BIRD MUSIC 143 



would pass away; the pavilion, the kiosks, the 

 gravelled walks and offensive flower-beds, the well- 

 dressed invalids and idlers, the artificiality of the 

 scene, with big hotel buildings for background, would 

 be to me something illusory — a mental picture which 

 I could dismiss from my mind at any moment, or 

 an appearance which would vanish at a breath of 

 wind or on the coming of a cloud over the sun. The 

 people sitting and moving about me had no real 

 existence; I alone existed there, with a willow-wren 

 for companion, and was sitting not on an iron chair 

 painted green but on the root of an old oak or beech 

 tree, or on a bed of pine needles, with the smell of 

 pine and bracken in my nostrils, with only that 

 wandering aerial tender voice, that gossamer thread 

 of sound, floating on the silence. 



This is doubtless an extreme example of the power 

 of expression, and could perhaps only be experienced 

 by one whose chief pleasure from childhood has been 

 in wild birds and who delights in bird voices above all 

 sounds. But expression is not everything: there is 

 a charm in some sounds so great that we love them 

 from the first time of hearing, when they are without 

 associations with a happy past; and in such cases 

 we can suppose that the emotional expression, if it 

 exists at all, is produced indirectly and forms but a 

 slight element in the aesthetic effect. 



There is, besides expression, another thing not 

 often taken into account which makes some bird 

 melodies impress us more than others — the state of 

 mind, or mood, we are in and the conditions in which 



