Our Friend John Burroughs Part 18

Perhaps the poet in Mr. Burroughs is nowhere more plainly seen than in his descriptions of bird life, yet how accurately he gives their salient points; he represents the bird as an object in natural history, but ah! how much more he gives! Imagine our bird-lover describing a bird as Ellery Channing described one, as something with "a few feathers, a hole at one end and a point at the other, and a pair of wings"! We see the bird Mr. Burroughs sees; we hear the one he hears. Long before I had the memorable experience of standing with him on the banks of the Willowemoc and listening at twilight to the slow, divine chant of the hermit thrush, I had heard it in my dreams, because of that inimitable description of its song in "Wake-Robin." It does, indeed, seem to be "the voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one attains to in his best moments." As one listens to its strain in the hush of twilight, the pomp of cities and the pride of civilization of a truth seem trivial and cheap.

What a near, human interest our author makes us feel in the birds, how we watch their courts.h.i.+ps, how we peer into their nests, and how lively is our solicitude for their helpless young swung in their "procreant cradles," beset on all sides by foes that fly and creep and glide! And not only does he make the bird a visible living creature; he makes it sing joyously to the ear, while all nature sings blithely to the eye. We see the bird, not as a ma.s.s of feathers with "upper parts bright blue, belly white, breast ruddy brown, mandibles and legs black," as the textbooks have it, but as a thing of life and beauty: "Yonder bluebird with the earth tinge on his breast and the sky tinge on his back,--did he come down out of heaven on that bright March morning when he told us so softly and plaintively that, if we pleased, spring had come?" Who is there in reading this matchless description of the bluebird that does not feel the retreat of winter, that does not feel his pulse quicken with the promise of approaching spring, that does not feel that the bird did, indeed, come down out of heaven, the heaven of hope and promise, even though the skies are still bleak, and the winds still cold? Who, indeed, except those prosaic beings who are blind and deaf to the most precious things in life?

"I heard a bluebird this morning!" one exclaimed exultantly, so stirred as to forget momentarily her hearer's incapacity for enthusiasm. "Well, and did it sound any different from what it did last year, and the year before, and the year before that?" inquired in measured, world-wearied tones the dampener of ardors. No, my poor friend, it did not. And just because it sounded the same as it has in all the succeeding springs since life was young, it touched a chord in one's heart that must be long since mute in your own, making you poor, indeed, if this dear familiar bird voice cannot set it vibrating once more.

THE END