HERMIT THRUSH. 



Hark from that moonlit cedar what a burst! 

 What triumph! hark! what pain! 



Listen, Eugenia 



How thick the bursts come crowding through 



the leaves! 



Again thou nearest I 

 Eternal passion! 

 Eternal pain! " 



I wonder what he would have written in an ode to the 

 American bird! certainly less about passion and pain, 

 and more about musical bursts of triumph. As regards 

 sentiment in a bird's song, that, as I have already said, 

 depends upon one's state of mind; the passionate and 

 plaintive notes of the Nightingale apparently have no 

 place in the Hermit's song; our gifted Thrush sings 

 more of the glory of life and less of its tragedy, more of 

 the joy of heaven and less of the passion of earth. That 

 is a purely human point of view all the more significant 

 because one bird sings to the European, and the other to 

 the American ear! 



H. D. Minot, comparing English with American birds, 

 writes, " the Nightingale had a most wonderful com- 

 pass, and was the greatest of all bird vocalists, but with 

 a less individual and exquisite genius than our Wood 

 Thrush." In the vales of Tuscany, Italy, one of the best 

 places in Europe to hear the Nightingale sing (possibly 

 excepting the banks of the Volga, in Russia), there is 

 ample opportunity to listen to the exquisite trills, and 

 solemn overtones of that famous bird, but an expe- 

 rienced ear will not discover in the song anything like 

 the melody of the Hermit Thrush. Musical notation is, 

 of course, wholly inadequate to express the remarkable, 

 appealing quality of the Nightingale's voice, but the 

 construction of the song is perfectly represented ; the 

 following is a transcription taken from Lescuyer's Lan- 

 gagt et Chant dea Oiseaux : it shows how very simple the 



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