I once spent a summer day at the mountain home of a well-known literary woman and editor. She lamented the absence of birds about her house. I named a half-dozen or more I had heard or seen in her trees within an hour -- the indigo-bird, the purple finch, the yellowbird, the veery thrush, the red-eyed vireo, the song sparrow.
"Do you mean to say you have seen or heard all these birds while sitting here on my porch?" she inquired.
"I really have," I said.
"I do not see them or hear them," she replied, "and yet I want to very much."
"No," I said, "you only want to want to see and hear them."
You must have the bird in your heart before you can find it in the bush.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, October 28, 2004
Parable of the Birds
John Burroughs (1837-1921), The Art of Seeing Things: