THE ORNITHOLOGY OF TENNYSON. 
Rev. JULIAN G. TUCK, M.A., 
Tostock Rectory, Bury Si. Edmunds, Suffolk 
As our greatest English poet has recently passed away from us, 
and has (to quote his own words) ‘gone... . from this room 
into the next,’ it may not be deemed unfitting to offer a tribute 
to his memory in the pages of ‘The Naturalist’ by quoting a few 
passages from his voluminous writings illustrative of bird-life. If 
the late Poet-Laureate were not an ornithologist in the sense in 
: aan aie : 
under the roof of which he passed the early years of his life. 
Beginning with ‘Claribel,’ the poem which stands first in most 
editions of Tennyson’s writings, we meet with the lines— 
rin’ ho lintwhite swelleth, 
The clear-voiced mavis dwelleth, 
The perl throdtle lispeth. 
and in ‘ Mariana’ he alludes to a sound well known to his readers 
alike in town and country, 
The sparrow’s chirrup on the roo 
Going on through the group of poems colin eso 
‘Juvenilia’ we have the two songs dedicated ‘ To the : the 
poet in his school-boy days go bird-nesting, and thus dias the 
slumbers of the white owls which lived in the tower of his father’s 
church? Possibly he did, since we read— 
Alone, and warming his five wits, 
The white owl in the belfry sits. 
In the second of these songs the sonorous cry of the brown owl is 
splendidly described as 
i argh ier so 
Tuwhoo, fh ches tuwhit, h 
Perhaps the ‘ Dying Swan’ appeals more to “he lover of poetry 
than to the naturalist; but in the ‘ Miller's Daughter’ we have an 
allusion to 
some wild skylark’s matin song, 
and also to sia deve which seems to have been a special favourite 
with the Laureate ; 
And oft I heard the tender dove 
r making moan 
Feb. 1893 
