Birds and Poets
by
John Burroughs
Part 4 out of 4
fable and myth that now lies behind us. "Leaves of Grass" is,
perhaps, the first serious and large attempt at an expression in
poetry of a knowledge of the earth as one of the orbs, and of man
as a microcosm of the whole, and to give to the imagination these
new and true fields of wonder and romance. In it fable and
superstition are at an end, priestcraft is at an end, skepticism
and doubt are at an end, with all the misgivings and dark
forebodings that have dogged the human mind since it began to relax
its hold upon tradition and the past; and we behold man reconciled,
happy, ecstatic, full of reverence, awe, and wonder, reinstated in
Paradise,-- the paradise of perfect knowledge and unrestricted
faith.
It needs but a little pondering to see that the great poet of the
future will not be afraid of science, but will rather seek to plant
his feet upon it as upon a rock. He knows that, from an enlarged
point of view, there is no feud between Science and Poesy, any more
than there is between Science and Religion, or between Science and
Life. He sees that the poet and the scientist do not travel
opposite but parallel roads, that often approach each other very
closely, if they do not at times actually join. The poet will
always pause when he finds himself in opposition to science; and
the scientist is never more worthy the name than when he escapes
from analysis into synthesis, and gives us living wholes. And
science, in its present bold and receptive mood, may be said to be
eminently creative, and to have made every first-class thinker and
every large worker in any aesthetic or spiritual field immeasurably
its debtor. It has dispelled many illusions, but it has more than
compensated the imagination by the unbounded vistas it has opened
up on every hand. It has added to our knowledge, but it has added
to our ignorance in the same measure: the large circle of light
only reveals the larger circle of darkness that encompasses it, and
life and being and the orbs are enveloped in a greater mystery to
the poet to-day than they were in the times of Homer or Isaiah.
Science, therefore, does not restrict the imagination, but often
compels it to longer flights. The conception of the earth as an
orb shooting like a midnight meteor through space, a brand cast by
the burning sun with the fire at its heart still unquenched, the
sun itself shooting and carrying the whole train of worlds with it,
no one knows whither,--what a lift has science given the
imagination in this field! Or the tremendous discovery of the
correlation and conservation of forces, the identity and
convertibility of heat and force and motion, and that no ounce of
power is lost, but forever passed along, changing form but not
essence, is a poetic discovery no less than a scientific one. The
poets have always felt that it must be so, and, when the fact was
authoritatively announced by science, every profound poetic mind
must have felt a thrill of pleasure. Or the nebular hypothesis of
the solar system,--it seems the conception of some inspired madman,
like William Blake, rather than the cool conclusion of reason, and
to carry its own justification, as great power always does. Indeed,
our interest in astronomy and geology is essentially a poetic one,--
the love of the marvelous, of the sublime, and of grand harmonies.
The scientific conception of the sun is strikingly Dantesque, and
appalls the imagination. Or the hell of fire through which the
earth has passed, and the aeons of monsters from which its fair
forms have emerged,--from which of the seven circles of the Inferno
did the scientist get his hint? Indeed, science everywhere reveals
a carnival of mightier gods than those that cut such fantastic
tricks in the ancient world. Listen to Tyndall on light, or to
Youmans on the chemistry of a sunbeam, and see how fable pales its
ineffectual fires, and the boldest dreams of the poets are
eclipsed.
The vibratory theory of light and its identity with the laws of
sound, the laws of the tides and the seasons, the wonders of the
spectroscope, the theory of gravitation, of electricity, of
chemical affinity, the deep beneath deep of the telescope, the
world within world of the microscope,--in these and many other
fields it is hard to tell whether it is the scientist or the poet
we are listening to. What greater magic than that you can take a
colorless ray of light, break it across a prism, and catch upon a
screen all the divine hues of the rainbow?
In some respects science has but followed out and confirmed the dim
foreshadowings of the human breast. Man in his simplicity has
called the sun father and the earth mother. Science shows this to
be no fiction, but a reality; that we are really children of the
sun, and that every heart-beat, every pound of force we exert, is a
solar emanation. The power with which you now move and breathe came
from the sun just as literally as the bank-notes in your pocket
came from the bank.
The ancients fabled the earth as resting upon the shoulders of
Atlas, and Atlas as standing upon a turtle; but what the turtle
stood upon was a puzzle. An acute person says that science has but
changed the terms of the equation, but that the unknown quantity is
the same as ever. The earth now rests upon the sun,--in his
outstretched palm; the sun rests upon some other sun, and that upon
some other; but what they all finally rest upon, who can tell? Well
may Tennyson speak of the "fairy tales of science," and well may
Walt Whitman say:--
"I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the
reasons of things;
They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen."
But, making all due acknowledgments to science, there is one danger
attending it that the poet alone can save us from,--the danger that
science, absorbed with its great problems, will forget Man. Hence
the especial office of the poet with reference to science is to
endow it with a human interest. The heart has been disenchanted by
having disclosed to it blind, abstract forces where it had
enthroned personal humanistic divinities. In the old time, man was
the centre of the system; everything was interested in him, and
took sides for or against him. There were nothing but men and gods
in the universe. But in the results of science the world is more
and more, and man is less and less. The poet must come to the
rescue, and place man again at the top, magnify him, exalt him,
reinforce him, and match these wonders from without with equal
wonders from within. Welcome to the bard who is not appalled by the
task, and who can readily assimilate and turn into human emotions
these vast deductions of the savants! The minor poets do nothing in
this direction; only men of the largest calibre and the most heroic
fibre are adequate to the service. Hence one finds in Tennyson a
vast deal more science than he would at first suspect; but it is
under his feet; it is no longer science, but faith, or reverence,
or poetic nutriment. It is in "Locksley Hall," "The Princess," "In
Memoriam," "Maud," and in others of his poems. Here is a passage
from "In Memoriam:"--
"They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread
"In tracts of fluent heat began,
And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man;
"Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime,
The herald of a higher race,
And of himself in higher place
If so he type this work of time
"Within himself, from more to more;
Or, crown'd with attributes of woe,
Like glories, move his course, and show
That life is not as idle ore,
"But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter'd with the shocks of doom
"To shape and use. Arise and fly
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die."
Or in this stanza behold how the science is disguised or turned
into the sweetest music:--
"Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Yon orange sunset waning slow;
From fringes of the faded eve,
O happy planet, eastward go;
Till over thy dark shoulder glow
Thy silver sister-world, and rise
To glass herself in dewy eyes
That watch me from the glen below."
A recognition of the planetary system, and of the great fact that
the earth moves eastward through the heavens, in a soft and tender
love-song!
But in Walt Whitman alone do we find the full, practical
absorption, and re-departure therefrom, of the astounding idea that
the earth is a star in the heavens like the rest, and that man, as
the crown and finish, carries in his moral consciousness the
flower, the outcome, of all this wide field of turbulent
unconscious nature. Of course in his handling it is no longer
science, or rather it is science dissolved in the fervent heat of
the poet's heart, and charged with emotion. "The words of true
poems," he says, "are the tufts and final applause of science."
Before Darwin or Spencer he proclaimed the doctrine of evolution:--
"I am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
And call anything close again when I desire it.
"In vain the speeding and shyness;
In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach;
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath his own powder'd bones;
In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes;
In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsters
lying low."
In the following passage the idea is more fully carried out, and
man is viewed through a vista which science alone has laid open;
yet how absolutely a work of the creative imagination is revealed:--
"I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I am incloser of things
to be.
My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs;
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the
steps;
All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount.
"Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me;
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing--I know I was even there;
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the foetid carbon.
"Long I was hugg'd close--long and long,
Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me,
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful
boatmen;
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings;
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
"Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me;
My embryo has never been torpid--nothing could overlay it,
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long low strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited
it with care;
All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight
me:
Now on this spot I stand with my robust Soul."
I recall no single line of poetry in the language that fills my
imagination like that beginning the second stanza:--
"Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me."
One seems to see those huge Brocken shadows of the past sinking and
dropping below the horizon like mountain peaks, as he presses
onward on his journey. Akin to this absorption of science is
another quality in my poet not found in the rest, except perhaps a
mere hint of it now and then in Lucretius,--a quality easier felt
than described. It is a tidal wave of emotion running all through
the poems, which is now and then crested with such passages as
this:--
"I am he that walks with the tender and growing night;
I call to the earth and sea, half held by the night.
"Press close, bare-bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic,
nourishing night!
Night of south winds! night of the large, few stars!
Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night.
"Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breath'd earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains, misty topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with
blue!
Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds, brighter and clearer for my
sake!
Far-swooping, elbow'd earth! rich, apple-blossom'd earth!
Smile, for your lover comes!"
Professor Clifford calls it "cosmic emotion,"--a poetic thrill and
rhapsody in contemplating the earth as a whole,--its chemistry and
vitality, its bounty, its beauty, its power, and the applicability
of its laws and principles to human, aesthetic, and art products.
It affords the key to the theory of art upon which Whitman's poems
are projected, and accounts for what several critics call their
sense of magnitude,--"something of the vastness of the succession
of objects in Nature."
"I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those
of the earth!
I swear there can be no theory of any account, unless it corroborate
the theory of the earth!
No politics, art, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account,
unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude
of the earth."
Or again, in his "Laws for Creation:"--
"All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the
compact truth of the world,
There shall be no subject too pronounced--All works shall illustrate
the divine law of indirections."
Indeed, the earth ever floats in this poet's mind as his mightiest
symbol,--his type of completeness and power. It is the armory from
which he draws his most potent weapons. See, especially, "To the
Sayers of Words," "This Compost," "The Song of the Open Road," and
"Pensive on her Dead gazing I heard the Mother of all."
The poet holds essentially the same attitude toward cosmic
humanity, well illustrated in "Salut au Monde:"--
"My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the
whole earth;
I have look'd for equals and lovers, and found them ready for me
in all lands;
I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.
"O vapors! I think I have risen with you and moved away to distant
continents, and fallen down there for reasons;
I think I have blown with you, O winds;
O waters, I have finger'd every shore with you."
Indeed, the whole book is leavened with vehement Comradeship. Not
only in the relations of individuals to each other shall loving
good-will exist and be cultivated,--not only between the different
towns and cities, and all the States of this indissoluble,
compacted Union,--but it shall make a tie of fraternity and fusion
holding all the races and peoples and countries of the whole earth.
Then the National question. As Whitman's completed works now stand,
in their two volumes, it is certain they could only have grown out
of the Secession War; and they will probably go to future ages as
in literature the most characteristic identification of that war,--
risen from and portraying it, representing its sea of passions and
progresses, partaking of all its fierce movements and perturbed
emotions, and yet sinking the mere military parts of that war,
great as those were, below and with matters far greater, deeper,
more human, more expanding, and more enduring.
I must not close this paper without some reference to Walt
Whitman's prose writings, which are scarcely less important than
his poems. Never has Patriotism, never has the antique Love of
Country, with even doubled passion and strength, been more fully
expressed than in these contributions. They comprise two thin
volumes,--now included in "Two Rivulets,"--called "Democratic
Vistas" and "Memoranda during the War;" the former exhibiting the
personality of the poet in more vehement and sweeping action even
than do the poems, and affording specimens of soaring vaticination
and impassioned appeal impossible to match in the literature of our
time. The only living author suggested is Carlyle; but so much is
added, the _presence_ is so much more vascular and human, and the
whole page so saturated with faith and love and democracy, that
even the great Scotchman is overborne. Whitman, too, radiates
belief, while at the core of Carlyle's utterances is despair. The
style here is eruptive and complex, or what Jeremy Taylor calls
_agglomerative,_ and puts the Addisonian models utterly to rout,--a
style such as only the largest and most Titanic workman could
effectively use. A sensitive lady of my acquaintance says reading
the "Vistas" is like being exposed to a pouring hailstorm,--the
words fairly bruise her mind. In its literary construction the book
is indeed a shower, or a succession of showers, multitudinous,
wide-stretching, down-pouring,--the wrathful bolt and the quick
veins of poetic fire lighting up the page from time to time. I can
easily conceive how certain minds must be swayed and bent by some
of these long, involved, but firm and vehement passages. I cannot
deny myself the pleasure of quoting one or two pages. The writer is
referring to the great literary relics of past times:--
"For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand,--
those forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn
through all the nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs;
Hindus, with hymn and apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet,
with spirituality, as in flames of lightning, conscience like red-
hot iron, plaintive songs and screams of vengeance for tyrannies
and enslavement; Christ, with bent head, brooding love and peace,
like a dove; Greek, creating eternal shapes of physical and
aesthetic proportion; Roman, lord of satire, the sword, and the
codex,--of the figures, some far off and veiled, others near and
visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre, not a
grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the great painters,
architects, musicians; rich Shakespeare, luxuriant as the sun,
artist and singer of Feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous
colors, owner thereof, and using them at will;--and so to such as
German Kant and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the
ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods.
Of these, and the like of these, is it too much, indeed, to return
to our favorite figure, and view them as orbs, moving in free paths
in the spaces of that other heaven, the cosmic intellect, the Soul?
"Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in your atmospheres,
grown not for America, but rather for her foes, the Feudal and the
old--while our genius is democratic and modern. Yet could ye,
indeed, but breathe your breath of life into our New World's
nostrils--not to enslave us as now, but, for our needs, to breed a
spirit like your own--perhaps (dare we to say it?) to dominate,
even destroy what you yourselves have left! On your plane, and no
less, but even higher and wider, will I mete and measure for our
wants to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards, with
unconditional, uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic
despots of the west!"
Here is another passage of a political cast, but showing the same
great pinions and lofty flight:--
"It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts
of imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with lines of
blood, and many a deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of
cankerous imperfection,--saying, Lo! the roads, the only plans of
development, long, and varied with all terrible balks and
ebullitions. You said in your soul, I will be empire of empires,
overshadowing all else, past and present, putting the history of
Old World dynasties, conquests, behind me as of no account,--making
a new history, the history of Democracy, making old history a
dwarf,--I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating time. If these,
O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the determinations of
your Soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and already specimens of
the cost. Behold the anguish of suspense, existence itself wavering
in the balance, uncertain whether to rise or fall; already, close
behind you and around you, thick winrows of corpses on
battlefields, countless maimed and sick in hospitals, treachery
among Generals, folly in the Executive and Legislative departments,
schemers, thieves everywhere,--cant, credulity, make-believe
everywhere. Thought you greatness was to ripen for you, like a
pear? If you would have greatness, know that you must conquer it
through ages, centuries,--must pay for it with a proportionate
price. For you, too, as for all lands, the struggle, the traitor,
the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of
prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay
of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the
ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunder-storms, deaths,
births, new projections, and invigorations of ideas and men."
The "Memoranda during the War" is mainly a record of personal
experiences, nursing the sick and wounded soldiers in the
hospitals: most of it is in a low key, simple, unwrought, like a
diary kept for one's self; but it reveals the large, tender,
sympathetic soul of the poet even more than his elaborate works,
and puts in practical form that unprecedented and fervid
comradeship which is his leading element. It is printed almost
verbatim, just as the notes were jotted down at the time and on the
spot. It is impossible to read it without the feeling of tears,
while there is elsewhere no such portrayal of the common soldier,
and such appreciation of him, as is contained in its pages. It is
heart's blood, every word of it, and along with "Drum-Taps" is the
only literature of the war thus far entirely characteristic and
worthy of serious mention. There are in particular two passages in
the "Memoranda" that have amazing dramatic power, vividness, and
rapid action, like some quick painter covering a large canvas. I
refer to the account of the assassination of President Lincoln, and
to that of the scenes in Washington after the first battle of Bull
Run. What may be called the mass-movement of Whitman's prose style--
the rapid marshaling and grouping together of many facts and
details, gathering up, and recruiting, and expanding as the
sentences move along, till the force and momentum become like a
rolling flood, or an army in echelon on the charge--is here
displayed with wonderful effect.
Noting and studying what forces move the world, the only sane
explanation that comes to me of the fact that such writing as these
little volumes contain has not, in this country especially, met
with its due recognition and approval, is that, like all Whitman's
works, they have really never yet been published at all in the true
sense,--have never entered the arena where the great laurels are
won. They have been printed by the author, and a few readers have
found them out, but to all intents and purposes they are unknown.
I have not dwelt on Whitman's personal circumstances, his age (he
is now, 1877, entering his fifty-ninth year), paralysis, seclusion,
and the treatment of him by certain portions of the literary
classes, although these have all been made the subjects of wide
discussion of late, both in America and Great Britain, and have, I
think, a bearing under the circumstances on his character and
genius. It is an unwritten tragedy that will doubtless always
remain unwritten. I will but mention an eloquent appeal of the
Scotch poet, Robert Buchanan, published in London in March, 1876,
eulogizing and defending the American bard, in his old age,
illness, and poverty, from the swarms of maligners who still
continue to assail him. The appeal has this fine passage:--
"He who wanders through the solitudes of far-off Uist or lonely
Donegal may often behold the Golden Eagle sick to death, worn with
age or famine, or with both, passing with weary waft of wing from
promontory to promontory, from peak to peak, pursued by a crowd of
rooks and crows, which fall back screaming whenever the noble bird
turns his indignant head, and which follow frantically once more,
hooting behind him, whenever he wends again upon his way."
Skipping many things I should yet like to touch upon,--for this
paper is already too long,--I will say in conclusion that, if any
reader of mine is moved by what I have here written to undertake
the perusal of "Leaves of Grass," or the later volume, "Two
Rivulets," let me yet warn him that he little suspects what is
before him. Poetry in the Virgilian, Tennysonian, or Lowellian
sense it certainly is not. Just as the living form of man in its
ordinary garb is less beautiful (yet more beautiful) than the
marble statue; just as the living woman and child that may have sat
for the model is less beautiful (yet more so) than one of Raphael's
finest Madonnas, or just as a forest of trees addresses itself less
directly to the feeling of what is called art and form than the
house or other edifice built from them; just as you, and the whole
spirit of our current times, have been trained to feed on and
enjoy, not Nature or Man, or the aboriginal forces, or the actual,
but pictures, books, art, and the selected and refined,--just so
these poems will doubtless first shock and disappoint you. Your
admiration for the beautiful is never the feeling directly and
chiefly addressed in them, but your love for the breathing flesh,
the concrete reality, the moving forms and shows of the universe. A
man reaches and moves you, not an artist. Doubtless, too, a certain
withholding and repugnance has first to be overcome, analogous to a
cold sea plunge; and it is not till you experience the reaction,
the after-glow, and feel the swing and surge of the strong waves,
that you know what Walt Whitman's pages really are. They don't give
themselves at first,--like the real landscape and the sea, they are
all indirections. You may have to try them many times; there is
something of Nature's rudeness and forbiddingness, not only at the
first, but probably always. But after you have mastered them by
resigning yourself to them, there is nothing like them anywhere in
literature for vital help and meaning. The poet says:--
"The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,
That scorn the best I can do to relate them."
And the press of your mind to these pages will certainly start new
and countless problems that poetry and art have never before
touched, and that afford a perpetual stimulus and delight.
It has been said that the object of poetry and the higher forms of
literature is to escape from the tyranny of the real into the
freedom of the ideal; but what is the ideal unless ballasted and
weighted with the real? All these poems have a lofty ideal
background; the great laws and harmonies stretch unerringly above
them, and give their vista and perspective. It is because Whitman's
ideal is clothed with rank materiality, as the soul is clothed with
the carnal body, that his poems beget such warmth and desire in the
mind, and are the reservoirs of so much power. No one can feel more
than I how absolutely necessary it is that the facts of nature and
experience be born again in the heart of the bard, and receive the
baptism of the true fire before they be counted poetical; and I
have no trouble on this score with the author of "Leaves of Grass."
He never fails to ascend into spiritual meanings. Indeed, the
spirituality of Walt Whitman is the chief fact after all, and
dominates every page he has written.
Observe that this singer and artist makes no _direct_ attempt to be
poetical, any more than he does to be melodious or rhythmical. He
approaches these qualities and results as it were from beneath, and
always indirectly; they are drawn to him, not he to them; and if
they appear absent from his page at first, it is because we have
been looking for them in the customary places on the outside, where
he never puts them, and have not yet penetrated the interiors. As
many of the fowls hide their eggs by a sort of intuitive prudery
and secretiveness, Whitman always half hides, or more than half
hides, his thought, his glow, his magnetism, his most golden and
orbic treasures.
Finally, as those men and women respect and love Walt Whitman best
who have known him longest and closest personally, the same rule
will apply to "Leaves of Grass" and the later volume, "Two
Rivulets." It is indeed neither the first surface reading of those
books, nor perhaps even the second or third, that will any more
than prepare the student for the full assimilation of the poems.
Like Nature, and like the Sciences, they suggest endless suites of
chambers opening and expanding more and more and continually.
INDEX
[Transcribist's note: Index has been shortened to names
of authors and to birds, with scientific names.]
Aeschylus
Akers, Elizabeth.
Apuleius.
Audubon, John Jaines.
Bacon, Francis.
Benton, Myron.
Bible.
Bittern, American (_Botaurus lentiginosus_).
Björnson, Björnstjerne.
Blackbird, cow, or cowbird (_Molothrus ater_).
Blackbird, European.
Bluebird (_Sialia sialis_).
Bobolink (_Dolichonyx oryzivorus_).
Bryant, William Cullen.
Buchanan, Robert.
Bunting, snow, or snowflake (_Passerina nivalis_).
Burke, Edmund.
Burns, Robert.
Byron, Lord.
Cardinal. See Grosbeak, cardinal.
Carlyle, Thomas.
Cedar-bird, or cedar waxwing (_Ampelis cedrorum_).
Chat, yellow-breasted (_Icteria virens_).
Chewink, or towhee (_Pipilo erythrophthalmus_).
Chickadee (_Parus atricapillus_).
Cicada.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.
Cowper, William.
Crow, American (_Corvis brachyrhynchos_).
Cuckoo, American.
Cuckoo, European.
Dante.
Darwin, Charles.
Dove, mourning (_Zenaidura macroura_).
Eagle.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo.
Everett, Edward.
Flagg, Wilson.
Flicker. See High-hole.
Flycatcher, great crested (_Myiarchus crinitus_).
Frogs. See Hyla.
Gilder, Richard Watson.
Grasshopper of Greek poetry.
Grosbeak, cardinal, or cardinal (_Cardinalis cardinalis_).
Grosbeak, pine (_Pinicola enucleator leucura_).
Grouse, ruffed (_Bonasa umbellus_).
Hamerton, Philip Gilbert.
Hawk.
High-hole, or yellow-hammer, or golden-shafted woodpecker, or
flicker (_Colaptes auratus luteus_).
Hogg, James.
Homer.
Hood, Thomas.
Hornets, black.
Hudson River valley.
Hummingbird, ruby-throated (_Trochilus colubris_).
Hyla, green.
Hyla, Pickering's.
Ingelow, Jean.
Jefferson, Thomas.
Jonson, Ben.
Keats, John.
Kingbird (_Tyrannus tyrannus_).
Lamb, Charles.
Lark. See Skylark.
Lark, shore or horned (_Otocoris alpestris_).
Lathrop, George Parson.
Lincoln, Abraham.
Lizard.
Locust.
Logan, John.
Loon (_Gavia imber_).
Lowell, James Russell.
Lyly, John.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington.
Meadowlark (_Sturnella magna_).
Michael Angelo.
Milton, John.
Mockingbird (_Mimus polyglottos_).
Oriole, Baltimore (_Icterus galbula_).
Oven-bird, or golden-crowned thrush (_Seiurus aurocapillus_).
Owl.
Partridge. See Grouse, ruffed.
Pewee, wood (_Contopus virens_).
Phaedrus.
Phoebe-bird (_Sayornis phoebe_).
Pigeon, passenger (_Ectopistes migratorius_).
Pipit, American, or titlark (_Anthus pensilvanicus_).
Pipit, Sprague's (_Anthus spragueii_).
Pope, Alexander.
Quail, or bob-white (_Colinus virginianus_).
Redpoll (_Acanthis linaria_).
Robin, American (_Merula migratoria_).
Sandpiper, spotted, or "tip-up" (_Actitis macularia_).
Sandpipers.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe.
Snake.
Snake, garter.
Socrates.
Solomon.
Sparrow, social or chipping (_Spizella socialis_).
Sparrow, song (_Melospiza cinerea melodia_).
Sparrow, tree or Canada (_Spizella monticola_).
Sparrow, vesper (_Pooecetes gramineus_).
Sparrow, white-crowned (_Zonotrichia leucophrys_).
Sparrow, white-throated (_Zonotrichia albicollis_).
Spenser.
Strawberry.
Sugar-berry.
Swallow, barn (_Hirundo erythrogastra_).
Swallow, chimney, or chimney swift (_Chaetura pelagica_).
Swallow, cliff (Petrochellidon lunifrons).
Swift, chimney. See Swallow.
Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe.
Tennyson, Alfred.
Thaxter, Celia.
Thomson, James.
Thoreau, Henry D..
Thrasher, brown, or long-tailed thrush (_Toxostoma rufum_).
Thrush, golden-crowned. See Ovenbird.
Thrush, hermit (_Hylocichla guttata pallasii_).
Thrush, wood (_Hylocichla mustelina_).
Tip-up. See Sandpiper, spotted.
Titlark. See Pipit, American.
Townee. See Chewink.
Trowbridge, John T.
Turgenieff.
Turner, J. M. W.
Turtles.
Warbler, pine (_Dendroica vigorsii_).
Water-thrush.
Whip-poor-will (_Antrostomus vociferous_).
Whitman, Walt.
Whittier, John Greenleaf.
Wilde, Richard Henry.
Wilson, Alexander.
Woodchuck.
Woodpecker, downy (_Dryobates pubescens medianus_).
Woodpecker, golden-shafted. See High-hole.
Woodpecker, hairy (_Dryobates villosus_).
Woodpecker, red-headed (_Melanerpes erythrocephalus_).
Wordsworth, William.
Wren, house (_Troglodytes aëdon_).
Yellow-hammer. See High-hole.
Yellow-throat, Maryland, or northern yellow-throat (_Geothlypis
trichas brachidactyla_).
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[Transcribist's note: John Burroughs used some characters
which are not standard to our writing in 2001.
He used a dieresis in preeminent, and accented "e"s in
debris and denouement, and in some French words. These have
been replaced with plain English letters.
I substituted the letters "oe" "ae" and for these ligatures, used
Often in words such as phoebe and in scientific names. Similarly
the "e" in the golden eagle's scientific name is modernized.
He also used symbols available to a typesetter which are
unavailable to us in ASCII (plain vanilla text) to illustrate
bird calls and notes. I have replaced these with a description
of what was there originally.
Finally, he used italics throughout the book that I was
unable to retain; I have used underlines on each side of an
italicized word, phrase or paragraph. _This phrase is italic_,
for instance.
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