4 BIRDS AND POETS 
quate symbols to express what he felt or to adorn 
his theme. AXschylus saw in the eagle “the dog of 
Jove,” and his verse cuts like a sword with such a 
conception. 
It is not because the old bards were less as poets, 
but that they were more as men. ‘To strong, sus- 
ceptible characters, the music of nature is not con- 
fined to sweet sounds. The defiant scream of the 
hawk circling aloft, the wild whinney of the loon, 
the whooping of the crane, the booming of the bit- 
tern, the vulpine bark of the eagle, the loud trum- 
peting of the migratory geese sounding down out 
of the midnight sky; or by the seashore, the coast of 
New Jersey or Long Island, the wild crooning of 
the flocks of gulls, repeated, continued by the hour, 
swirling sharp and shrill, rising and falling like the 
wind in a storm, as they circle above the beach or 
dip to the dash of the waves, — are much more wel- 
come in certain moods than any and all mere bird- 
melodies, in keeping as they are with the shaggy 
and untamed features of ocean and woods, and sug- 
gesting something like the Richard Wagner music 
in the ornithological orchestra. 
“Nor these alone whose notes 
Nice-fingered art must emulate in vain, 
But cawing rooks, and kites that swim sublime 
In still repeated circles, screaming loud, 
The jay, the pie, and even the boding owl, 
That hails the rising moon, have charms for me,” 
says Cowper. “I never hear,” says Burns in one 
of his letters, “‘the loud, solitary whistle of the cur- 
lew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence 
