65 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES. 
ing among the swaying foliage, were like 
flashes of rare thought shot swiftly through 
the brain of some grand genius. 
Although I have hinted at the triolet, I shall 
not speak of that, or indeed of any other 
purely conventional form of verse, saving the 
mere observation that nothing of the kind, 
from the sonnet to the rondel, is suited to the 
freshness and freedom of out-door life. The 
over-racy honey of the bumble-bee, little suited 
as itis to the table of the epicure, has such 
flavor as ought to mark the songs of the sylvan 
poet. JI am in hopes that in our country a 
school of young singers will soon appear, 
widely different from that now forming in Eng- 
land, and also unlike the jeune école of France. 
Why should we as a people foster, or even 
countenance, forms of poetical affectation 
worn out and flung aside by the Old World 
some hundreds of years ago? 
Our venerable Walt Whitman may have 
pushed at times too far in the other direction, 
but he has caught the spirit of freedom and 
has dashed his unkempt songs with a dew as 
American as that of Helicon was Greek. It is 
a broad, out-door sense in which one enjoys 
some of his breezy verses :— 
“T think I have blown with you, O winds ; 
O waters, I have fingered every shore with you.” 
It is indeed a pleasing thing to idly blow 
with the wind, or to blow with the wind fora 
purpose ; and what is more recreating than to 
finger sweet shores with the water? A canoe, 
if but a pirogue, and a shore to finger, if only 
the bank of a rivulet, can give delight of no 
uncertain sort to a healthy soul. 
