n music. You take away from
English poetry one of its pleiades, and bereave it of a
companionship more intimate than that of the nearest neighborhood of
the stars above. How the lark's life and song blend, in the rhyme
of the poet, with "the sheen of silver fountains leaping to the
sea," with morning sunbeams and noontide thoughts, with the sweetest
breathing flowers, and softest breezes, and busiest bees, and
greenest leaves, and happiest human industries, loves, hopes, and
aspirations!

The American has read and heard of all this from his youth up to the
day of setting his foot, for the first time, on English ground. He
has tried to believe it, as in things seen, temporal and tangible.
But in doing this he has to contend with a sense or suspicion of
unreality--a feeling that there has been great poetical exaggeration
in the matter. A patent fact lies at the bottom of this
incredulity. The forefathers of New England carried no wild bird
with them to sing about their cabin homes in the New World. But
they found beautiful and happy birds on that wild continent, as
well-dressed, as graceful in form and motion, and of as fine taste
for music and other accomplishments, as if they and their ancestors
had sung before the courts of Europe for twenty generations. These
sang their sweet songs of welcome to the Pilgrims as they landed
from the "Mayflower." These sang to them cheerily, through the
first years and the later years of their stern trials and
tribulations. These built their nests where the blue eyes of the
first white children born in the land could peer in upon the
speckled eggs with wonder and delight. What wonder that those
strong-hearted puritan fathers and mothers, who

"Made the aisles of the dim wood ring
With the anthems of the free,"

should love the fellowship of these native singers of the field and
forest, and give them names their hearts loved in the old home land
beyond the sea! They did not consult Linnaeus, nor any musty Latin
genealogy of Old World birds, at the christening of these songsters.
There was a good family resemblance in many cases. The blustering
partridge, brooding over her young in the thicket, was very nearly
like the same bird in England. For the mellow-throated thrush of
the old land they found a mate in the new, of the same size, color,
and general habits, though less musical. The blackbird was nearly
the same in many respects, though the smaller American