But unfortunately the cormorant never does anything of the kind; it is not a bird of prey: it is web-footed, a rapid swimmer and diver, and lives upon fish, which it usually swallows as it catches them. Virgil is nearer to fact when he says:-- "When crying cormorants forsake the sea And, stretching to the covert, wing their way." But cormorant with Longfellow may stand for any of the large rapacious birds, as the eagle or the condor. True, and yet the picture is a purely fanciful one, as no bird of prey SAILS with his burden; on the contrary, he flaps heavily and laboriously, because he is always obliged to mount. The stress of the rhyme and metre are of course in this case very great, and it is they, doubtless, that drove the poet into this false picture of a bird of prey laden with his quarry. It is an ungracious task, however, to cross- question the gentle Muse of Longfellow in this manner. He is a true poet if there ever was one, and the slips I point out are only like an obscure feather or two in the dove carelessly preened. The burnished plumage and the bright hues hide them unless we look sharply. Whittier gets closer to the bone of the New England nature. He comes from the farm, and his memory is stored with boyhood's wild and curious lore, with "Knowledge never learned of schools, Of the wild bee's morning chase, Of the wild flower's time and place, Flight of fowl and habitude Of the tenants of the wood; How the tortoise bears his shell, How the woodchuck digs his cell, And the ground-mole sinks his well; How the robin feeds her young; How the oriole's nest is hung; Where the whitest lilies blow, Where the freshest berries grow, Where the ground-nut trails its vine, Where the wood-grape's clusters shine; Of the black wasp's cunning way, Mason of his walls of clay, And the architectural plans Of gray hornet artisans!" The poet is not as exact as usual when he applies the epithet "painted" to the autumn beeches, as the foliage of the beech is the least painty of all our trees; nor when he speaks of "Wind-flower and violet, amber and white," as neither of the flowers named is amber-colored. From "A Dream of Summer" the reader might infer that the fox shut up house in the winter like the muskrat:-- "The fox his hillside cell forsakes, The muskrat leaves his nook, The bluebird in the meadow brakes Is singing with the brook."