BIRDS AND POETS 31 
Where never bluebird’s plume intrudes. 
Quick darting through the dewy morn, 
The redstart trilled his twittering horn 
And vanished in thick boughs ; at even, 
Like liquid pearls fresh showered from heaven, 
The high notes of the lone wood thrush 
Fell on the forest’s holy hush ; 
But thou all day complainest here, — 
‘Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!’ ” 
Emerson’s best natural history poem is the ‘‘ Hum- 
ble-bee,”” —a poem as good in its way as Burns’s 
poem on the mouse; but his later poem, “‘ The Tit- 
mouse,” has many of the same qualities, and cannot 
fail to be acceptable to both poet and naturalist. 
The chickadee is indeed a truly Emersonian bird, 
and the poet shows him to be both a hero and a 
philosopher. Hardy, active, social, a winter bird 
no less than a summer, a defier of both frost and 
heat, lover of the pine-tree, and diligent searcher 
after truth in the shape of eggs and larve of insects, 
preéminently a New England bird, clad in black and 
ashen gray, with a note the most cheering and reas- 
suring to be heard in our January woods, —I know 
of none other of our birds so well calculated to cap- 
tivate the Emersonian muse. 
Emerson himself is a northern hyperborean genius, 
—a winter bird with a clear, saucy, cheery call, 
and not a passionate summer songster. His lines 
have little melody to the ear, but they have the vigor 
and distinctness of all pure and compact things. 
They are like the needles of the pine — “the snow 
loving pine ” — more than the emotional foliage of 
the deciduous trees, and the titmouse becomes them 
well : — 
