86 BIRDS AND POETS 
in his pleasant poem, “The Sparrow,” but he must 
some time have looked upon the bird with genuine 
emotion to have written the first two stanzas: — 
“Glimmers gay the leafless thicket 
Close beside my garden gate, 
Where, so light, from post to wicket, 
Hops the sparrow, blithe, sedate ; 
Who, with meekly folded wing, 
Comes to sun himself and sing. 
“Tt was there, perhaps, last year, 
That his little house he built ; 
For he seems to perk and peer, 
And to twitter, too, and tilt 
The bare branches in between, 
With a fond, familiar mien.”’ 
The bluebird has not been overlooked, and Hal- 
leck, Longfellow, and Mrs. Sigourney have written 
poems upon him, but from none of them does there 
fall that first note of his in early spring, —a note 
that may be called the violet of sound, and as wel- 
come to the ear, heard above the cold damp earth, 
as is its floral type to the eye a few weeks later. 
Lowell’s two lines come nearer the mark: — 
“The bluebird, shifting his light load of song 
From post to post along the cheerless fence.’ 
Or the first swallow that comes twittering up the 
southern valley, laughing a gleeful, childish laugh, 
and awakening such memories in the heart, who has 
put him in a poem? So the hummingbird, too, 
escapes through the finest meshes of rhyme. 
The most melodious of our songsters, the wood 
thrush and hermit thrush — birds whose strains, 
more than any others, express harmony and serenity 
