translated into it at all.

And so it may be, that in some simpler age, poets may go back, like
the old Minnesingers, to the birds of the forest, and learn of them
to sing.

And little do most of them know how much there is to learn; what
variety of character, as well as variety of emotion, may be
distinguished by the practised ear, in a 'charm of birds' (to use the
old southern phrase), from the wild cry of the missel-thrush, ringing
from afar in the first bright days of March, a passage of one or two
bars repeated three or four times, and then another and another,
clear and sweet, and yet defiant--for the great 'stormcock' loves to
sing when rain and wind is coming on, and faces the elements as
boldly as he faces hawk and crow--down to the delicate warble of the
wren, who slips out of his hole in the brown bank, where he has
huddled through the frost with wife and children, all folded in each
other's arms like human beings, for the sake of warmth,--which, alas!
does not always suffice; for many a lump of wrens may be found,
frozen and shrivelled, after a severe winter. Yet even he, sitting
at his house-door in the low sunlight, says grace for all mercies (as
a little child once worded it) in a song so rapid, so shrill, so
loud, and yet so delicately modulated, that you wonder at the amount
of soul within that tiny body; and then stops suddenly, as a child
who has said its lesson, or got to the end of the sermon, gives a
self-satisfied flirt of his tail, and goes in again to sleep.

Character? I know not how much variety of character there may be
between birds of the same species but between species and species the
variety is endless, and is shown--as I fondly believe--in the