The Owls Are Not What They Seem

{o,o} {^,^} "Wise midnight bags! It is no honest and blunt
|)__) (__(| tu-whit tu- who of the poets, but, without jesting,
-"-"- -"-"- a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves...They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions."

- H.D. Thoreau