NATURE AND THE POETS 91 



set the example to the poets that have succeeded 

 him of closely studying Nature as she appears under 

 our own skies. 



I yield to none in my admiration of the sweetness 

 and simplicity of his poems of nature, and in gen- 

 eral of their correctness of observation. They are 

 tender and heartfelt, and they touch chords that no 

 other poet since Wordsworth has touched with so 

 firm a hand. Yet he was not always an infallible 

 observer; he sometimes tripped upon his facts, and 

 at other times he deliberately moulded them, adding 

 to, or cutting off, to suit the purposes of his verse. 

 I will cite here two instances in which his natural 

 history is at fault. In his poem on the bobolink 

 he makes the parent birds feed their young Avith 

 "seeds," whereas, in fact, the young are fed exclu- 

 sively upon insects and worms. The bobolink is 

 an insectivorous bird in the North, or until its 

 brood has flown, and a granivoroua bird in the 

 South. 



In his "Evening Kevery " occur these lines: 



" The mother bird hath broken for her brood 

 Their prison shells, or shoved them from the nest, 

 Plumed for their earliest flight." 



It is not a fact that the mother bird aids her 

 offspring in escaping from the shell. The young of 

 all birds are armed with a small temporary horn or 

 protuberance upon the upper mandible, and they 

 are so placed in the shell that this point is in imme- 

 diate contact with its inner surface; as soon as they 

 are fully developed and begin to struggle to free 



