A GENERAL VIEW 11 



description. He reveals a knowledge of nests, derived The nests 

 from eye- and ear-observation in boyhood, which any 

 young naturalist might envy and must respect. In 

 130 the matter of locality he points out the preference of 

 ten or twelve different species or varieties of birds 

 without naming a single one : 



Some to the holly hedge 

 Nestling repair ; and to the thicket some. 

 Some to the rude protection of the thorn 

 Commit their feeble offspring. The cleft tree 

 Offers its kind concealment to a few, 

 Their food its insects and its moss their nests. 

 Others apart, far in the grassy dale, 

 140 Or roughening waste, their humble texture weave. 

 But most in woodland solitudes delight, 

 In unfrequented glooms, or shaggy banks 

 Steep and divided by a babbling brook 

 Whose murmurs soothe them. 



In these ten or twelve lines there is allusion, without 

 specified reference, to as many different birds to such 

 birds, for example, as blackbirds and thrushes, chaf- 

 finches and yellow-hammers, starlings and woodpeckers, 

 larks, lapwings, robins and wrens, kingfishers and 



150 dippers or water-ouzels, respectively. Thomson also 

 gives instances of adventure on the part of mated 

 birds in procuring the last luxurious furnishings of 

 a cosy nest hair and wool, plucked from the backs 

 of cattle and sheep quietly grazing in the fields ; and 

 at least one instance of audacity in the abstraction 

 from some barn of a long golden oat-straw, conveyed 

 as a great prize with unusual haste, and almost with 

 a sense of heroic theft in the transaction, to the grow- 

 ing structure, till, after many such exciting exploits, 



i6o { soft and warm, clean and complete ' the birdhou'se is 



