“And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.

“O blessed Bird! the earth we pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial, faery place;
That is fit home for thee!”

Logan’s stanzas, “To the Cuckoo,” have less merit both as poetry and natural history, but they are older, and doubtless the latter poet benefited by them.  Burke admired them so much that, while on a visit to Edinburgh, he sought the author out to compliment him:—­

“Hail, beauteous stranger of the grove! 
Thou messenger of spring! 
Now Heaven repairs thy rural seat,
And woods thy welcome sing.

“What time the daisy decks the green,
Thy certain voice we hear;
Hast thou a star to guide thy path,
Or mark the rolling year?

. . . . . . . .

“The schoolboy, wandering through the wood
To pull the primrose gay,
Starts, the new voice of spring to hear,
And imitates thy lay.

. . . . . . . .

“Sweet bird! thy bower is ever green,
Thy sky is ever clear;
Thou hast no sorrow in thy song,
No winter in thy year.”

The European cuckoo is evidently a much gayer bird than ours, and much more noticeable.

“Hark, how the jolly cuckoos sing
‘Cuckoo!’ to welcome in the spring,”

says John Lyly three hundred years agone.  Its note is easily imitated, and boys will render it so perfectly as to deceive any but the shrewdest ear.  An English lady tells me its voice reminds one of children at play, and is full of gayety and happiness.  It is a persistent songster, and keeps up its call from morning to night.  Indeed, certain parts of Wordsworth’s poem—­those that refer to the bird as a mystery, a wandering, solitary voice—­seem to fit our bird better than the European species.  Our cuckoo is in fact a solitary wanderer, repeating its loud, guttural call in the depths of the forest, and well calculated to arrest the attention of a poet like Wordsworth, who was himself a kind of cuckoo, a solitary voice, syllabling the loneliness that broods over streams and woods,—­

       “And once far off, and near.”

Our cuckoo is not a spring bird, being seldom seen or heard in the North before late in May.  He is a great devourer of canker-worms, and, when these pests appear, he comes out of his forest seclusion and makes excursions through the orchards stealthily and quietly, regaling himself upon those pulpy, fuzzy titbits.  His coat of deep cinnamon brown has a silky gloss and is very beautiful.  His note or call is not musical but loud, and has in a remarkable degree the quality of remoteness and introvertedness.  It is like a vocal legend, and to the farmer bodes rain.

It is worthy of note, and illustrates some things said farther back, that birds not strictly denominated songsters, but criers like the cuckoo, have been quite as great favorites with the poets, and have received as affectionate treatment at their hands, as have the song-birds.  One readily recalls Emerson’s “Titmouse,” Trowbridge’s “Pewee,” Celia Thaxter’s “Sandpiper,” and others of a like character.