82 The Wilderness Hunter 



This is not a feeling to regret, but it must be 

 taken into account in accepting any estimate of bird 

 music even in considering the reputation of the 

 European skylark and nightingale. To both of these 

 birds I have often listened in their own homes; al- 

 ways with pleasure and admiration, but always with 

 a growing belief that relatively to some other birds 

 they were ranked too high. They are pre-eminently 

 birds with literary associations; most people take 

 their opinions of them at second-hand, from the 

 poets. 



No one can help liking the lark ; it is such a brave, 

 honest, cheery bird, and, moreover, its song is ut- 

 tered in the air, and is very long-sustained. But it 

 is by no means a musician of the first rank. The 

 nightingale is a performer of a very different and 

 far higher order; yet though it is indeed a notable 

 and admirable singer, it is an exaggeration to call 

 it unequaled. In melody, and above all in that 

 finer, higher melody where the chords vibrate with 

 the touch of eternal sorrow, it can not rank with 

 such singers as the wood-thrush and hermit-thrush. 

 The serene, ethereal beauty of the hermit's song, 

 rising and falling through the still evening, under 

 the archways of hoary mountain forests that have 

 endured from time everlasting; the golden, leisurely 

 chiming of the wood-thrush, sounding on June after- 

 noons, stanza by stanza, through sun-flecked groves 

 of tall hickories, oaks, and chestnuts ; with these there 



