'A race of splendid and savageold men,'
of course dominated by moral and spiritual laws, but with volcanoes of force always alive beneath the surface."
And still again: One of the questions to be put to any poem assuming a first-class importance among us—and I especially invite this inquiry toward "Leaves of Grass"—is, How far is this work consistent with, and the outcome of, that something which secures to the race ascendency, empire, and perpetuity? There is in every dominant people a germ, a quality, an expansive force, that, no matter how it is overlaid, gives them their push and their hold upon existence,—writes their history upon the earth, and stamps their imprint upon the age. To what extent is your masterpiece the standard-bearer of this quality,—helping the race to victory? helping me to be more myself than I otherwise would?
III
Not the least of my poet's successes is in his thorough assimilation of the modern sciences, transmuting them into strong poetic nutriment, and in the extent to which all his main poems are grounded in the deepest principles of modern philosophical inquiry.
Nearly all the old literatures may be said to have been founded upon fable, and upon a basis and even superstructure of ignorance, that, however charming it may be, we have not now got, and could not keep if we had. The bump of wonder and the feeling of the marvelous,—a kind of half-pleasing fear, like that of children in the dark or in the woods,—were largely operative with the old poets, and I believe are necessary to any eminent success in this field; but they seem nearly to have died out of the modern mind, like organs there is no longer any use for. The poetic temperament has not yet adjusted itself to the new lights, to science, and to the vast fields and expanses opened up in the physical cosmos by astronomy and geology, and in the spiritual or intellectual world by the great German metaphysicians. The staple of a large share of our poetic literature is yet mainly the result of the long age of fable and myth that now lies behind us. "Leaves of Grass" is, perhaps, the first serious and large attempt at an expression in poetry of a knowledge of the earth as one of the orbs, and of man as a microcosm of the whole, and to give to the imagination these new and true fields of wonder and romance. In it fable and superstition are at an end, priestcraft is at an end, skepticism and doubt are at an end, with all the misgivings and dark forebodings that have dogged the human mind since it began to relax its hold upon tradition and the past; and we behold man reconciled, happy, ecstatic, full of reverence, awe, and wonder, reinstated in Paradise,—the paradise of perfect knowledge and unrestricted faith.
It needs but a little pondering to see that the great poet of the future will not be afraid of science, but will rather seek to plant his feet upon it as upon a rock. He knows that, from an enlarged point of view, there is no feud between Science and Poesy, any more than there is between Science and Religion, or between Science and Life. He sees that the poet and the scientist do not travel opposite but parallel roads, that often approach each other very closely, if they do not at times actually join. The poet will always pause when he finds himself in opposition to science; and the scientist is never more worthy the name than when he escapes from analysis into synthesis, and gives us living wholes. And science, in its present bold and receptive mood, may be said to be eminently creative, and to have made every first-class thinker and every large worker in any aesthetic or spiritual field immeasurably its debtor. It has dispelled many illusions, but it has more than compensated the imagination by the unbounded vistas it has opened up on every hand. It has added to our knowledge, but it has added to our ignorance in the same measure: the large circle of light only reveals the larger circle of darkness that encompasses it, and life and being and the orbs are enveloped in a greater mystery to the poet to-day than they were in the times of Homer or Isaiah. Science, therefore, does not restrict the imagination, but often compels it to longer flights. The conception of the earth as an orb shooting like a midnight meteor through space, a brand cast by the burning sun with the fire at its heart still unquenched, the sun itself shooting and carrying the whole train of worlds with it, no one knows whither,—what a lift has science given the imagination in this field! Or the tremendous discovery of the correlation and conservation of forces, the identity and convertibility of heat and force and motion, and that no ounce of power is lost, but forever passed along, changing form but not essence, is a poetic discovery no less than a scientific one. The poets have always felt that it must be so, and, when the fact was authoritatively announced by science, every profound poetic mind must have felt a thrill of pleasure. Or the nebular hypothesis of the solar system,—it seems the conception of some inspired madman, like William Blake, rather than the cool conclusion of reason, and to carry its own justification, as great power always does. Indeed, our interest in astronomy and geology is essentially a poetic one,—the love of the marvelous, of the sublime, and of grand harmonies. The scientific conception of the sun is strikingly Dantesque, and appalls the imagination. Or the hell of fire through which the earth has passed, and the aeons of monsters from which its fair forms have emerged,—from which of the seven circles of the Inferno did the scientist get his hint? Indeed, science everywhere reveals a carnival of mightier gods than those that cut such fantastic tricks in the ancient world. Listen to Tyndall on light, or to Youmans on the chemistry of a sunbeam, and see how fable pales its ineffectual fires, and the boldest dreams of the poets are eclipsed.
The vibratory theory of light and its identity with the laws of sound, the laws of the tides and the seasons, the wonders of the spectroscope, the theory of gravitation, of electricity, of chemical affinity, the deep beneath deep of the telescope, the world within world of the microscope,—in these and many other fields it is hard to tell whether it is the scientist or the poet we are listening to. What greater magic than that you can take a colorless ray of light, break it across a prism, and catch upon a screen all the divine hues of the rainbow?
In some respects science has but followed out and confirmed the dim foreshadowings of the human breast. Man in his simplicity has called the sun father and the earth mother. Science shows this to be no fiction, but a reality; that we are really children of the sun, and that every heart-beat, every pound of force we exert, is a solar emanation. The power with which you now move and breathe came from the sun just as literally as the bank-notes in your pocket came from the bank.
The ancients fabled the earth as resting upon the shoulders of Atlas, and Atlas as standing upon a turtle; but what the turtle stood upon was a puzzle. An acute person says that science has but changed the terms of the equation, but that the unknown quantity is the same as ever. The earth now rests upon the sun,—in his outstretched palm; the sun rests upon some other sun, and that upon some other; but what they all finally rest upon, who can tell? Well may Tennyson speak of the "fairy tales of science," and well may Walt Whitman say:—
"I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and thereasons of things;They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen."
But, making all due acknowledgments to science, there is one danger attending it that the poet alone can save us from,—the danger that science, absorbed with its great problems, will forget Man. Hence the especial office of the poet with reference to science is to endow it with a human interest. The heart has been disenchanted by having disclosed to it blind, abstract forces where it had enthroned personal humanistic divinities. In the old time, man was the centre of the system; everything was interested in him, and took sides for or against him. There were nothing but men and gods in the universe. But in the results of science the world is more and more, and man is less and less. The poet must come to the rescue, and place man again at the top, magnify him, exalt him, reinforce him, and match these wonders from without with equal wonders from within. Welcome to the bard who is not appalled by the task, and who can readily assimilate and turn into human emotions these vast deductions of the savants! The minor poets do nothing in this direction; only men of the largest calibre and the most heroic fibre are adequate to the service. Hence one finds in Tennyson a vast deal more science than he would at first suspect; but it is under his feet; it is no longer science, but faith, or reverence, or poetic nutriment. It is in "Locksley Hall," "The Princess," "In Memoriam," "Maud," and in others of his poems. Here is a passage from "In Memoriam:"—
"They say,The solid earth whereon we tread"In tracts of fluent heat began,And grew to seeming-random forms,The seeming prey of cyclic storms,Till at the last arose the man;"Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime,The herald of a higher race,And of himself in higher placeIf so he type this work of time"Within himself, from more to more;Or, crown'd with attributes of woe,Like glories, move his course, and showThat life is not as idle ore,"But iron dug from central gloom,And heated hot with burning fears,And dipt in baths of hissing tears,And batter'd with the shocks of doom"To shape and use. Arise and flyThe reeling Faun, the sensual feast;Move upward, working out the beast,And let the ape and tiger die."
Or in this stanza behold how the science is disguised or turned into the sweetest music:—
"Move eastward, happy earth, and leaveYon orange sunset waning slow;From fringes of the faded eve,O happy planet, eastward go;Till over thy dark shoulder glowThy silver sister-world, and riseTo glass herself in dewy eyesThat watch me from the glen below."
A recognition of the planetary system, and of the great fact that the earth moves eastward through the heavens, in a soft and tender love-song!
But in Walt Whitman alone do we find the full, practical absorption, and re-departure therefrom, of the astounding idea that the earth is a star in the heavens like the rest, and that man, as the crown and finish, carries in his moral consciousness the flower, the outcome, of all this wide field of turbulent unconscious nature. Of course in his handling it is no longer science, or rather it is science dissolved in the fervent heat of the poet's heart, and charged with emotion. "The words of true poems," he says, "are the tufts and final applause of science." Before Darwin or Spencer he proclaimed the doctrine of evolution:—
"I am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over,And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,And call anything close again when I desire it."In vain the speeding and shyness;In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach;In vain the mastodon retreats beneath his own powder'd bones;In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes;In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsterslying low."
In the following passage the idea is more fully carried out, and man is viewed through a vista which science alone has laid open; yet how absolutely a work of the creative imagination is revealed:—
"I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I am incloser of thingsto be.My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs;On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between thesteps;All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount."Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me;Afar down I see the huge first Nothing—I know I was even there;I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,And took my time, and took no hurt from the foetid carbon."Long I was hugg'd close—long and long,Immense have been the preparations for me,Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me,Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerfulboatmen;For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings;They sent influences to look after what was to hold me."Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me;My embryo has never been torpid—nothing could overlay it,For it the nebula cohered to an orb,The long low strata piled to rest it on,Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and depositedit with care;All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delightme:Now on this spot I stand with my robust Soul."
I recall no single line of poetry in the language that fills my imagination like that beginning the second stanza:—
"Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me."
One seems to see those huge Brocken shadows of the past sinking and dropping below the horizon like mountain peaks, as he presses onward on his journey. Akin to this absorption of science is another quality in my poet not found in the rest, except perhaps a mere hint of it now and then in Lucretius,—a quality easier felt than described. It is a tidal wave of emotion running all through the poems, which is now and then crested with such passages as this:—
"I am he that walks with the tender and growing night;I call to the earth and sea, half held by the night."Press close, bare-bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic,nourishing night!Night of south winds! night of the large, few stars!Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night."Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breath'd earth!Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains, misty topt!Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged withblue!Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!Earth of the limpid gray of clouds, brighter and clearer for mysake!Far-swooping, elbow'd earth! rich, apple-blossom'd earth!Smile, for your lover comes!"
Professor Clifford calls it "cosmic emotion,"—a poetic thrill and rhapsody in contemplating the earth as a whole,—its chemistry and vitality, its bounty, its beauty, its power, and the applicability of its laws and principles to human, aesthetic, and art products. It affords the key to the theory of art upon which Whitman's poems are projected, and accounts for what several critics call their sense of magnitude,—"something of the vastness of the succession of objects in Nature."
"I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate thoseof the earth!I swear there can be no theory of any account, unless it corroboratethe theory of the earth!No politics, art, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account,unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitudeof the earth."
Or again, in his "Laws for Creation:"—
"All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and thecompact truth of the world,There shall be no subject too pronounced—All works shall illustratethe divine law of indirections."
Indeed, the earth ever floats in this poet's mind as his mightiest symbol,—his type of completeness and power. It is the armory from which he draws his most potent weapons. See, especially, "To the Sayers of Words," "This Compost," "The Song of the Open Road," and "Pensive on her Dead gazing I heard the Mother of all."
The poet holds essentially the same attitude toward cosmic humanity, well illustrated in "Salut au Monde:"—
"My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around thewhole earth;I have look'd for equals and lovers, and found them ready for mein all lands;I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them."O vapors! I think I have risen with you and moved away to distantcontinents, and fallen down there for reasons;I think I have blown with you, O winds;O waters, I have finger'd every shore with you."
Indeed, the whole book is leavened with vehement Comradeship. Not only in the relations of individuals to each other shall loving good-will exist and be cultivated,—not only between the different towns and cities, and all the States of this indissoluble, compacted Union,—but it shall make a tie of fraternity and fusion holding all the races and peoples and countries of the whole earth.
Then the National question. As Whitman's completed works now stand, in their two volumes, it is certain they could only have grown out of the Secession War; and they will probably go to future ages as in literature the most characteristic identification of that war,—risen from and portraying it, representing its sea of passions and progresses, partaking of all its fierce movements and perturbed emotions, and yet sinking the mere military parts of that war, great as those were, below and with matters far greater, deeper, more human, more expanding, and more enduring.
I must not close this paper without some reference to Walt Whitman's prose writings, which are scarcely less important than his poems. Never has Patriotism, never has the antique Love of Country, with even doubled passion and strength, been more fully expressed than in these contributions. They comprise two thin volumes,—now included in "Two Rivulets,"—called "Democratic Vistas" and "Memoranda during the War;" the former exhibiting the personality of the poet in more vehement and sweeping action even than do the poems, and affording specimens of soaring vaticination and impassioned appeal impossible to match in the literature of our time. The only living author suggested is Carlyle; but so much is added, thepresenceis so much more vascular and human, and the whole page so saturated with faith and love and democracy, that even the great Scotchman is overborne. Whitman, too, radiates belief, while at the core of Carlyle's utterances is despair. The style here is eruptive and complex, or what Jeremy Taylor callsagglomerative,and puts the Addisonian models utterly to rout,—a style such as only the largest and most Titanic workman could effectively use. A sensitive lady of my acquaintance says reading the "Vistas" is like being exposed to a pouring hailstorm,—the words fairly bruise her mind. In its literary construction the book is indeed a shower, or a succession of showers, multitudinous, wide-stretching, down-pouring,—the wrathful bolt and the quick veins of poetic fire lighting up the page from time to time. I can easily conceive how certain minds must be swayed and bent by some of these long, involved, but firm and vehement passages. I cannot deny myself the pleasure of quoting one or two pages. The writer is referring to the great literary relics of past times:—
"For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand,—those forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn through all the nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs; Hindus, with hymn and apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet, with spirituality, as in flames of lightning, conscience like red-hot iron, plaintive songs and screams of vengeance for tyrannies and enslavement; Christ, with bent head, brooding love and peace, like a dove; Greek, creating eternal shapes of physical and aesthetic proportion; Roman, lord of satire, the sword, and the codex,—of the figures, some far off and veiled, others near and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre, not a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the great painters, architects, musicians; rich Shakespeare, luxuriant as the sun, artist and singer of Feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous colors, owner thereof, and using them at will;—and so to such as German Kant and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods. Of these, and the like of these, is it too much, indeed, to return to our favorite figure, and view them as orbs, moving in free paths in the spaces of that other heaven, the cosmic intellect, the Soul?
"Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in your atmospheres, grown not for America, but rather for her foes, the Feudal and the old—while our genius is democratic and modern. Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe your breath of life into our New World's nostrils—not to enslave us as now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own—perhaps (dare we to say it?) to dominate, even destroy what you yourselves have left! On your plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, will I mete and measure for our wants to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards, with unconditional, uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic despots of the west!"
Here is another passage of a political cast, but showing the same great pinions and lofty flight:—
"It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts of imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with lines of blood, and many a deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous imperfection,—saying, Lo! the roads, the only plans of development, long, and varied with all terrible balks and ebullitions. You said in your soul, I will be empire of empires, overshadowing all else, past and present, putting the history of Old World dynasties, conquests, behind me as of no account,—making a new history, the history of Democracy, making old history a dwarf,—I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating time. If these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the determinations of your Soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and already specimens of the cost. Behold the anguish of suspense, existence itself wavering in the balance, uncertain whether to rise or fall; already, close behind you and around you, thick winrows of corpses on battlefields, countless maimed and sick in hospitals, treachery among Generals, folly in the Executive and Legislative departments, schemers, thieves everywhere,—cant, credulity, make-believe everywhere. Thought you greatness was to ripen for you, like a pear? If you would have greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages, centuries,—must pay for it with a proportionate price. For you, too, as for all lands, the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunder-storms, deaths, births, new projections, and invigorations of ideas and men."
The "Memoranda during the War" is mainly a record of personal experiences, nursing the sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals: most of it is in a low key, simple, unwrought, like a diary kept for one's self; but it reveals the large, tender, sympathetic soul of the poet even more than his elaborate works, and puts in practical form that unprecedented and fervid comradeship which is his leading element. It is printed almost verbatim, just as the notes were jotted down at the time and on the spot. It is impossible to read it without the feeling of tears, while there is elsewhere no such portrayal of the common soldier, and such appreciation of him, as is contained in its pages. It is heart's blood, every word of it, and along with "Drum-Taps" is the only literature of the war thus far entirely characteristic and worthy of serious mention. There are in particular two passages in the "Memoranda" that have amazing dramatic power, vividness, and rapid action, like some quick painter covering a large canvas. I refer to the account of the assassination of President Lincoln, and to that of the scenes in Washington after the first battle of Bull Run. What may be called the mass-movement of Whitman's prose style—the rapid marshaling and grouping together of many facts and details, gathering up, and recruiting, and expanding as the sentences move along, till the force and momentum become like a rolling flood, or an army in echelon on the charge—is here displayed with wonderful effect.
Noting and studying what forces move the world, the only sane explanation that comes to me of the fact that such writing as these little volumes contain has not, in this country especially, met with its due recognition and approval, is that, like all Whitman's works, they have really never yet been published at all in the true sense,—have never entered the arena where the great laurels are won. They have been printed by the author, and a few readers have found them out, but to all intents and purposes they are unknown.
I have not dwelt on Whitman's personal circumstances, his age (he is now, 1877, entering his fifty-ninth year), paralysis, seclusion, and the treatment of him by certain portions of the literary classes, although these have all been made the subjects of wide discussion of late, both in America and Great Britain, and have, I think, a bearing under the circumstances on his character and genius. It is an unwritten tragedy that will doubtless always remain unwritten. I will but mention an eloquent appeal of the Scotch poet, Robert Buchanan, published in London in March, 1876, eulogizing and defending the American bard, in his old age, illness, and poverty, from the swarms of maligners who still continue to assail him. The appeal has this fine passage:—
"He who wanders through the solitudes of far-off Uist or lonely Donegal may often behold the Golden Eagle sick to death, worn with age or famine, or with both, passing with weary waft of wing from promontory to promontory, from peak to peak, pursued by a crowd of rooks and crows, which fall back screaming whenever the noble bird turns his indignant head, and which follow frantically once more, hooting behind him, whenever he wends again upon his way."
Skipping many things I should yet like to touch upon,—for this paper is already too long,—I will say in conclusion that, if any reader of mine is moved by what I have here written to undertake the perusal of "Leaves of Grass," or the later volume, "Two Rivulets," let me yet warn him that he little suspects what is before him. Poetry in the Virgilian, Tennysonian, or Lowellian sense it certainly is not. Just as the living form of man in its ordinary garb is less beautiful (yet more beautiful) than the marble statue; just as the living woman and child that may have sat for the model is less beautiful (yet more so) than one of Raphael's finest Madonnas, or just as a forest of trees addresses itself less directly to the feeling of what is called art and form than the house or other edifice built from them; just as you, and the whole spirit of our current times, have been trained to feed on and enjoy, not Nature or Man, or the aboriginal forces, or the actual, but pictures, books, art, and the selected and refined,—just so these poems will doubtless first shock and disappoint you. Your admiration for the beautiful is never the feeling directly and chiefly addressed in them, but your love for the breathing flesh, the concrete reality, the moving forms and shows of the universe. A man reaches and moves you, not an artist. Doubtless, too, a certain withholding and repugnance has first to be overcome, analogous to a cold sea plunge; and it is not till you experience the reaction, the after-glow, and feel the swing and surge of the strong waves, that you know what Walt Whitman's pages really are. They don't give themselves at first,—like the real landscape and the sea, they are all indirections. You may have to try them many times; there is something of Nature's rudeness and forbiddingness, not only at the first, but probably always. But after you have mastered them by resigning yourself to them, there is nothing like them anywhere in literature for vital help and meaning. The poet says:—
"The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,That scorn the best I can do to relate them."
And the press of your mind to these pages will certainly start new and countless problems that poetry and art have never before touched, and that afford a perpetual stimulus and delight.
It has been said that the object of poetry and the higher forms of literature is to escape from the tyranny of the real into the freedom of the ideal; but what is the ideal unless ballasted and weighted with the real? All these poems have a lofty ideal background; the great laws and harmonies stretch unerringly above them, and give their vista and perspective. It is because Whitman's ideal is clothed with rank materiality, as the soul is clothed with the carnal body, that his poems beget such warmth and desire in the mind, and are the reservoirs of so much power. No one can feel more than I how absolutely necessary it is that the facts of nature and experience be born again in the heart of the bard, and receive the baptism of the true fire before they be counted poetical; and I have no trouble on this score with the author of "Leaves of Grass." He never fails to ascend into spiritual meanings. Indeed, the spirituality of Walt Whitman is the chief fact after all, and dominates every page he has written.
Observe that this singer and artist makes nodirectattempt to be poetical, any more than he does to be melodious or rhythmical. He approaches these qualities and results as it were from beneath, and always indirectly; they are drawn to him, not he to them; and if they appear absent from his page at first, it is because we have been looking for them in the customary places on the outside, where he never puts them, and have not yet penetrated the interiors. As many of the fowls hide their eggs by a sort of intuitive prudery and secretiveness, Whitman always half hides, or more than half hides, his thought, his glow, his magnetism, his most golden and orbic treasures.
Finally, as those men and women respect and love Walt Whitman best who have known him longest and closest personally, the same rule will apply to "Leaves of Grass" and the later volume, "Two Rivulets." It is indeed neither the first surface reading of those books, nor perhaps even the second or third, that will any more than prepare the student for the full assimilation of the poems. Like Nature, and like the Sciences, they suggest endless suites of chambers opening and expanding more and more and continually.
INDEX
[Transcribist's note: Index has been shortened to namesof authors and to birds, with scientific names.]AeschylusAkers, Elizabeth.Apuleius.Audubon, John Jaines.Bacon, Francis.Benton, Myron.Bible.Bittern, American (Botaurus lentiginosus).Björnson, Björnstjerne.Blackbird, cow, or cowbird (Molothrus ater).Blackbird, European.Bluebird (Sialia sialis).Bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus).Bryant, William Cullen.Buchanan, Robert.Bunting, snow, or snowflake (Passerina nivalis).Burke, Edmund.Burns, Robert.Byron, Lord.Cardinal. See Grosbeak, cardinal.Carlyle, Thomas.Cedar-bird, or cedar waxwing (Ampelis cedrorum).Chat, yellow-breasted (Icteria virens).Chewink, or towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus).Chickadee (Parus atricapillus).Cicada.Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.Cowper, William.Crow, American (Corvis brachyrhynchos).Cuckoo, American.Cuckoo, European.Dante.Darwin, Charles.Dove, mourning (Zenaidura macroura).Eagle.Emerson, Ralph Waldo.Everett, Edward.Flagg, Wilson.Flicker. See High-hole.Flycatcher, great crested (Myiarchus crinitus).Frogs. See Hyla.Gilder, Richard Watson.Grasshopper of Greek poetry.Grosbeak, cardinal, or cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis).Grosbeak, pine (Pinicola enucleator leucura).Grouse, ruffed (Bonasa umbellus).Hamerton, Philip Gilbert.Hawk.High-hole, or yellow-hammer, or golden-shafted woodpecker, orflicker (Colaptes auratus luteus).Hogg, James.Homer.Hood, Thomas.Hornets, black.Hudson River valley.Hummingbird, ruby-throated (Trochilus colubris).Hyla, green.Hyla, Pickering's.Ingelow, Jean.Jefferson, Thomas.Jonson, Ben.Keats, John.Kingbird (Tyrannus tyrannus).Lamb, Charles.Lark. See Skylark.Lark, shore or horned (Otocoris alpestris).Lathrop, George Parson.Lincoln, Abraham.Lizard.Locust.Logan, John.Loon (Gavia imber).Lowell, James Russell.Lyly, John.Macaulay, Thomas Babington.Meadowlark (Sturnella magna).Michael Angelo.Milton, John.Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos).Oriole, Baltimore (Icterus galbula).Oven-bird, or golden-crowned thrush (Seiurus aurocapillus).Owl.Partridge. See Grouse, ruffed.Pewee, wood (Contopus virens).Phaedrus.Phoebe-bird (Sayornis phoebe).Pigeon, passenger (Ectopistes migratorius).Pipit, American, or titlark (Anthus pensilvanicus).Pipit, Sprague's (Anthus spragueii).Pope, Alexander.Quail, or bob-white (Colinus virginianus).Redpoll (Acanthis linaria).Robin, American (Merula migratoria).Sandpiper, spotted, or "tip-up" (Actitis macularia).Sandpipers.Shelley, Percy Bysshe.Snake.Snake, garter.Socrates.Solomon.Sparrow, social or chipping (Spizella socialis).Sparrow, song (Melospiza cinerea melodia).Sparrow, tree or Canada (Spizella monticola).Sparrow, vesper (Pooecetes gramineus).Sparrow, white-crowned (Zonotrichia leucophrys).Sparrow, white-throated (Zonotrichia albicollis).Spenser.Strawberry.Sugar-berry.Swallow, barn (Hirundo erythrogastra).Swallow, chimney, or chimney swift (Chaetura pelagica).Swallow, cliff (Petrochellidon lunifrons).Swift, chimney. See Swallow.Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe.Tennyson, Alfred.Thaxter, Celia.Thomson, James.Thoreau, Henry D..Thrasher, brown, or long-tailed thrush (Toxostoma rufum).Thrush, golden-crowned. See Ovenbird.Thrush, hermit (Hylocichla guttata pallasii).Thrush, wood (Hylocichla mustelina).Tip-up. See Sandpiper, spotted.Titlark. See Pipit, American.Townee. See Chewink.Trowbridge, John T.Turgenieff.Turner, J. M. W.Turtles.Warbler, pine (Dendroica vigorsii).Water-thrush.Whip-poor-will (Antrostomus vociferous).Whitman, Walt.Whittier, John Greenleaf.Wilde, Richard Henry.Wilson, Alexander.Woodchuck.Woodpecker, downy (Dryobates pubescens medianus).Woodpecker, golden-shafted. See High-hole.Woodpecker, hairy (Dryobates villosus).Woodpecker, red-headed (Melanerpes erythrocephalus).Wordsworth, William.Wren, house (Troglodytes aëdon).Yellow-hammer. See High-hole.Yellow-throat, Maryland, or northern yellow-throat (Geothlypistrichas brachidactyla).