BIRDS IN A VILLAGE. 
29 
numberless verses that make the smoothest lines and 
lyrics of our sweetest and most facile singers, from 
Herrick to Swinburne, seem hard and mechanical 
by comparison. Bat there is something more. I 
doubt for one thing if we are justified in the boast 
we sometimes make, that the feeling for nature 
is stronger in our poets than in those of other 
countries. The most scientific critic may be unable 
to pick a hole in Tennyson's botany and zoology, 
but the passion for, and feeling of oneness with, 
nature may exist without this modern minute 
accuracy. Be this as it may, it was not Tennyson 
nor any other of our poets that I would have taken 
to my dreamed-of solitary cabin for companionship : 
Melendez came first to my mind. I think of his 
lines to a butterfly — 
De doude alegre vienes 
Tan suelta y tan festiva, 
Las valles alegrando 
Veloz mariposilla? 
and can imagine him coming to see me through the 
woods and down the hill with the careless ease and 
lightness of heart of his own purple-winged child 
of earth and air — tan suelta y tan festiva. Here 
in these four or five words one may read the whole 
secret of his charm — the exquisite delicacy and 
seeming artlessness in the form, and the spirit 
that is in him — the old simple healthy natural 
