NATURE AND THE POETS. 95 



his native state ? Or of a Massachusetts poet, who 

 finds the snow-drop and the early primrose bloom- 

 ing along his native streams, with the orchis and the 

 yellow violet, and makes the blackbird conspicuous 

 among New England songsters ? Our ordinary yew 

 is not a tree at all, but a low spreading evergreen 

 shrub that one may step over, and as for the nightin- 

 gale, if they have the mocking-bird in Kansas, they 

 can very well do without him. We have several va- 

 rieties of blackbirds, it is true ; but when an Amer- 

 ican poet speaks in a general way of the blackbird 

 piping or singing in a tree, as he would speak of a 

 robin or a sparrow, the suggestion or reminiscence 

 awakened is always that of the blackbird of English 

 poetry. 



" In days when daisies deck the ground, 



And blackbirds whistle clear, 

 With honest joy our hearts will bound 

 To see the coming year " 



sings Burns. I suspect that the English reader of 

 even some of Emerson's and Lowell's poems would 

 infer that our blackbird was identical with the British 

 species. I refer to these lines of Emerson : 



" Where arches green the livelong day 

 Echo the blackbirds' roundelay;" 



and to these lines from Lowell's " Rosaline " : 



" A blackbird whistling overhead 

 Thrilled through mv brain;" 



*nd again these from " The Fountain of Youth " : . 



