Of course the poet was not writing an agricultural essay, yet one does not like to feel that he was obliged to ignore or sacrifice any part of the truth to build up his verse. One likes to see him keep within the fact without being conscious of it or hampered by it, as he does in "The Planting of the Apple-Tree," or in the "Lines to a Water-Fowl." But there are glimpses of American scenery and climate in Bryant that are unmistakable, as in these lines from "Midsummer:"-- "Look forth upon the earth--her thousand plants Are smitten; even the dark, sun-loving maize Faints in the field beneath the torrid blaze; The herd beside the shaded fountain pants; For life is driven from all the landscape brown; The bird has sought his tree, the snake his den, The trout floats dead in the hot stream, and men Drop by the sunstroke in the populous town." Here is a touch of our "heated term" when the dogstar is abroad and the weather runs mad. I regret the "trout floating dead in the hot stream," because, if such a thing ever has occurred, it is entirely exceptional. The trout in such weather seek the deep water and the spring holes, and hide beneath rocks and willow banks. The following lines would be impossible in an English poem:-- "The snowbird twittered on the beechen bough, And 'neath the hemlock, whose thick branches bent Beneath its bright, cold burden, and kept dry A circle, on the earth, of withered leaves, The partridge found a shelter." Both Bryant and Longfellow put their spring bluebird in the elm, which is a much better place for the oriole,--the elm-loving oriole. The bluebird prefers a humbler perch. Lowell puts him upon a post in the fence, which is a characteristic attitude:-- "The bluebird, shifting his light load of song, From post to post along the cheerless fence." Emerson calls him "April's bird," and makes him "fly before from tree to tree," which is also good. But the bluebird is not strictly a songster in the sense in which the song sparrow or the indigo-bird, or the English robin redbreast, is; nor do Bryant's lines hit the mark:-- "The bluebird chants, from the elm's long branches, A hymn to welcome the budding year."