46 TUCK : THE ORNITHOLOGY OF TENNYSON. 
‘In Memoriam’ also contains the stanza which some years: ago gave 
rise to a correspondence in one of the weekly papers as to the claims 
of the wheatear* or the kingfisher ; 
When rosy germane tuft the larch, 
And rarely pipes the saw gue thrush ; 
Or underneath the barr 
Flits by the sea-blue bird of feat: 
In the first part of ‘ Maud’ we . the — 
The May-fly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow is spear’d by the shrike. 
And the whole little wood where I xt is a world of plunder and prey. 
Coming now to the ‘Idylls of the King’ which many lovers of 
Tennyson’s poetry consider to be the very crown of his work, and 
perhaps that by which he will be best known a century hence, we 
meet with many striking references to bird-life. In the ‘Coming of 
Arthur’ the small birds’ ignore habit of flying after the cuckoo 
is alluded to in the King’s spee 
I have seen the cuckoo beam by lesser fowl, 
And reason in the ch bf 
A little further on in the same idyll we read— 
The swallow and the swift are near akin. 
In ‘Gareth and Lynette,’ when Gareth invokes the ‘birds that 
warble to the morning sky,’ Lynette retorts, 
What knowest thou of birds, lark, mavis, merle, linnet ? 
The bern has mention (ome ai him in the suggestive lines— 
bbe oge the lorie hern peck shi ob hol 
Lets n his other leg, and s ore dreams 
Of seule supper in the ae 
The next idyll, ‘Geraint and Enid,’ has a passage of great beauty, 
in which Geraint is described as. hearing Enid, then unknown to 
him, singing a song, which was to him like a sudden and unexpected 
burst of music on an April morning, causing the hearer 
To think or say, ‘ There is the nightingale.’ 
Again, Geraint is represented as 
Glancing all at once as keenly at her 
As careful robins eye the delver’s toil ; 
a pretty simile suggested by the robin’s well-known habit of waiting 
in attendance on a gardener when turning over the soil, and bringing 
worms to the surface. 
Dwellers near the few places in which the stone-curlew breeds 
will be well able to understand Enid’s nervous alarm wh 
The great plover’s human whistle 
mazed 
a heart, and glancing round jhe: waste she feared 
n every feet brake an ambuscade. 
Sie Lirds of the Tumler District,’ p.'ge. 
Naturalist, 
