and the use of the bicycle had rendered attendance at those so easy that the club classes were no longer required and were discontinued, the social evening still being maintained.

A club such as ours could only be carried out fully in a large household; and a big country house, the centre of an estate, and having extensive grounds demanding the employment of many outdoor servants, furnishes the best possible field for an experiment such as ours. We were peculiarly fortunate in our head servants, for as heads of departments they all heartily threw themselves into the movement. Much in these cases must always depend on the persons occupying the positions of foremen. Without their help one can do but little. But while admitting this I must also assert the opinion that the principle underlying the operations of such a club as ours can be introduced into much smaller households, or a number of households can combine together to carry it out, as has been done with so much success by the Neighbourhood' Guilds, initiated by Dr. Stanley Coit in New York and London, and by the splendid Community Recreation Movement now being carried out in many centres in the U.S.A., and also in this country by village clubs.

If a district or a number of small households in suburban areas would group themselves together for such community service, providing a general room where social gatherings of various kinds could be held, would that not in itself greatly brighten the lives of the members of those households? The fact that social gatherings are held, when songs and recitations and glees are welcome, gives an incentive to forget to gossip and instead to look up the reading and practise the song or the piece of music, and makes people feel that they are wanted, and that they have a contribution to give to the community in which they live which is valued. That is largely the secret of the success of the Women's Rural Institutes, but there is no reason why the same plan should not be adopted by all members of the community, as is urged by the Village Clubs Movement.

What I have said explains perhaps the stories to which I have alluded, and which have been a source of both amusement and annoyance to our friends.

Such annoyance has been well worth enduring when we remember the social advantages we received through the medium of our club and how truly it increased that sense of understanding and mutual respect and regard which means so much when it exists between the members of a community which must of necessity be of so close a character when living under the same roof.

Our home, whether at Haddo House, or at Ottawa, or at the Viceregal Lodge, Dublin, has been a very busy one, for there were always many visitors coming and going and much enter

taining, both of an official character and also in connection with various organisations, which meant much careful planning, much attention and preparation, and a great deal of hard work and extra hours. If the members of our household, and not only the heads of the departments, but those of all grades, had not thrown themselves heart and soul into carrying out those entertainments so as to make them as pleasant as possible to the guests, we could never have achieved our purpose. We always had the consciousness that our household were just as keen as ourselves in making the various functions as successful as possible, whether those concerned parties of school-children, or His Majesty's Ministers or Their Majesties themselves.

Ladies who are hostesses know how much organisation and thought are required to make an entertainment a success, and the larger the entertainment and the larger the staff of servants the more thought and trouble does it require, and the more necessity is there for all to work heartily together. Indeed, I have always found the most intelligent co-operation among our household servants whenever and wherever there has been any special occasion for it, as well as when things have been moving along smoothly and regularly.

Of one thing I am very sure, and that is that the existence of our Household Club in no way tended to deteriorate the service rendered either to ourselves or to our guests, nor did it interfere with the discipline which must exist in every well-ordered household. But it did introduce the element of deep, mutual regard and understanding and sympathy for one another's lives, and a basis on which may be built a common fellowship for all true and noble purposes, which should surely be the outcome of every Christian home and the aim and desire of every thoughtful householder.

ISHBEL ABERDEEN AND TEMAIR.

POETS AND BIRDS

'IN a bird poem I want the real bird as a basis-not merely a description of it, but its true place in the season and in the landscape, and no liberties taken with the facts of its life history. I must see, or hear, or feel the live bird in the verses. Give me the real bird first, and then all the poetry that can be evoked from it.' Thus wrote John Burroughs, the American naturalist, in the introduction to his anthology Songs of Nature. A man who can write a good bird-poem must have something both of the poet and of the naturalist in him. No mere egg-snatcher has ever written poetry, nor is he ever likely to do so. And some good poets who were not good naturalists have made appalling 'howlers' when attempting to sing about birds.

It would be difficult to define a bird-poem, although to say why certain verses about birds are not bird-poetry would be easy. The best bird-poems catch the spirit of the bird; they re-create and make articulate in us the emotions, exaltations, ecstasies, which are aroused by seeing or hearing it; we feel them dumbly, but only poets can put them into words. At the same time, by some subtle artistry, they make us see and hear the bird itself; cunning rhythm and cadence conjure up its very song, or give us some delightful poise or wing-beat which we have noticed and loved. Many poems succeed in producing one or the other of these effects, but few satisfy both requirements.

Keats' Ode to the Nightingale-to my mind perhaps the most lovely lyric in the English language-does not quite come within our definition of a perfect bird-poem. All the atmosphere, sensuous and spiritual, of the nightingale's song is there, but the poem might have been written by a man who had never seen a nightingale, and would not know one if he saw it. In the same way, Swinburne's Swallow, my Sister, O Sister Swallow, is not a bird-poem, because it sings of the swallow of legend and mythology, and not of the real bird.

One poem which seems to me to fulfil all the requirements of bird poetry is T. E. Browne's Vespers :

O blackbird, what a boy you are!

How you do go it!

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Blowing your bugle to that one sweet star—
How you do blow it !

And does she hear you, blackbird boy, so far?

Or is it wasted breath?

'Good Lord, she is so bright
To-night !'

The blackbird saith.

I know no poem which interprets the blackbird's song so beautifully. The last three lines, besides being pure poetry, render the inconsequent cadence of the merle's naïve folk-song to perfection. Two lines from Horne's poem, The Plough, express in the same way the song's artless quality :

With his own lonely moods

The blackbird holds a colloquy.

As the desultory phrases fall from his golden bill, he seems to be thinking aloud in music. The thrush is the conscious artist, the virtuoso. Your blackbird, as Bottom would say, is more condoling.'

Many poems which are not entirely 'bird '-poems contain passages which almost uncannily focus a mood of Nature in one or two exquisite lines of bird-poetry. For instance,

The redbreast whistles from a garden croft,

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Can any language suggest more perfectly and tersely a picture of an English autumn? And does not

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England-now

set one's pulses tingling with the glow of a crisp spring morning? There are other poems in which a line or two bring the very bird before our eyes more vividly than a page of uninspired description. For instance,

And evening full of the linnets' wings.

One can see a flock of brown linnets sweeping down to their roosting-place at sundown, and hear the rustling of their wings. Or, again, take Davenant's

The lark now leaves his wat'ry nest
And climbing shakes his dewy wings.

Possibly the well-known and very beautiful setting of these verses to music unconsciously heightens their delight, but I know none which so truly wakes in one the joy of a dewy May morning.

George Meredith, though not a trained naturalist, had a good working knowledge of birds. His Lark Ascending is certainly the

best lark poem ever written. The metre itself is to me infinitely more expressive of the skylark's song than the somewhat jerky rhythm of Shelley's well-known verses, where the trochee at the end of the first and third lines of each stanza often breaks the swing, and pulls one up with a jolt. Meredith's description of the bird's song might well be applied to the impetuous rapture of his own verse :

He drops the silver chain of sound
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolved and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls;

A press of hurried notes that run

So fleet they scarce are more than one,

Yet changeingly the trills repeat

And linger ringing while they fleet.

In wealth and profusion of imagery he is certainly not inferior to Shelley:

Such wooing as the ear receives
From zephyr caught in choric leaves
Of aspens when their chattering net
Is flushed to white with shivers wet.

And in interpreting the spirit of the song he touches deeper truths than Shelley. Both poets agree that to attain to such artless rapture is not for mortals:

We want the key of his wild note
Of truthful in a tuneful throat,

The song seraphically free
Of taint of personality,

said one, and the other

But, says

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Meredith, there are men, some still with us and others no longer here, whose lives are of such nobility and beauty that they

Yield substance, though they sing not, sweet

For song our highest heaven to greet.

Such souls create for us and for themselves a joy as deep and full as the lark's

Because their love of Earth is deep.

Others of Meredith's poems ring with bird music. In The Young Princess (Part I.), the opening lines give out the 'nightingale theme':