4 h\fe History of Common Cuckoo. 



dropped into another bird's nest — that is, found a 

 father in the Rev. John Logan, who appropriated it, 

 but only in the end to lose by his mean action — 

 named it " the messenger of spring." Had these 

 poets known what later observation has revealed 

 about the cuckoo and its ways, they might have been 

 less effusive, though, perhaps, they would have had 

 their answer in justification ready. They would have 

 said that they had to do with the impressions made 

 on an imaginative mind by the cuckoo's note, which 

 revelations of science, however adverse to the bird's 

 character in certain respects, could never modify as 

 regards the possibility of poetic impression. A later 

 poet, who, it is to be presumed, knew all about the 

 cuckoo, yet wrote thus : — 



The cuckoo from the wood I hear ; 

 He has no thought to fill my ear ; 

 And yet the sounds come sweet to me — 

 The note of bird in ecstasy. 



Continuous, full, it floats and fills 

 The air with soft impassioned thrills. 

 And makes me think of days gone by, 

 When I had gracious company. 



Goethe was much exercised by the knowledge of 

 the cuckoo's habits in certain respects. We find 

 Eckermann and him thus speaking as reported in the 

 " Conversations " : — 



" We know," said I, " that it does not brood itself, 



but lays its egg in the nest of some other bird 



We also know that these are all insect-eating birds ; 

 and must be so, because the cuckoo itself is an insect- 

 eating bird, and its young cannot be brought up by 



