12 WAKE-ROBIN 
tion of the season, among other things, has brought 
the perfection of the song and plumage of the 
birds. The master artists are al’ here; and the 
expectations excited by the robin and the song 
sparrow are fully justified. The thrushes have all 
come; and I sit down upon the first rock, with 
hands full of the pink azalea, to listen. With me, 
the cuckoo does not arrive till June; and often 
the goldfinch, the kingbird, the scarlet tanager 
delay their coming till then. In the meadows the 
bobolink is in all his glory; in the high pastures 
the field sparrow sings his breezy vesper-hymn; 
and the woods are unfolding to the music of the 
thrushes. 
The cuckoo is one of the most solitary birds of 
our forests, and is strangely tame and quiet, appear- 
ing equally untouched by joy or grief, fear or 
anger. Something remote seems ever weighing 
upon his mind. His note or call is as of one lost 
or wandering, and to the farmer is prophetic of 
rain. Amid the general joy and the sweet assur- 
ance of things, I love to listen to the strange clair- 
voyant call. Heard a quarter of a mile away, from 
out the depths of the forest, there is something 
peculiarly weird and monkish about it. Words- - 
worth’s lines upon the European species apply 
equally well to ours: — 
“© blithe new-comer ! I have heard, 
I hear thee and rejoice: 
O cuckoo! shall I call thee bird ? 
Or but a wandering voice ? 
