UPLAND PASTURES 17 



Now there comes a hush in the bird songs, a hush in 

 all nature, while the peak behind us grows amethyst, 

 the high zenith clouds are salmon streamers, and the 

 golden west blushes into rose. The woods grow dim. 

 The rose dusks to a deeper hue, and suddenly against 

 it all the pointed firs stand darkly up like a spired city 

 in fairyland. At that moment the birds break their 

 hush, the Peabodies flute from spire to spire like little 

 Moslems in Christian belfries, and from the dusk of the 

 forest wall behind us comes ringing the full-throated 

 song of a hermit thrush. Even the sparrows respect 

 that master minstrel, and pause. An expectant silence 

 succeeds. Then, from farther off, from the very depths 

 of the woods, the coolness of their brooks, the greenness 

 of their leaves, the mystery of their silences made vocal, 

 the answer comes, in liquid triplets dripping twilight. 

 George Moore has called the songs of Schubert and 

 Schumann "the moonlit lakes and nightingales of 

 music." But what man-made music is twilight and 

 the hermit thrush? A few of Mozart's andantes? 

 Almost, perhaps, yet they lack the forest timbre and the 

 dusk; they are liquid and pensive, but they were com- 

 posed at sunrise, or while the sun yet lingered on the low- 

 land meadows. Incomparable of birds, uncelebrated 

 in classic story like the nightingale, uttering no home- 

 sick note in a warm and sentimental southland like 

 the mocking bird, your habitat in your musical mating- 

 time is the forests of our bleak New Hampshire hills, 



