Part 20

liverworts and bloodroots being among those talismanic plants. There is a world of serenity in the following metrical etching, which makes one almost long to die and be forever at rest:—

“Happy their end Who vanish down life’s evening stream Placid as swans that drift in dream Round the next river-bend.”

Our poet had the charming habit of making some characteristic bird-way do deft metaphorical duty in his verse, like the skilful weaver who runs a line of exquisite tint through his weft. Here is an instance, found in the poem called “Threnodia,”—

“I loved to see the infant soul · · · · · · · Peep timidly from out its nest, His lips, the while, Fluttering with half-fledged words, Or hushing to a smile That more than words expressed, When his glad mother on him stole And snatched him to her breast! O, thoughts were brooding in those eyes, That would have soared like strong-winged birds Far, far into the skies, Gladding the earth with song And gushing harmonies.”

Here is another fine simile,—

“As if a lark should suddenly drop dead While the blue air yet trembled with its song, So snapped at once that music’s golden thread.”

In the following stanzas on “The Falcon”—used as a metaphor for Truth—there is a captivating multiplicity of figures,—

“I know a falcon swift and peerless As e’er was cradled in the pine; No bird had ever eye so fearless, Or wing so strong as this of mine.

“The winds not better love to pilot A cloud with molten gold o’errun, Than him, a little burning islet, A star above the coming sun.

“For with a lark’s heart he doth tower, By a glorious upward instinct drawn; No bee nestles deeper in the flower Than he in the bursting rose of dawn.”

It almost throws one into “a midsummer night’s dream” to read this picturesque line,—

“The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmosphere.”

That must have been an expressive face indeed whose features were

“As full of motion as a nest That palpitates with unfledged birds,”

albeit one may be permitted to hope, without irreverence, that it made a more attractive picture than did the callow youngsters gaping and wabbling in their nursery. But here is a delineation of bird life so graphically and richly colored that one longs for the brush of the artist to transfer it to canvas. Listen! listen! There is an exhilarant in the atmosphere.

“The little bird sits at his door in the sun, Atilt like a blossom among the leaves, And lets his illumined being o’errun With the deluge of summer it receives; His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings, And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings; He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,— In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best?”

The last two lines, by the way, are in perfect keeping with Mr. Lowell’s generous instincts, which were always on the side of the lowly and unappreciated. Seductive as the figure is, there seems to be something slightly forced in the poet’s conceit that the thrushes sing because they have been “pierced through with June’s delicious sting,” unless it might be justified on the principle that pain and trial often enhance moral values.

There is a beautiful stanza in the poem, “On Planting a Tree at Inverara,”—

“Hither the busy birds shall flutter, With the light timber for their nests, And, pausing from their labor, utter The morning sunshine in their breasts.”

With all his poet’s soul Lowell loved the serene, as when he congratulates himself on having left the grating noise and stifling smoke of London, and found in some sequestered haunt

“Air and quiet too; Air filtered through the beech and oak; Quiet by nothing harsher broke Than wood-dove’s meditative coo.”

The word “meditative” is extremely felicitous, but no more so than the hop-skip-and-spring of the following lines from a Commencement dinner poem:—

“I’ve a notion, I think, of a good dinner speech, Tripping light as a sandpiper over the beach, Swerving this way and that, as the wave of the moment Washes out its slight trace with a dash of whim’s foam on’t, And leaving on memory’s rim just a sense Something graceful had gone by, a live present tense; Not poetry,—no, not quite that, but as good, A kind of winged prose that could fly if it would.”

Like all discriminating lovers of “Nature’s blithe commoners,” Lowell had his favorites, whose praises he frequently rung with a sincerity that cannot be doubted for a moment. He was especially partial to the bobolink. He must have often peeped into the

“Tussocks that house blithe Bob o’ Lincoln,”

or his Muse would not have been so adept and faithful in her hymning descriptions. We will lend a listening ear while she sings her chansons on the virtues of the bird our poet loved so truly. First, I will call attention to the following portraiture of that cavalier of the meadow, the male bobolink, at the season when there are bantlings in the grass-domed nest which demand his paternal care, as well as that of his faithful spouse,—

“Meanwhile that devil-may-care, the bobolink, Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops Just ere he sweeps o’er rapture’s tremulous brink, And ’twixt the windrows most demurely drops, A decorous bird of business, who provides For his brown mate and fledgelings six besides, And looks from right to left, a farmer ’mid his crops.”

One can almost see the poet leaning against the rail fence of the clover field, with pencil in hand, drawing the portrait of the bird which is posing unconsciously before him, so true is his delineation of bobolink life. But to find Lowell at his best you must read his description of Robert o’ Lincoln at his best. Hark!—