C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Canary

Bird of the amber beak,
Bird of the golden wing!
Thy dower is thy carolling;
Thou hast not far to seek
Thy bread, nor needest wine
To make thy utterance divine;
Thou art canopied and clothed
And unto Song betrothed.

E. C. Stedman.

Sing away, ay, sing away,
Merry little bird,
Always gayest of the gay,
Though a woodland roundelay
You ne’er sung nor heard;
Though your life from youth to age
Passes in a narrow cage.

D. M. Mulock.

Thou should’st be carolling thy Maker’s praise,
Poor bird! now fetter’d, and here set to draw,
With graceless toil of beak and added claw,
The meager food that scarce thy want allays!
And this—to gratify the gloating gaze
Of fools, who value nature not a straw,
But know to prize the infraction of her law
And hard perversion of her creatures’ ways!
Thee the wild woods await, in leaves attired,
Where notes of liquid utterance should engage
Thy bill, that now with pain scant forage earns.

Julian Fane.

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