THE HERRING GULL. 27 



Of Kayoshk, the sea gulls peering, 

 Gazing at him through the opening, 

 Heard them saying to each other, 

 'Tis our brother, Hiawatha ! 



******* 

 And the wild and clamorous sea gulls, 

 Toiled with beak and claws together." 



This vigorous and truthful picture is not at all what we 

 who are not poets would have imagined. Because of its white- 

 ness most of us think the gull the emblem of purity and 

 gentleness, and would not have written 



"As of birds of prey contending." 



Yet that just describes the fierceness and rapacity of sea gulls. 

 Few of our most savage hawks are more bloodthirsty than 

 sea gulls, just as the crow is hardly more shrewd and ingen- 

 ious, and as no bird is at once so bold and so wary. 

 Nor is the error in the line 



" Saw the glittering eyes of sea gulls ; " 



for the kind the poet is describing the kind he must be 

 describing, both because his words fit that and no other, and 

 because it is the gull he used oftenest to see when he was a 

 boy and man along the Portland shore and up the river 

 Charles has yellow eyes that are as fierce and unflinching as 

 a hawk's. (The eyes of young gulls and of the smaller species 

 are brown.) 



But does the gull work with his feet ? Not unless he 

 braces with them to get tearing-hold. His nails are not made 

 for scratching, and his thumb or fourth toe is too high up on 

 his leg to help him grasp any object. This is the touch over- 

 much in the description, something the poet remembered in- 

 correctly, or added from his imagination. But there are few 

 naturalists equal to the poets. 



