Arnold is not perhaps a profound botanist, but he knows all the plants of his own locality, and knows where to find them. Moreover, he takes pleasure in describing them for himself, with fresh epithets of his own, unborrowed from scientific manuals. CHAPTER VIII MATTHEW ARNOLD'S BIRDS THE exploring of rural districts, waste places, woods, hill-sides and river banks for rare flowers, and the identifying of the specimens there found, do not play a large part in modern botany; but such a pastime gives a pleasure all its own. It is clear from the passages already quoted that Arnold tasted the joy of wandering, Flora in hand, and making the acquaintance of new faces, as well as recognising old friends like the fritillaries and the gentians in their fresh spring garb. With the flowers go the birds, and Arnold was of necessity also a bird lover. His aviary is not extensive, and does not include many birds that find place in poetic effusions. The lark and the linnet are not in it, and his reference to song-birds generally and the sweetness of their music is of the most meagre. He is more concerned with their habits, migration, food, flight, and with tragic incidents in their life. The swallow is much in evidence in his poetry, as well as the stork and the sea-fowl, and game-birds like the grouse and the partridge. His descriptions, as with those of flowers, are not conventional or trite, but are drawn directly from the object, pictures painted from his own observation. He once or twice mentions the thrush, the cuckoo, and the blackbird, and he has devoted one short poem to Philomela-the nightingale ; "the speckled missel-thrush"; "In the pines the thrush is waking"; "The blackbird picking food ". The cuckoo, loud on some high lawn, Is answer'd from the depth of dawn. When May, Brought by the west wind, returns Back to your native heaths, And the plover is heard on the moors. Between the waves and black o'erhanging cliffs, The shining seafowl, that with screams. On the cliff-side the pigeons Roost deep on the rocks. The phenomena of migration have great interest for him, whether drawn from his own observation or gathered from books of travel. Take this beautiful and feeling picture of the swallows just prior to their autumnal flight : And as the swallows crowd the bulrush beds Of some clear river, issuing from a lake, And to each bulrush crest a swallow hangs And their quick twittering fills the banks and shores- He knows a swallow from a swift, as we see from his epithet "black-winged" in the line Where black-winged swallows haunt the glittering Thames. That vast sky-neighbouring mountain of milk-snow; Or this, of migrating cranes crossing from the As when some grey November morn the files, Or some frore Caspian reed bed, southward bound We have already quoted his reference to the fieldfare (or, as he calls it, the fell-fare) and its feeding on the red holly berries. His description grouse is accurate : of the The red grouse springing at our sound, So of the hawk swooping on a partridge : As on some partridge in the corn a hawk Take, too, that beautiful and pathetic simile of the eagle, portrayed with such minuteness and sympathetic tenderness in Sohrab and Rustum : As when some hunter in the spring hath found A breeding eagle sitting on her nest Upon the craggy isle of a hill-lake, And pierced her with an arrow as she rose, |