66 BY-WAYS AND BIRD^NOT-ES. 



ing among the swaying foliage, were like 

 flashes of rare thought shot swiftly through 

 the brain of some grand genius. 



Although I have hinted at the triolet, I shall 

 not speak of that, or indeed of any other 

 purely conventional form of verse, saving the 

 mere observation that nothing of the kind, 

 from the sonnet to the rondel, is suited to the 

 freshness and freedom of out-door life. The 

 over-racy honey of the bumble-bee, little suited 

 as it is to the table of the epicure, has such 

 flavor as ought to mark the songs of the sylvan 

 poet. I am in hopes that in our country a 

 school of young singers will soon appear, 

 widely different from that now forming in Eng- 

 land, and also unlike the jeune hole of France. 

 Why should we as a people foster, or even 

 countenance, forms of poetical affectation 

 worn out and flung aside by the Old World 

 some hundreds of years ago ? 



Our venerable Walt Whitman may have 

 pushed at times too far in the other direction, 

 but he has caught the spirit of freedom and 

 has dashed his unkempt songs with a dew as 

 American as that of Helicon was Greek. It is 

 a broad, out-door sense in which one enjoys 

 some of his breezy verses : — 



" I think I have blown with you, O winds ; 

 O waters, I have fingered every shore with you." 



It is indeed a pleasing thing to idly blow 

 with the wind, or to blow with the wind for a 

 purpose ; and what is more recreating than to 

 finger sweet shores with the water ? A canoe, 

 if but a pirogue, and a shore to finger, if only 

 the bank of a rivulet, can give delight of no 

 uncertain sort to a healthv soul. 



