The redstart trilled his twittering horn
And vanished in thick boughs; at even,
Like liquid pearls fresh showered from heaven,
The high notes of the lone wood thrush
Fell on the forest's holy hush;
But thou all day complainest here,--
'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'"

Emerson's best natural history poem is the "Humble-Bee,"--a poem as
good in its way as Burns's poem on the mouse; but his later poem,
"The Titmouse," has many of the same qualities, and cannot fail to
be acceptable to both poet and naturalist.

The chickadee is indeed a truly Emersonian bird, and the poet shows
him to be both a hero and a philosopher. Hardy, active, social, a
winter bird no less than a summer, a defier of both frost and heat,
lover of the pine-tree, and diligent searcher after truth in the
shape of eggs and larvae of insects, preeminently a New England
bird, clad in black and ashen gray, with a note the most cheering
and reassuring to be heard in our January woods,--I know of none
other of our birds so well calculated to captivate the Emersonian
muse.

Emerson himself is a northern hyperborean genius,--a winter bird
with a clear, saucy, cheery call, and not a passionate summer
songster. His lines have little melody to the ear, but they have
the vigor and distinctness of all pure and compact things. They are
like the needles of the pine--"the snow loving pine"--more than the
emotional foliage of the deciduous trees, and the titmouse becomes
them well:--