Love's Meinie: Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds

More dear to men's hearts?
To the bird's inspiration they owe it;
For the Nightingale first
Sweet music rehearsed,
Prima-Donna, Composer, and Poet.

The Owl's dark retreats
Showed sages the sweets
Of brooding, to spin, or unravel
Fine webs in one's brain,
Philosophical—vain;
The Swallows,—the pleasures of travel.

Who chirped in such strain
Of Greece, Italy, Spain
And Egypt, that men, when they heard,
Were mad to fly forth,
From their nests in the North,
And follow—the tail of the Bird.

Besides, it is true,
To our wisdom is due
The knowledge of Sciences all;
And chiefly, those rare
Metaphysics of Air
Men 'Meteorology' call,

And men, in their words,
Acknowledge the Birds'
Erudition in weather and star;
For they say, "'Twill be dry,—
The swallow is high,"
Or, "Rain, for the Chough is afar."

'Twas the Rooks who taught men
Vast pamphlets to pen
Upon social compact and law,
And Parliaments hold,
As themselves did of old,
Exclaiming 'Hear, Hear,' for 'Caw, Caw.'

And whence arose Love?
Go, ask of the Dove,
Or behold how the Titmouse, unresting,
Still early and late
Ever sings by his mate,
To lighten her labors of nesting.

Their bonds never gall,
Though the leaves shoot, and fall,
And the seasons roll round in their course,
For their marriage, each year,
Grows more lovely and dear;
And they know not decrees of Divorce.

That these things are truth
We have learned from our youth,
For our hearts to our customs incline,
As the rivers that roll
From the fount of our soul,
Immortal, unchanging, divine.

Man, simple and old,
In his ages of gold,
Derived from our teaching true light,
And deemed it his praise
In his ancestors' ways
To govern his footsteps aright.

But the fountain of woes,
Philosophy, rose;
And, what between reason and whim,
He has splintered our rules
Into sections and schools,
So the world is made bitter, for him.

But the birds, since on earth
They discovered the worth
Of their souls, and resolved with a vow
No custom to change,
For a new, or a strange,
Have attained unto Paradise, now.

Line 9. Pelted, said of hail, not rain. Felt by nakedness, in a more severe manner than mere rain.

11. 'Weathers,' i.e., both weathers—hail and cold: the armor of the feathers against hail; the down of them against cold. See account of Feather-mail in 'Laws of Fésole,' chap, vi., p. 53, with the first and fifth plates, and figure 15.

15. Blind. By the beating of the rain in his face. In hail, there is real danger and bruising, if the hail be worth calling so, for the whole body; while in rain, if it be rain also worth calling rain, the great plague is the beating and drenching in the face.

16. Swung. Opposed to 'sit' in previous line. The human creature, though it sate steady on this unshakable earth, had no house over its head. The bird, that lived on the tremblingest and weakest of bending things, had her nest on it, in which even her infinitely tender brood were deep sheltered and warm, from the wind. It is impossible to find a lovelier instance of pure poetical antithesis.

20. House. Again antithetic to the perfect word 'Home' in the line before. A house is exactly, and only, half-way to a 'home.' Man had not yet got so far as even that! and had lost, the chorus satirically imply, even the power of getting the other half, ever, since his "She gave me of the tree."

24. Bricks. The first bad inversion permitted, for "to combine bricks with cement." In my Swallow lecture I had no time to go into the question of her building materials; the point is, however, touched upon in the Appendix (pp. 110, 112, and note).

30. 'Drill,' for 'quarry out,' 'tunnel,' etc., the best general term available.

36. Composer of the music; Poet of the meaning.

Compare, and think over, the Bullfinch's nest, etc., § 48 to 61 of 'Eagle's Nest.'