Bobolink: If Lowell had a favorite bird, it was the bobolink,
although the oriole was a close competitor for his praises. In one of
his letters he says: "I think the bobolink the best singer in the
world, even undervaluing the lark and the nightingale in the
comparison." And in another he writes: "That liquid tinkle of theirs
is the true fountain of youth if one can only drink it with the right
ears, and I always date the New Year from the day of my first draught.
Messer Roberto di Lincoln, with his summer alb over his shoulders, is
the true chorister for the bridals of earth and sky. There is no bird
that seems to me so thoroughly happy as he, so void of all _arriere
pensee_ about getting a livelihood. The robin sings matins and vespers
somewhat conscientiously, it seems to me--makes a business of it and
pipes as it were by the yard--but Bob squanders song like a poet."
Compare the description in _Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line:_
"'Nuff said, June's bridesman, poet o' the year,
Gladness on wings, the bobolink, is here;
Half hid in tip-top apple-blooms he swings,
Or climbs aginst the breeze with quiverin' wings,
Or, givin' way to 't in a mock despair,
Runs down, a brook o' laughter, thru the air."
See also the opening lines of _Under the Willows_ for another
description full of the ecstasy of both bird and poet. The two
passages woven together appear in the essay _Cambridge Thirty Years
Ago_, as a quotation. An early poem on _The Bobolink_, delightful and
widely popular, was omitted from later editions of his poems by
Lowell, perhaps because to his maturer taste the theme was too much
moralized in his early manner. "Shelley and Wordsworth," says Mr.
Brownell, "have not more worthily immortalized the skylark than Lowell
has the bobolink, its New England congener."