164 
WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. 
Every trill and quaver of a rival song its victorious, Elfin 
skill would reproduce, until each separate throat was choked 
with envy. Ah, then the joy and glory of its conquest 
comes ! Out of the silence there would go such a " storm 
of music," 
" Such harmonious madness 
From its throat would flow," 
as might " shake the dull oblivion from his dreams !" 
Shakspeare was diverse as a peopled world ; all moods, all 
thoughts, all humors of all men, alike were his. The veri- 
similitudes and Protean versatility of the Mocking Bird are 
quite as strange. Indeed, its power of adaptation is most 
remarkable. Mr. Audubon represents it in its native and 
congenial home — the dew-dropping, odor-breathing South 
— as the most gentle and confiding of creatures. We can 
bear eye-witness of this ; for here it is known and cherished 
in the fraternal spirit of our Philosophy, and is as fearless, 
familiar, and domestic as a household sprite. We have seen 
it, as he rep];esents, place its nest openly upon the fence by 
the side of the public road, and have often thrown crumbs 
to it as it hopped about the door-sill. But like all vigorous 
natures, it is restless and a wanderer — though, with a saga- 
cious and mysterious sympathy or apprehension, it never 
pushes its migations beyond the vicinage of Humanity of 
some sort or other. 
So when impulse and poverty had driven Shakspeare to 
London, his masterly genius mated itself with circumstances 
as he found them, (so far as was necessary,) — with the base 
huckstering elements he saw to be all-powerful around the 
theatres — until, interfusing his own "candied nature" into 
those about him, he elevated them upon his triumphs into 
dignity, as well as awed respect. But this facility of adap- 
tation illustrates only a phase of its Shaksperian character. 
Shakspeare was the genius of " infinite humors " — Jack 
