How the lark's life and song blend, in the rhyme of the poet, with "the sheen of silver fountains leaping to the sea," with morning sunbeams and noontide thoughts, with the sweetest breathing flowers, and softest breezes, and busiest bees, and greenest leaves, and happiest human industries, loves, hopes, and aspirations! The American has read and heard of all this from his youth up to the day of setting his foot, for the first time, on English ground.

He has tried to believe it, as in things seen, temporal and tangible.
But in doing this he has to contend with a sense or suspicion of unreality--a feeling that there has been great poetical exaggeration in the matter.

A patent fact lies at the bottom of this incredulity.

The forefathers of New England carried no wild bird with them to sing about their cabin homes in the New World.

But they found beautiful and happy birds on that wild continent, as well-dressed, as graceful in form and motion, and of as fine taste for music and other accomplishments, as if they and their ancestors had sung before the courts of Europe for twenty generations.