tended to soften their antagonisms, and hasten their blending into
one great and mighty people. How the name and song of this happiest
of earthly birds run through all the rhyme and romance of English
poetry, of English rural life, ever since there was an England!
Take away its history and its song from her daisy-eyed meadows, and
shaded lanes, and hedges breathing and blooming with sweetbrier
leaves and hawthorn flowers--from her thatched cottages, veiled with
ivy--from the morning tread of the reapers, and the mower's lunch of
bread and cheese under the meadow elm, and you take away a living
and beautiful spirit more charming than music. You take away from
English poetry one of its pleiades, and bereave it of a
companionship more intimate than that of the nearest neighborhood of
the stars above. How the lark's life and song blend, in the rhyme
of the poet, with "the sheen of silver fountains leaping to the
sea," with morning sunbeams and noontide thoughts, with the sweetest
breathing flowers, and softest breezes, and busiest bees, and
greenest leaves, and happiest human industries, loves, hopes, and
aspirations!

The American has read and heard of all this from his youth up to the
day of setting his foot, for the first time, on English ground. He
has tried to believe it, as in things seen, temporal and tangible.
But in doing this he has to contend with a sense or suspicion of
unreality--a feeling that there has been great poetical exaggeration
in the matter. A patent fact lies at the bottom of this
incredulity. The forefathers of New England carried no wild bird
with them to sing about their cabin homes in the New World. But
they found beautiful and happy birds on that wild continent, as
well-dressed, as graceful in form and motion, and of as fine taste
for music and other accomplishments, as if they and their ancestors