42 BIRDS IN TOWN AND VILLAGE 



the last of that long, illustrious line of poets who 

 sang as no others have sung of the pure delight- 

 fulness of a life with nature. Something of this 

 charm is undoubtedly due to the beauty of the 

 language they wrote in and to the free, airy grace 

 of assonants. What a hard, artificial sound the 

 rhyme too often has : the clink that falls at regu- 

 lar intervals as of a stone-breaker's hammer! 

 In the freer kinds of Spanish poetry there are 

 numberless verses that make the smoothest lines 

 and lyrics of our sweetest and most facile singers, 

 from Herrick to Swinburne, seem hard and 

 mechanical by comparison. But there is something 

 more. I doubt, for one thing, if we are justified 

 in the boast we sometimes make that the feeling 

 for Nature is stronger in our poets than in those 

 of other countries. The most scientific critic may 

 be unable to pick a hole in Tennyson's botany 

 and zoology; but the passion for, and feeling of 

 oneness with Nature may exist without this 

 modern minute accuracy. Be this as it may, it 

 was not Tennyson, nor any other of our poets, 

 that I would have taken to my dreamed-of solitary 

 cabin for companionship: Melendez came first to 

 my mind. I think of his lines to a butterfly: 



