TUCK: THE ORNITHOLOGY OF TENNYSON. 43 
‘Locksley Hall’ contains almost in its opening lines a fine piece 
of word-painting ; 
*Tis the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call, 
Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall. 
As one reads the passage there appears to rise before the eye the 
lonely gray old house, standing on the ‘dreary moorland,’ from 
which the flights of curlews make their way at _ fall of the tide to 
the ‘barren shore.’ In the same poem comes the well-known 
allusion to the incon beauty and lustre of the plumage of birds 
at the vernal] season 
In the Spring a eunie crimson comes upon the robin’s breast ; 
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself oe aang — ; 
In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to fico: of love. 
Any reader of ‘ bate Hall’ who has stood waiting for the evening 
flight of ducks in the fading light of a December day, and has 
watched the lines of rooks going overhead to their roosting-place in 
some distant wood, their calls sounding clear through the frosty air, 
can appreciate the force of the line which mentions 
The many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home. 
Another description of bird-life on a spring morning is given us 
in ‘Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere.’ 
Sometimes the linnet piped his song ; 
Sometimes the — whistled stro 
Sometimes the sparhawk, wheel’d el 
Hushed all the sees from fear of wro ng. 
The ‘ Poet’s Song’ introduces us to a musician chanting 
melody loud and sweet, 
That made the wild swan pause in na eede 
And the lark drop down at his fee 
The swallow stopt as he uae the bee, 
The snake slipt under a 
The wild hawk stood with he, wk on his beak, 
And stared, with his foot on the pr 
And the nignsnast | thought, ‘I have sung many songs, 
But never a one so gay 
For he —_ of what the world will be ; 
When the world has died away.’ 
Allusions to the song of the pena are somewhat numerous 
in Tennyson’s writings; perhaps the happiest of all is that in the 
‘Grandmother.’ This most loveable old lady is represented as 
telling her little grandchild how some seventy years ago she ‘stood 
y the road at the gate’ to meet her lover, when in the still summer 
evening ; 
The moon like a on fire was tising over the dale, 
And whit, ag ote, in the bush beside me chirrupt the nightingale. 
Feb. 1893. 
