Tell us 'tis coming, though not by Cuckoo,
Nor dost thou summer bear away with thee
Though thou a yawling bawling Cuckoo be.
When thou dost cease among us to appear,
Then doth our harvest bravely crown our year.
But thou hast fellows, some like thee can do
Little but suck our eggs, and sing Cuckoo.

Since Cuckoos forward not our early spring
Nor help with notes to bring our harvest in,
And since while here, she only makes a noise
So pleasing unto none as girls and boys,
The Formalist we may compare her to,
For he doth suck our eggs and sing Cuckoo."

A perusal of this little volume with its roughness and quaintness,
sometimes grating on the ear but full of strong thought and picturesque
images, cannot fail to raise Bunyan's pretensions as a poet. His muse,
it is true, as Alexander Smith has said, is a homely one. She is "clad
in russet, wears shoes and stockings, has a country accent, and walks
along the level Bedfordshire roads." But if the lines are unpolished,
"they have pith and sinew, like the talk of a shrewd peasant," with the
"strong thought and the knack of the skilled workman who can drive by a
single blow the nail home to the head."

During his imprisonment Bunyan's pen was much more fertile in prose than
in poetry. Besides his world-famous "Grace Abounding," he produced
during the first six years of his gaol life a treatise on prayer,
entitled "Praying in the Spirit;" a book on "Christian Behaviour,"
setting forth with uncompromising plainness the relative duties of