124 Wild Bird Guests 



showing appreciation of wild birds; Bryant, 

 Drake, Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, Poe, 

 Holmes, Van Dyke, and Mackaye are among the 

 many who have tuned their lyres to the songs of 

 birds. Of all Poe's poems the best known is The 

 Raven; of Bryant's, few are better known than 

 To a Waterfowl. How birds can awaken poetry 

 in the heart of a child is shown by The Hermit 

 Thrush, written by Percy Mackaye's little 

 daughter Arvia at the age of nine. In short, as 

 John Burroughs indicates in his book Birds and 

 Poets, these bards are inseparable, and Tennyson 

 must have felt this when he wrote The Poet's Song: 



" And he sat him down in a lonely place, 



And chanted a melody loud and sweet, 

 That made the wild swan pause in her cloud, 



And the lark drop down at his feet. 

 The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee, 



The snake slipt under a spray, 

 The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak, 



And stared, with his foot on the prey, 

 And the nightingale thought, ' I have sung many songs, 



But never a one so gay, 

 For he sings of what the world will be, 



When the years have died away.'" 



And perhaps our own Van Dyke felt it even more 

 deeply when at the close of his lovely poem on 

 The Veery he sings: 



