e formed his style upon
Tillotson's (Bossuet on the other hand, formed _his_ upon Corneille's);
but I rather think he got it at Will's, for its greatest charm is, that
it has the various freedom of talk. In verse, he has a pomp which,
excellent in itself, became pompousness in his imitators. But he had
nothing of Milton's ear for various rhythm and interwoven harmony. He
knew how to give new modulation, sweetness, and force to the pentameter;
but in what used to be called pindarics, I am heretic enough to think
he generally failed.

* * * * *

From "My Study Windows."

=_219._= LOVE OF BIRDS AND SQUIRRELS.

Wilson's thrush comes every year to remind me of that most poetic of
ornithologists. He flits before me through the pine-walk like the very
genius of solitude. A pair of pewees have built immemorially on a
jutting brick in the arched entrance to the ice-house. Always on the
same brick, and never more than a single pair, though two broods of five
each are raised there every summer. How do they settle their claim to
the homestead? By what right of primogeniture? Once, the children of a
man employed about the place ooelogized the nest, and the pewees left us
for a year or two. I felt towards those boys as the messmates of the
Ancient Mariner did towards him after he had shot the albatross. But the
pewees came back at last, and one of them is now on his wonted perch, so
near my window that I can hear the click of his bill as he snaps a fly
on the wing.... The pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the morning;
and, during the early summer he preludes his matutinal ejaculation of
_pewee_ with a slender whistle, unheard at any other time. He saddens
with the season, and, as summer declines, he changes his note to _eheu,
pewee_! I as if in lamentation. Had he been an Italian bird, Ovid would
have had a plaintive tale to tell about him. He is so familiar as often
to pursue a fly through the open window into my library.

There is something inexpressibly dear to me in these old friendships of
a lifetime. There is scarce a tree of mine but has had, at some time or
other, a happy homestead among its boughs, to which I cannot say,

"Many light hearts and wings,
Which now be dead, lodged in thy living bowers."

My walk under the pines would lose half its summer charm were I to miss
that shy anchorite, the Wilson's thrush, nor hear in haying time
the metallic ring of his song, that justifie