Explore "A Wild Strawberry" by Henry Van Dyke on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"Such is the story of the Boblink; once spiritual, musical, / admired, the joy of the meadows, and the favourite bird of / spring; finally a gross little sensualist who expiates his / sensuality in the larder. His story contains a moral, worthy / the attention of all little birds and little boys; warning / them to keep to those refined and intellectual pursuits / which raised him to so high a pitch of popularity during the / early part of his career; but to eschew all tendency to that / gross and dissipated indulgence, which brought this mistaken / little bird to an untimely end. " / -- WASHINGTON IRVING: Wolfert's Roost.
The Swiftwater brook was laughing softly to itself as it ran through a strip of hemlock forest on the edge of the Woodlings' farm. Among the evergreen branches overhead the gayly-dressed warblers, -- little friends of the forest, -- were flitting to and fro, lisping their June songs of contented love: milder, slower, lazier notes than those in which they voiced the amourous raptures of May. Prince's Pine and golden loose-strife and pink laurel and blue hare-bells and purple-fringed orchids, and a score of lovely flowers were all abloom. The late spring had hindered some; the sudden heats of early summer had hastened others; and now they seemed to come out all together, as if Nature had suddenly tilted up her cornucopia and poured forth her treasures in spendthrift joy.