"Glimmers gay the leafless thicket
Close beside my garden gate,
Where, so light, from post to wicket,
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."

The bluebird has not been overlooked, and Halleek, Longfellow, and
Mrs. Sigourney have written poems upon him, but from none of them
does there fall that first note of his in early spring,--a note
that may be called 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 hummingbird, too,
escapes through the finest meshes of rhyme.