made the names living realities to many who have 

 never seen or heard these birds. There are sweet singers in our own 

 country that must take a place in literature, and their names will be 

 doubly dear to the heart through an intimate acquaintance with the 

 birds themselves. One of the most sympathetic of our modern writers 

 has voiced this thought in an exquisite bit of verse — ' The Wood-notes 

 of the Veery.' 



If two different birds, or two different flowers, in England and 

 America bear the same name, there is no need to cavil, only to recognize 

 the fact that there is a difference. This extension of the name is in 

 itself a source of great interest; it helps to link us to the life and 

 literature of past generations, and in so doing to develop an intelligent 

 and sympathetic understanding. One might have in mind our crow 

 blackbird when reading Tennyson's poem — ' The Blackbird,' and fail to 

 see its truth and beauty, simply by not knowing that there are several 

 birds of this name. 



A golden bill! the silver tongue, 



Cold February loved, is dry: 



Plenty corrupts the melody 

 That made thee famous once, when young: 



No one who knew our blackbird could ever apply this description to 

 him. It more aptly applies to the robin than to any other bird in this 

 country. The golden bill; the silver tongue of our early spring; the 

 corruption of melody when gorged with autumnal fruit; all these are 

 thrush attributes and apply with equal pertinence to both species. 



An appreciation of the rightful meaning of a name will go far 

 toward making a true mind picture of the thing itself. A poet like 

 Tennyson was a keen observer of nature, to the slightest detail, and a 

 reader gains the greater pleasure when he divines this quality in the 1 

 poet's verse. This is not a scientific attitude of mind, not the attitude 

 of a carping critic, but the realization of a certain beauty because of 

 a certain truth — and truth is after all the one thing needful, the only 

 thing that satisfies the soul. 



