My Garden Acquaintance

An essay on the birds of a New England garden, by a man who had watched the same acre for most of his life. Lowell reports on the orioles, robins, cat-birds, bobolinks and crows of Elmwood — their arrivals, their quarrels, their depredations on his fruit, and their opinion of him — and takes issue along the way with the ornithologists, particularly on the question of whether birds sing at all in the sense the poets mean. It is natural history conducted in the first person and with a running argument in it.

James Russell Lowell published the essay in the Atlantic Monthly in 1869 and collected it in My Study Windows in 1871. He was a poet, a professor at Harvard and later minister to Spain and to Britain, and this is among the best-liked of his familiar essays.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete essay.