NATURE AND THE POETS 91 



set the example to the poets that have succeeded 

 him of closely studying Nature as she appears under 

 our own skies. 



I yield to none in my admiration of the sweetness 

 and simplicity of his poems of nature, and in gen- 

 eral of their correctness of observation. They are 

 tender and heartfelt, and they touch chords that no 

 other poet since Wordsworth has touched with so 

 firm a hand. Yet he was not always an infallible 

 observer; he sometimes tripped upon his facts, and 

 at other times he deliberately moulded them, adding 

 to, or cutting off, to suit the purposes of his verse. 

 I wiU cite here two instances in which his natural 

 history is at fault. In his poem on the bobolink 

 he makes the parent birds feed their young with 

 " seeds, " whereas, in fact, the young are fed exclu- 

 sively upon insects and worms. The bobolink is 

 an insectivorous bird in the North, or until its 

 brood has flown, and a granivorous bird in the 

 South. 



In his "Evening Eevery " occur these lines: — 



" The mother bird hath broken for her brood 

 Their prison shells, or shoved them from the nest, 

 Plumed for their earliest flight." 



It is not a fact that the mother bird aids her 

 offspring in escaping from the shell. The young of 

 all birds are armed with a small temporary horn or 

 protuberance upon the upper mandible, and they 

 are so placed in the shell that this point is in imme- 

 diate contact with its inner surface; as soon as they 

 are fully developed and begin to struggle to free 



