delightful it is, and how summer-like and shrill it sounds from the
choir of grasshoppers." One of the poets in the Anthology finds a
grasshopper struggling in a spider's web, which he releases with
the words:--

"Go safe and free with your sweet voice of song."

Another one makes the insect say to a rustic who had captured him:--

"Me, the Nymphs' wayside minstrel whose sweet note
O'er sultry hill is heard, and shady grove to float."

Still another sings how a grasshopper took the place of a broken
string on his lyre, and "filled the cadence due."

"For while six chords beneath my fingers cried,
He with his tuneful voice the seventh supplied;
The midday songster of the mountain set
His pastoral ditty to my canzonet;
And when he sang, his modulated throat
Accorded with the lifeless string I smote."

While we are trying to introduce the lark in this country, why not
try this Pindaric grasshopper also?

It is to the literary poets and to the minstrels of a softer age
that we must look for special mention of the song-birds and for
poetical rhapsodies upon them. The nightingale is the most general
favorite, and nearly all the more noted English poets have sung her
praises. To the melancholy poet she is melancholy, and to the