knowing no bounds,--how many human aspirations are realized in
their free, holiday lives, and how many suggestions to the poet in
their flight and song!

Indeed, is not the bird the original type and teacher of the poet,
and do we not demand of the human lark or thrush that he "shake out
his carols" in the same free and spontaneous manner as his winged
prototype? Kingsley has shown how surely the old minnesingers and
early ballad-writers have learned of the birds, taking their key-
note from the blackbird, or the wood-lark, or the throstle, and
giving utterance to a melody as simple and unstudied. Such things
as the following were surely caught from the fields or the woods:--

"She sat down below a thorn,
Fine flowers in the valley,
And there has she her sweet babe borne,
And the green leaves they grow rarely."

Or the best lyric pieces, how like they are to certain bird-songs!
--clear, ringing, ecstatic, and suggesting that challenge and
triumph which the outpouring of the male bird contains. (Is not the
genuine singing, lyrical quality essentially masculine?) Keats and
Shelley, perhaps more notably than any other English poets, have
the bird organization and the piercing wild-bird cry. This, of
course, is not saying that they are the greatest poets, but that
they have preeminently the sharp semi-tones of the sparrows and the
larks.

But when the general reader thinks of the birds of the poets, he
very naturally calls to mind the renowned birds, the lark and the