The little sparrows hop ingenuously about the pavement quarreling with sharp voices over those things that interest them. But we who are wiser shut ourselves in on either hand and no one knows whether we think good or evil.
Meanwhile, the old man who goes about gathering dog-lime walks in the gutter without looking up and his tread is more majestic than that of the Episcopal minister approaching the pulpit of a Sunday.
These things astonish me beyond words.
Bird. Bird with outstretched wings poised inviolate unreaching
yet reaching you image this November
planes to a stop miraculously fixed in my arresting eyes
...
makes him cry out lustily - which is a trait more related to music than otherwise. Wherever he finds himself in early spring, on back streets or beside palaces, he carries on unaffectedly his amours. It begins in the egg, his sex genders it: What is more pretentioulsy useless or about which we more pride ourselves?
...
Ten thousand sparrows who had come in from the desert to roost. They filled the trees of a small park. Men fled (with ears ringing!) from their droppings, leaving the premises to the alligators who inhabit the fountain. His image is familiar as that of the aristocratic unicorn
...
throws back his head and simply - yells! The din is terrific The way he swipes his bill across a plank to clean it, is decisive. So with everything he does. His coppery eybrows give him the air of being always a winner-and yet I saw once, the female of his species clinging determinedly to the edge of a water pipe, catch him by his crown-feathers to hold him silent, subdued, hanging above the city streets until she was through
...
the black escutcheon of the breast undecipherable, an effigy of a sparrow, a dried wafer only, left to say and it says it without offence, beautifully; This was I, a sparrow. I did my best; farewell.
...
Against the sky. Let me not forget at least, after the three day rain, beaks raised aface, the two starlings at and near the top twig of the white-oak, dwafing the barn, completing the minute gree of the sculptured foliage, their bullet heads bent back, their horny lips chattering to the morning sun! Praise! while the wraithlike warblers, all but unseen in looping flight dart from pine to spruce, spruce to pine southward. Southward! where new mating warms the wit and cold does not strike, for respite.