O, for a seat in some poetic nook, Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook.--LEIGH HUNT. ---- By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals.--CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. ---- To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.--WORDSWORTH. ---- To him who in the love of nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language.--BRYANT. ---- And this one life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.--SHAKESPEARE. ---- And now 'twas like all instruments, Now like a lonely flute; And now it is an angel's song, That makes the heavens be mute.--COLERIDGE. ---- There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture in the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.--BYRON. ---- In June 'tis good to be beneath a tree While the blithe season comforts every sense; Steeps all the brain in rest, and heals the heart, Brimming it o'er with sweetness unawares, Fragrant and silent as that rosy snow Wherewith the pitying apple-tree fills up And tenderly lines some last-year's Robin's nest.--LOWELL. ---- THE ARKANSAS KINGBIRD. ---- ONE of the difficulties of the scientific ornithologist is to differentiate species. This bird is often confounded with the Flycatchers, and for a very good reason, its habits being similar to those of that family. It is almost a counterpart of the Kingbird, (See BIRDS, vol. ii, p. 157) possessing a harsher voice, a stronger flight, and, if possible, a more combative, pugnacious spirit. It is a summer resident, is common in the western United States, and occasionally a straggler far eastward, migrating southward in winter to Guatemala. Col. Goss, in his history of the birds of Kansas, one of the most comprehensive and valuable books ever published on ornithology, says that the nesting places and eggs of this species are essentially the same as those of the Kingbird. They are brave and audacious in their attacks upon the birds of prey and others intruding upon their nesting grounds. Their combative spirit, however, does not continue beyond the breeding season. They arrive about the first of May, begin laying about the middle of that month, and return south in September. The female is smaller than the male and her plumage is much plainer.