The sounds made by winds are also often and particularly noted. They sigh through reeds, they make a remote and hollow noise in “wintery pines,” they murmur through the poplars, they rustle lightly over “deep embattled ears of corn,” they join in concert with woods and waters, or they sweep in mighty harmonies through ancient forests. The whispering breezes, and dying gales of the classical poetry do not often occur. Brown in his “Letter” shows how deeply he was impressed by the roaring of the winds through the mountains, and the one passage in which Dr. Johnson showed any appreciation of wild Nature is a description of the combined sounds of streams and wind on a stormy night in Scotland. A characteristic passage is Thomson’s fine description of thunder among the mountains. Wordsworth, from the peculiar delicacy of his perceptions and perhaps from his contemplative Nature, was deeply sensitive to the silences in the world about him. There is some though but little indication of a similar pleasure in preceding poetry. One of the best passages is Thomson’s description of the boding silence before a storm. This has, however, much less of the real Wordsworthian spirit than has Brown’s conception of the silence that spoke from the starry vault, the shadowy cliffs, the motionless groves, and the faint mirror of the placid lake. Of sounds from animate Nature the emphasis is of course on birds. But the feathered choir of the classical period has been resolved into distinct species, each with a voice of its own. The nightingale is not supplanted but she is no longer a monopolist in the realms of the muses. In this transition poetry the cuckoo takes an interesting place. Wordsworth’s address to the bird as “the darling of the spring” gives the association of ideas found in most of the early poems. The cuckoo is the harbinger of spring. Armstrong and A. Philips have the loud note of the cuckoo as one of the first hints of the opening year, and Thomson’s symphony of spring is introduced by “the first note the hollow cuckoo sings.” Mendes says it is “the cuckoo that announceth spring,” and Gray speaks of the cuckoo’s note as part of “the untaught harmony of spring.” The peculiarity of the cuckoo’s note is also often mentioned. Other birds have many notes, says John Cunningham, “the cuckoo has but two.” Logan, as Wordsworth after him, records the fact that the bird is usually unseen, and both speak of the schoolboy’s surprise as the strange cry falls on his ear. The lark, the nightingale, and the linnet are frequently mentioned, but usually in terms somewhat conventional. They had been in poetry so long that a distinct effort would have been needed to think of them under new phrases. To be released from the captivity of a stock diction and conventional sentiment they waited for Shelley and Keats and Wordsworth. It is in observations on birds not counted poetical property that we find fresh and exact expression. A mark of the new