Of cannon-mouths summon the sable flocks

To wait their death-doomed prey, and they do wait;
Yes, when the glittering columns, front to front
Drawn out, approach in deep and awful silence,
The raven's voice is heard hovering between.
Sometimes upon the far deserted tents

She boding sits, and sings her fateful song.
But in the abandoned field she most delights,
When o'er the dead and dying slants the beam
Of peaceful morn, and wreaths of reeking mist
Rise from the gore-dewed sward; from corpse to corpse
She revels far and wide; then, sated, flies

To some shot-shivered branch, whereon she cleans
Her purpled beak; and down she lights again

To end her horrid meal; another, keen,
Plunges her beak deep in yon horse's side,
Till, by the hound displaced, she flits
Once more to human prey.

Macaulay is perpetually feasting his raven with "armies" and similar cates, while Scott makes it the boon companion of the wolf, over the corpses of "caitiffs, outraged maidens, and slaughtered priests." They are i

But "the birds obscene" of the poets is a large subject in itself, for it includes the most diverse species-" night-ravens," "night-crows,” "night-hawks," "shricks," "whistlers," "bats," "harpyes," "heydeggres," "choughs," and "jackdaws."

It

And fatal birds about them flocked were,
Such as by nature men abhorre and hate,
The ill faste owl, death's dreadful messengere,
The hoars night-raven, tromp of dreadfull drere,
The leather-winged bats, daye's enemie,

The rueful shrick still waiting on the bere,

The whistler shrill that whoso heares doth dye,

The hellish harpyes, prophets of sad destiny.

It is a delightful stanza, and I would not spare a word from it. may not be exactly true that men "naturally" abhor and hate owls, or ravens either; that "screech-owls" feed on human corpses, or that bats are birds--and whether there are such birds as "whistlers " and "harpyes" I do not care to consider, for the stanza

In Mackay and Shelley.

is admirable as poetry—and epitomises every one of the poets' faults with regard to nature.1

Apart, however, from the "night" and "midlight" varieties of the bird, the raven-ordinary is depicted for us in poetry in colours of surpassing gloom. It is the familiar of witches, of Sycorax, and other "hagges infernal." "It sounds its trompe of doleful dreere whenever death or disease impends, and, "smelling graves," comes amongst men as

the bird that,

The hateful messenger of heavy stings,
Of death and dolour telling;

Seldom boding good,

Croaks its black auguries from some dark wood.

Antiquity has reflected on the raven, as on so many other birds, an "ominous" complexion, and our poets have misconstrued ominous as equivalent to sinister. Yet not only was black a colour of good omen, but the raven specially was as often auspicious as not, and the old woman in Southey was not wide of the mark when she twitted the nervous traveller

But though with the wind each murderer swings,
They both of them are harmless things,
And so are the ravens beside.

"Hideous," "funereal," "woe-boding," "lethal," it is the accomplice of guilty night, the comrade and fellow-lodger of toads and assassins, ghouls and wolves. It adds a horror to the dangerous gloom of rocks, the murderer's den, the witches' gatherings, the scene of yesterday's battle, the graveyard and the vault-a cruel and evil bird that delights in the disaster it forebodes, and rejoices in the disease which "it bears on its fatal wing."

Robins are "pious" birds, and therefore privileged, and so in a way "sacred"; and it is in these delightful phases that the poets prefer to notice them.

It is extraordinary how often in old ballads the idea of redbreasts covering over the bodies of dead men recurs:—

Call for the robin redbreast and the wren,

Since o'er shady groves they hover,

And with leaves and flowers cover

The friendless bodies of unmarried men.

It illustrates (line 2) the apparent want of sympathy with nature that can suppose "abhorrence" of owls natural to us; (lines 3 and 4) their prejudice against special birds; (line 5) their error of fact; (line 6) their habit of using a second name for a bird already utilised under another; (line 7) their invention of birds to eke out their inadequate repertory, and (line 8) their candid enlistment of the fauna of fable.

And when they were dead,

The robins so red
Brought strawberry leaves,
And over them spread.

Thus wandered these poor innocents,
Till deathe doth end their grief,
In one another's arms they died,
As wanting due relief.

No burial this pretty pair

Of any man receives,

Till robin-redbreast piously

Did cover them with leaves.

This last quotation is exquisite, and the idea certainly fascinated the poets. Among the more striking recognitions of the robin's "piety" may be cited Drayton, Grahanie, Cowley, Prior, Collins, Leyden, Gay, Herrick, Rogers—all of whom point to the same reason. for the bird's traditional reputation :

Cov'ring with moss the dead's unclosed eye,
The little redbreast teacheth charity.

That lesser pelican, the sweet

And shrilly ruddock,' with its bleeding breast,
Its tender pity of poor babes distrest.

A veil of leaves the redbreast o'er them threw,
Ere thrice their locks were wet with evening dew.

Their little corpses robin-redbreast found,
And strewed, with pious bills, the leaves around.

When I am departed, ring thou my knell,
Thou pitiful and pretty Philomel,
And when I am laid out for corpse, then be
Thou sexton, Redbreast, for to cover me.

A primrose turf is all thy monument,
And, for thy dirge, the robin lends his lay.

And robin-redbreasts, whom men praise
For pious birds, shall, when I die,

Make both my monument and elegy.

"The ruddock warbles soft."-Spenser (Epithalamion).
"The ruddock would,

With charitable bill, bring thee all this,

Yea, and furr'd moss besides, when flowers are none,

To winter-ground thy corse."-Shakespeare (Cymbeline).

So the robin comes to be privileged, and with abundant merit; and what delightful lines the poets devote to it!

Thus Wordsworth

And Thomson

Brisk Robin seeks a kindlier home;

Not like a beggar is he come,
But enters as a looked-for guest,
Confiding in his ruddy breast,
As if it were a natural shield
Charged with a blazon on the field,
Due to that good and pious deed
Of which we in the ballads read.

And thou the bird whom we love best,
The pious bird, with the scarlet breast,
Our little English Robin.

The bird that comes about our doors
When autumn winds are sobbing.

Art thou the Peter of Norway boors,
Their Thomas, in Finland

And Russia far inland?

The bird who, by some name or other,

All men who know thee call their brother,
The darling of children and men.

One alone,

The redbreast, sacred to the household gods,
Wisely regardful of the broiling sky,
In joyless fields, and thorny thicket, leaves
His shivering mates and pays to trusted man
His annual visit: half afraid, he first

Against the window beats, then brisk alights
On the warm hearth, then, hopping o'er the floor,
Eyes all the smiling family askance,

And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is,
Till, more familiar grown, the table crumbs

Attract his slender feet.

Similar passages might easily be multiplied, but Wordsworth sums

them all up—

Thrice happy creature, in all lands

Nurtured by hospitable hands.

From being privileged, the superstition of sanctity has gradually attached to the redbreast, and folk-lore is filled with pretty legends about it. Its breast (which poets often erroneously describe as "scarlet" and "crimson") is said to be scorched by the fires of hell, whither it flies daily with a drop of water, every time in the hope of quenching them; or again, it wears its ruddy plumage in memory of that day on Calvary when it perched upon the cross and tried

with all its little might to diminish the anguish of the crown of thorns. So

And

The robin, ay, the redbreast,
The robin and the wren,
If ye take out o' their nest,
Ye'll never thrive again.

A robin in a cage

Sets all heaven in a rage.

But, apart from all its legendary prepossessions, the robin deservedly commands the admiration of the poets as being the typical English bird, that gets merrier as the winter comes on, and is in full song on Christmas Day. "When staid Autumn walks with rustling tread," and "all her locks of yellow," he "cheers the pensive month," while he "mourns the falling leaf”—

And plaintively, in interrupted trills,
Sings the dirge of the departing year.

Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest.

And then comes winter.

But a long immunity from injury has taught him that he may seek alms without fear, and so he comes amongst us every frosty Christmas, as a welcome mendicant, and with a welcome carol. And could bird do more?

But it is impossible almost to think of "the robin" without "the wren," and could anything be more enchanting than the dreadful relations of these two birds!

Ah! Robin,
Joly Robin,

Tell me how thy leman doth?

Think of the profligate in the unprincipled passion—a wren. fiction.

case, and then of the victim of his The intrigue is certainly a delightful

But, after so much that is in praise of this bird, it would be showing an unfair partiality if I did not quote the Interpreter's moral of the robin, one of the quaintest passages in all that "book of delights," the "Pilgrim's Progress" :

Then, as they were coming in from abroad, they espied a little robin with a great spider in his mouth; so the Interpreter said, "Look here." So they looked, and Mercy wondered; but Christiana said, "What a disparagement is it to such a little pretty bird as the robin-redbreast is, he being also a bird above many, that loveth to maintain a kind of sociableness with man; I had thought they had lived on crumbs of bread, or upon other such harmless matter. I like him worse than I did."