26 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 



soft white dusked with gray-black, and the dignity of his ways 

 when danger does not threaten him or his adds to his beauty of 

 hue and carriage. There are, however, many birds as hand- 

 some. It is his song that, added to his other characteristics, 

 makes him to me the bird of birds. There are those that think 

 more beautiful the song of Veery or Hermit Thrush, but, asso- 

 ciations apart, and judging only on quality and relation of notes, I 

 must write down his song as the most beautiful bird-song I know. 

 I have many times listened to these three thrushes singing side 

 by side, in the Berkshire Hills and in our own Poconos, and I 

 have never had the least doubt as to which song had in it most 

 of beauty. Lovely as is the Veery' s song in itself, it takes the 

 accompaniment of moonlight and absolute stillness and far-off 

 places to raise it to the plane of the major songs of Hermit- 

 Thrush and Wood Thrush. 



And of these two major songs I have never heard so silver- 

 voiced a Hermit Thrush as one of three I several times listened 

 to in the summer of 1909 in the Poconos. Where he sang, there 

 sang, too, on more than one evening, a Wood Thrush. Now I 

 was intent on the one song, now on the other. Every time I 

 heeded the Hermit Thrush I wondered at his music, but the 

 liquid woodwind notes of the Wood Thrush reached that within 

 me that was far more intimate than wonder. The Hermit 

 Thrush, if you like, catches an echo in his song from harps 

 struck in some land that is happier than any man knows, and 

 perhaps there is finer phrasing and a more aerial music in his 

 song than in that of the Wood Thrush, but it has not the in- 

 comparable quality of Wood Thrush song, the mellow round- 

 ness of note, the nobility of accent, the heart-easing and uplift- 

 ing fall, the lyric cry so human, yet so strangely free of the 

 restlessness and sorrow of all things human. That chant is 

 uplifted in my memory whenever I think long of it, be it some 

 still gray dawn of November or blowing sunny morn of March, 

 and when I so hear it, it brings back with the hearing all the 

 cool freshness of late April eves, the scent of wood flowers and 

 just unprisoned buds of shrubs, wood-edges where the cones of 

 blossoming mazzards rise against the green mist of unfolding 

 leaves of tulip-trees and oaks, low white clouds that presage 



