NATURE AND THE POETS 



of the Kansas poet, who, in his published volume, 

 claims both the yew and the nightingale for his 

 native State? Or of a Massachusetts poet, who 

 finds the snowdrop and the early primrose bloom- 

 ing along his native streams, with the orchis and 

 the yellow violet, and makes the blackbird conspic- 

 uous among New England songsters ? Our ordinary 

 yew is not a tree at all, but a low spreading ever- 

 green shrub that one may step over; and as for the 

 nightingale, if they have the mockingbird in Kan- 

 sas, they can very well do without him. We have 

 several varieties of blackbirds, it is true; but when 

 an American 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 black- 

 bird 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 Brit- 

 ish 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:" 



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