254 IN BIRD LAND. 
Seductive as the figure is, there seems to be some- 
thing slightly forced in the poet’s conceit that the 
thrushes sing because they have been “ pierced 
? 
through with June’s delicious sting,” unless it might 
be justified on the principle that pain and trial often 
enhance moral values. 
There is a beautiful stanza in the poem, “ On 
Planting a, ree at, Inverara,’ — 
“ Hither the busy birds shall flutter, 
With the light timber for their nests, 
And, pausing from their labor, utter 
The morning sunshine in their breasts.” 
With all his poet’s soul Lowell loved the serene, 
as when he congratulates himself on having left the 
grating noise and stifling smoke of London, and 
found in some sequestered haunt 
“ Air and quiet too; 
Air filtered through the beech and oak; 
Quiet by nothing harsher broke 
Than wood-dove’s meditative coo.” 
The word “meditative’’ is extremely felicitous, 
but no more so than the hop-skip-and-spring of 
the following lines from a Commencement dinner 
poem : — 
“T’ve a notion, I think, of a good dinner speech, 
Tripping light as a sandpiper over the beach, 
Swerving this way and that, as the wave of the moment 
Washes out its slight trace with a dash of whim’s foam on’t, 
And leaving on memory’s rim just a sense 
Something graceful had gone by, a live present tense ; 
Not poetry, —no, not quite that, but as good, 
A kind of winged prose that could fly if it would.” 
