"I think old Caesar 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,
_Poean! 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, awaken quite a different train of emotions from
those awakened by the land-birds. 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, one of