THE SANDPIPER

Across the narrow beach we flit,
One little sandpiper and I;
And fast I gather, bit by bit,
The scattered driftwood bleached and dry. 
The wild waves reach their hands for it,
The wild wind raves, the tide runs high,
As up and down the beach we flit,—­
One little sandpiper and I.

       Above our heads the sullen clouds
          Scud black and swift across the sky;
       Like silent ghosts in misty shrouds
          Stand out the white lighthouses high. 
       Almost as far as eye can reach
          I see the close-reefed vessels fly,
       As fast we flit along the beach,—­
          One little sandpiper and I.

       I watch him as he skims along,
          Uttering his sweet and mournful cry;
       He starts not at my fitful song,
          Or flash of fluttering drapery;
       He has no thought of any wrong;
          He scans me with a fearless eye. 
       Stanch friends are we, well tried and strong,
          The little sandpiper and I.

       Comrade, where wilt thou be to-night
          When the loosed storm breaks furiously? 
       My driftwood fire will burn so bright! 
          To what warm shelter canst thou fly? 
       I do not fear for thee, though wroth
          The tempest rushes through the sky;
       For are we not God’s children both,
          Thou, little sandpiper, and I?

Others of our birds have been game for the poetic muse, but in most cases the poets have had some moral or pretty conceit to convey, and have not loved the bird first.  Mr. Lathrop preaches a little in his pleasant poem, “The Sparrow,” but he must some time have looked upon the bird with genuine emotion to have written the first two stanzas:—­

“Glimmers gay the leafless thicket
Close beside my garden gate,
Where, so light, from post to wicket,
Hops the sparrow, blithe, sedate: 
Who, with meekly folded wing,
Comes to sun himself and sing.

“It was there, perhaps, last year,
That his little house he built;
For he seems to perk and peer,
And to twitter, too, and tilt
The bare branches in between,
With a fond, familiar mien.”

The bluebird has not been overlooked, and Halleek, Longfellow, and Mrs. Sigourney have written poems upon him, but from none of them does there fall that first note of his in early spring,—­a note that may be called the violet of sound, and as welcome to the ear, heard above the cold, damp earth; as is its floral type to the eye a few weeks later Lowell’s two lines come nearer the mark:—­

“The bluebird, shifting his light load of song
From post to post along the cheerless fence.”

Or the first swallow that comes twittering up the southern valley, laughing a gleeful, childish laugh, and awakening such memories in the heart, who has put him in a poem?  So the hummingbird, too, escapes through the finest meshes of rhyme.