The mingled breath of the sea and the heather makes a medium that it is a joy to inhale, and all the land is picturesque and noble, a happy hunting-ground for the good walker and the lover of grand lines and fine detail. Mr. Lowell was wonderful in both of these characters, and it was in the active exercise of them that I saw him last. He was, in such conditions, a delightful host and a prime initiator. Two of these happy summer days, on the occasion of his last visit to Whitby, are marked possessions of my memory one of them a ramble on the warm wide moors, after a rough lunch at a little stony upland inn, in company charming and intimate, the thought of which, to-day, is a reference to a double loss; the other an excursion, made partly by a longish piece of railway, in his society alone, to Rievaulx Abbey, most fragmentary but most graceful of ruins. The day at Rievaulx was as exquisite as I could have wished it if I had known that it denoted a limit, and in the happy absence of any such revelation altogether given up to adventure and success. remember the great curving green terrace in Lord Feversham's park - prodigious and surely unique; it hangs over the abbey like a theatrical curtain and the temples of concord, or whatever they are, at either end of it, and the lovable view, and the dear little dowdy inn parlor at Helmsley, where there is, moreover, a massive fragment of profaner ruin, a bit of battered old castle, in the grassy préau of which (it was a perfect English picture) a company of well-grown young Yorkshire folk of both sexes were making lawn-tennis balls fly

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in and out of the past. I recall with vividness the very waits and changes of the return and our pleased acceptance of everything. We parted on the morrow, but I met Mr. Lowell a little later in Devonshire - O clustered charms of Ottery!-and spent three days in his company. I traveled back to London with him, and saw him for the last time at Paddington. He was to sail immediately for America. I went to take leave of him, but I missed him, and a day or two later he was gone.

I note these particulars, as may easily be imagined, wholly for their reference to himself - for the emphasized occasion they give to remembrance and regret. Yet even remembrance and regret, in such a case, have a certain free relief, for our final thought of James Russell Lowell is that what he consistently lived for remains of him. There is nothing ineffectual in his name and fame fame they stand for delightful things. He is one of the happy figures of literature. He had his trammels and his sorrows, but he drank deep of the full, sweet cup, and he will long count as an erect fighting figure on the side of optimism and beauty. He was strong without narrowness; he was wise without bitterness and bright without folly. That appears for the most part the clearest ideal of those who handle the English form, and he was altogether in the straight tradition. This tradition will surely not forfeit its great part in the world so long as we continue occasionally to know it by what is so solid in performance and so stainless in character.

Henry James.

Thus are we as Ammon or Delphi unto you

Dodona — nay, Phœbus Apollo;

For as first ye come all to get auguries of birds, even such is in all things your carriage,

Be the matter a matter of trade, or of earning

your living, or any one's marriage. And all things ye lay to the charge of a bird, that belong to concerning prediction : Winged Fame is a bird, as you reckon; you sneeze, and the sign 's as a bird for conviction!

Then must it not follow That we are to you all as the manifest godhead that speaks in prophetic Apollo?" ARISTOPHANES, Grand Chorus of Birds. (Translated by Swinburne.)

I.

WITH the desire to record certain fond and unscientific observations with regard to our winged friends and neighbors came the fanciful persuasion that this design would be furthered could the writer obtain, for scriptorial purposes, an eagle's quill. Then, as if to satirize an ambition so overweening, there was placed in my path one of the longer feathers from a humming-bird's wing. The omen was accepted, and although the offered pen (penna) was impracticable to my hand, it was preserved, to remind me that the Chorus of Birds must be left to Aristophanes, and to Ruskin all defining of the spiritual mystery contained within that exquisite embodiment of beauty, the bird. No less to the savant must be left the consideration of its specific description and curious data of a biological character. But in passing, somewhat unwillingly I recall that

occasionally in the glance of a bird's eye, so open yet so subtle, and occasionally in the markings upon its coat of imbricated plumes, an emphasis has been given to the suggestion of a remote common ancestor for my lovely subject and for the reptilian cousin that never exchanged its scales for plumes, or the ooze of the ancient strand for the realms of air. But if a varied adaptability and varied locomotive powers were taken as indications of superior organism, I know not, then, why the bird should not stand at the head of all created orders, the one family to whom, in its range, is given right of way by earth, water, air; and ability also to walk or run, to wade, swim, or dive, and the consummate gift of flight. Until man shall learn to fly should he boast preeminence?

observation, the robin, sparrow, meadow lark, blackbird, crow, and quail.

It is, of course, the poet's special prerogative to claim comradeship and kinship with the singing ones whose lyrics are flung about the air "in profuse strains of unpremeditated art," and die with no commemorative record of the written character; for what is so futile as the attempt to render a bird's song by the use of musical notes, or to venture its interpretation, even, in any collocation of human words? However, I do not go so far in the matter of reprehension as does a lady of my acquaintance, who thinks it a "positive wickedness in the small boy when he attempts a whistled mimicry of her favorites. It is to overlay a violet with sugar or to gild refined gold, when one sets out to poetize the melody or movement of a bird's song. But may I say that I have a half sympathy with those youthful friends of the Muse who are found guilty of solecisms in their sweeping impressment of ornithological subjects from afar? True, we cannot have skylarks afloat on the sea of air that sweeps our Western prairies, nor can we have nightingales singing where the whip-poor-will is head chorister; yet does it seem to me that the poet and the idealist have a prescriptive right to all the birds there are (and to those that are not, as the doves of Dodona, the birds that flew from Memnon's funeral pyre, the phoenix and the dodo, and the little bird that sings one's soul away in Arabia Deserta). The true lover and diviner of birds will keep an eye on those which share his own habitat, and an ear cognizant of their songs; yet, as he is true poet, will he own a quenchless sense of pleasure in those unheard songs that are sweeter, in the land of Keats and Shelley. A bird of passage itself, his soul follows the lure of voices and flight beyond his own horizon. Still, a special betrayal awaits that idealist who in the midst of nature takes up with the pleasing

assumption that all things there relate themselves to him and to his capacity for enjoying them. Some time must he overhear that the flowers bloom for themselves, and not, primarily, for him; and as to the birds, it may chance there will be conveyed to him some bit of current and humiliating public sentiment. like the following:

"They say," said the wren to the thrush,— "I know, for I build at their eaves, They say every song that we sing on the wing, or hid in the leaves,

Is sung for their pleasure! And you know 't is for Love and ourselves that we sing!"

Were it required to give on the moment a symbol for the universal principle of wholesome hunger, natural avidity. I would but cross my two forefingers as indicating the young bird's ever open mouth. Indeed, I should not be surprised to learn that some ancient picture-writing had anticipated this hieroglyphic suggestion. That the suggestion is justifiable any one will bear witness who has attempted to bring up "by hand" a kidnapped or a foundling bird. The quantum of food consumed daily by an under-fledgeling (if I may so call the infant bird not yet at all able to shift for itself) is something startling: and the matter of "providing," even for a giant adoptive parent, is by no means a light task, if the constant appeal of the open and accusing mouth is to be duly regarded. How long before the baby bird gets the coöperative use of the bifid beak! A human child could not be more awkward in learning to feed itself; but then, the poor bird-child has, as it were, a knife and fork for its mouth. In my experience, the care of a young

bird is accompanied with a grotesque sense of tenderness, as of nurse Glumdalclitch for little Gulliver, in the foster-parent's feeling towards this downy nestling, — this mere feathered egg so long retaining the contour of the walls of its brittle prison. There is nothing to parallel the supreme and pathetic confidence of the young bird in the hand which feeds it, and which might crush it on the instant if that hand would. Such pleasing" Auguries of Innocence" have in this way been shown me as nearly to cause forgetfulness of the annexed

menace :

"A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage."

I shall not shirk the confession that in several instances I have been accessory to the taking of young birds from the parent nest, but the nemesis that followed up the act was in each case distinct and unsparing. I shall not soon forget the accusation levied at me when, stooping with lighted lamp, I beheld, resting halfway down the stairs, one of these detained innocents. It had somehow managed to escape durance, but, benighted on its way to freedom, it had halted, and, with head under wing, and apparently having trustingly committed itself to Providence, it awaited the light, to continue its righteous quest. I had, moreover, a poignant fancy that, before going to sleep, it had put up a prayer (in the bird's way) soliciting forgiveness for its enemy. Again, helping a friend to secure a young thrush, it was my lot to experience what a bird's curse is like, -a note not to be forgotten, rapid, guttural, instinct with hate, denunciatory, from the very soul of the mother-thrush it came. My companion declared that its equivalent sound and meaning in human vocables could be approximated only by the line,

"Gr-r-r! there, go, my heart's abhorrence!"

While speaking of nests and traits of bird nature, one questions why the fea

I have spoken of subtlety in the glance of a bird's eye as betokening a remote kinship in primeval time with the saurian kind. But my heart misgives me when I think of the alleged (and perhaps actual) charming of the bird by ophidian witchcraft, and also when I reflect upon the defenselessness of the bird, how devoid it is of predatory arts; neither lying in wait for its victim, after the manner of feline nature, nor delighting in the prolonged pangs of the feebler creature it may have caught. Even the acknowledged birds of prey are not chargeable with this relish for playful cruelty. Such craft, for instance, as any of our familiar song-birds may display is directed merely towards the protection of itself or its offspring: it feigns dead that you may not regard it as worth your while;" it trails an unhurt

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wing, with pitiful cries, to lead you away from its nest. These devices do not impress us as real cunning, but rather as the artless arts of the infantine and inexperienced. In view of the multiplied dangers that beset the bird from the nest, its lover could almost complain that, by some oversight, Providence had left it as unpossessed of strategy as of strength against its foes.

It may Iwell be that the instinct of the fowler is not to be rooted from the human breast. I do not exactly know why we should wish to catch birds and tame them, but true it is of the most of those interested at all in the subject — and quite literally true- that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." I do not know why we should wish to tame them any more than we should wish to tame the west wind, or the sunset, or Fancy herself! Beautiful, fugitive, elusive things, birds in a cage are no more the creatures they were than a woodflower is of the woods when in a vase on the mantelpiece. Essentially, the wings are the bird; and captive song cannot make up to the imagination what is lost when the bird's free flight is foregone. Yet there is a distinct though rather unaccountable pleasure in holding in one's hand this slight creature of paradox (so timorous yet so fearless, so helpless yet so defying), this soft, wild, mysterious ranger that no word could stay nor cord bind but the moment before. Whoever cherishes a cage-bird has by him what serves as a perpetual symbol of the human spirit, environed, ignorant-contented or ignorant - protesting; usually, in the bird's case at least, ignorant-contented, if the bird was in its infancy deprived of liberty.

Poor Robin of the ruddy breast,
(Unwitting captive from the nest,)
Cage-bound, for freedom never pines.
But when a leisure hour inclines,
I ope his door; he ventures out,
And half in wonder, half in doubt,

A perilous journey takes around

The wide, wide world these four walls bound!

But the same bird that in the foregoing points the moral of a fable, upon his actual introduction to the out-door world appeared well aware of having come into his heritage; and I shall not forget the glance of the round, innocent, inspective eye, for the first time turned upon the vast orb of the sky, - two disks of unconscious speculation thus opposed to each other. While I was speaking about "Auguries of Innocence " I should have mentioned a token of this sort which not long ago came under my observation. From a last year's robin's nest which the storms had thrown to the ground was trailing a tatter of newspaper. The rain had effaced the type thereon to illegibility, with the exception of a paragraph noting an appointment for a meeting of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty, in a neighboring city. Had the former nest-holder been interested in that meeting? Had he attended it, in a public-spirited way, and in behalf of the whole bird community entered his protest against some crying evil of the hour?

III.

It is but to think of the widely differentiated individuals of the feathered tribe, to give a delightful diversity to any landscape held in the mind's eye. The grass-lands have their own broods, the forests theirs; nay, more, the denizens of the pine grove are often other