JANUARY. 19 



anxious perseverance with which naturalists 

 have investigated the subject ; and all the lively 

 and beautiful associations of their cries, and 

 forms, and habits, and resorts. When we think, 

 for a moment, that the swallows, martins and 

 swifts, which sport in our summer skies, and 

 become cohabitants of our houses, will presently 

 be dwelling in the heart of regions which we 

 long, in vain, to know, and whither our travel- 

 lers toil, in vain, to penetrate, — that they will 

 anon affix their nests to the Chinese pagoda, the 

 Indian temple, or, beneath the equator, to the 

 palm-thatched eaves of the African hut; that 

 the small birds which populate our summer 

 hedges and fields will quickly spread themselves 

 with the cuckoo, and its avant courier, the wry- 

 neck, over the warm regions beyond the pillars 

 of Hercules, and the wilds of the Levant, of 

 Greece and Syria; the nightingale will be se- 

 renading in the chestnut groves of Italy, and the 

 rose-gardens of Persia; that the thrush and the 

 fieldfare, which share our winter, will pour out 

 triumphant music in their native wastes, in the 

 sudden summers of Scandinavia ; that even some 

 of the wild fowls which frequent our winter 

 streams will return with the spring, to the far 

 tracts of North America ; and when we call to 

 our imagination the desolate rocks in the lonely 

 ocean, the craggy and misty isles of the Orkneys 



