"Here was this atom in full breath,
Hurling defiance at vast death;
This scrap of valor just for play
Fronts the north-wind in waistcoat gray,
As if to shame my weak behavior;
I greeted loud my little savior,

'You pet! what dost here? and what for?
In these woods, thy small Labrador,
At this pinch, wee San Salvador!
What fire burns in that little chest,
So frolic, stout, and self-possest?
Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine;
Ashes and jet all hues outshine.
Why are not diamonds black and gray?
And I affirm the spacious north
Exists to draw thy virtue forth.
I think no virtue goes with size;
The reason of all cowardice

Is, that men are overgrown,
And to be valiant, must come down
To the titmouse dimension.'

"I think old Cæsar must have heard
In northern Gaul my dauntless bird,
And, echoed in some frosty wold,
Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold.
And I will write our annals new
And thank thee for a better clew.
I, who dreamed not when I came here
To find the antidote of fear,

Now hear thee say in Roman key,
Paan! Veni, vidi, vici."

A late bird-poem and a good one of its kind is Celia Thaxter's "Sandpiper," which recalls Bryant's "Water-fowl" in its successful rendering of the spirit and atmosphere of the scene and the distinctness with

which the lone bird, flitting along the beach is brought before the mind. It is a woman's, or a feminine, poem, as Bryant's is characteristically a man's.

The sentiment or feeling awakened by any of the aquatic fowls is preeminently one of loneliness. The wood-duck which your approach starts from the pond or the marsh, the loon neighing down out of the April sky, the wild goose, the curlew, the stork, the bittern, the sandpiper, etc., awaken quite a different train of emotions from those awakened by the landbirds. They all have clinging to them some reminiscence and suggestion of the sea. Their cries echo its wildness and desolation; their wings are the shape of its billows.

Of the sandpipers there are many varieties, found upon the coast and penetrating inland along the rivers and water-courses, the smallest of the species, commonly called the "tip-up," going up all the mountain brooks and breeding in the sand along their banks; but the characteristics are the same in all, and the eye detects little difference except in size.

The walker on the beach sees him running or flitting before him, following up the breakers and picking up the aquatic insects left on the sands; and the trout-fisher along the farthest inland stream likewise intrudes upon its privacy. Flitting along from stone to stone seeking its food, the hind part of its body "teetering" up and down, its soft gray color blending it with the pebbles and the rocks; or else skimming up or down the stream on its long convex

wings, uttering its shrill cry, the sandpiper is not a bird of the sea merely; and Mrs. Thaxter's poem is as much for the dweller inland as the dweller upon the coast.

THE SANDPIPER.

Across the narrow beach we flit,

One little sandpiper and I;

And fast I gather, bit by bit,

The scattered driftwood bleached and dry.
The wild waves reach their hands for it,
The wild wind raves, the tide runs high,
As up and down the beach we flit,

One little sandpiper and I.

I watch him as he skims along,
Uttering his sweet and mournful cry;
He starts not at my fitful song,
Or flash of fluttering drapery;

He has no thought of any wrong;

He scans me with a fearless eye.

Stanch friends are we, well tried and strong,
The little sandpiper and I.

Comrade, where wilt thou be to-night
When the loosed storm breaks furiously?

My driftwood fire will burn so bright!
To what warm shelter canst thou fly?

I do not fear for thee, though wroth

The tempest rushes through the sky;
For are we not God's children both,

Thou, little sandpiper, and I?

Others of our birds have been game for the poetic muse, but in most cases the poets have had some moral or pretty conceit to convey and have not loved the bird first. Mr. Lathrop preaches a little in his pleasant poem, "The Sparrow," but he must sometime have looked upon the bird with genuine emotion to have written the first two stanzas:

"Glimmers gay the leafless thicket
Close beside my garden gate,
Where, so light, from post to thicket,
Hops the sparrow, blithe, sedate;
Who, with meekly folded wing,
Comes to sun himself and sing.

"It was there, perhaps, last year,
That his little house he built;
For he seems to perk and peer,
And to twitter, too, and tilt
The bare branches in between,
With a fond, familiar mien.

a note that

may

be

The bluebird has not been overlooked, and Halleck, Longfellow, and Mrs. Sigourney have written poems upon him, but from none of them does there fall that first note of his in early springcalled the violet of sound and as welcome to the ear heard above the cold damp earth, as is its floral type to the eye a few weeks later. Lowell's two lines come nearer the mark:

"The bluebird, shifting his light load of song

From post to post along the cheerless fence."

Or the first swallow that comes twittering up the southern valley, laughing a gleeful childish laugh, and awakening such memories in the heart, who has put him in a poem? So the humming-bird too escapes through the finest meshes of rhyme.

The most melodious of our songsters, the woodthrush and hermit-thrush - birds whose strains, more than any others, express harmony and serenityhave not, as I am aware of, yet had reared to them their merited poetic monument — unless indeed the already named poet of the mocking-bird has done this service for the hermit-thrush in his "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn." Here the threnody is blent of three chords, the blossoming lilac, the evening star, and the hermit-thrush, the latter playing the most prominent part throughout the composition. It is the exalting and spiritual utterance of the "solitary singer" that calms and consoles the poet, when the powerful shock of the President's assassination comes upon him, and he flees from the stifling atmosphere and offensive lights and conversation of the house,

"Forth to hiding, receiving night that talks not, Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,

To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still."

Numerous others of our birds would seem to challenge attention by their calls and notes. There is the Maryland yellow-throat, for instance, standing in the door of his bushy tent, and calling out as you approach, "which way, sir! "" which way, sir!" If