SONGS AND MUSIC 181 



whose ear for song amounts to genius, could recall to him- 

 self, after twenty years' absence from England, the song of 

 all our birds save three or four ; and probably the finest 

 passage in any book of natural history is his account of the 

 towering songs of the great American birds in one of his 

 books. 



The strangest thing about the welcome given to birds' 

 songs is that people may be within range of a particular song 

 year after year and never consciously hear it. One day a 

 naturalist says to them, ' Listen to the golden-crested wren in 

 the cedar,' or ' That is a cirl bunting in the elm ' — and for the 

 future the songs of the two birds, previously unnoticed and 

 unknown, take their proper place among the pleasures 

 of the garden. No doubt a surprising number of people 

 are absolutely deaf to song. The trill of the grasshopper- 

 warbler — a wonderfully accurate reproduction of the noise 

 of a fishing - reel, though pitched higher — is wholly in- 

 audible to some people of moderately acute hearing. The 

 song of the blue tit and the lark disappears from the 

 list of audible sounds at the very first approach of deaf- 

 ness ; and hundreds of country people never seem to have 

 heard the pretty little whispered piece of the goldcrest. 



If music proper be the test the 

 blackbird comes first. Those seven 

 or eight clear notes that he whistles 

 at sunrise and again after sunset also 

 carry farther than the song of any 

 bird, even than the thin, pleading 

 cry of the nightingale beneath the 

 stillness of summer stars. ' - 



. NIGHTINGALE 



As you loiter near a singing 

 nightingale the force of the guttural throat most astonishes 

 and thrills you. But, as the distance from the singer increases, 



