174 NATURAL HISTORY READER. 



plainly it suggests a long train of agreeable images of love, 

 beauty, friendship, and home ! 



6. The voice of every singing-bird has its associations 

 in the minds of all susceptible persons who were born and 

 nurtured within the precincts of its untutored minstrelsy. 

 The music of birds is modulated in pleasant unison with 

 all the chords of affection and imagination, filling the soul 

 with a lively consciousness of happiness and beauty, and 

 soothing it with romantic visions of memory — of love, when 

 it was an ethereal sentiment of adoration and not a passion, 

 and of friendship, when it was a passion and not an expe- 

 dience ; of dear and simple adventures, and of comrades 

 who had part in them ; of dappled mornings and serene 

 and glowing sunsets, of sequestered nooks and mossy seats 

 in the old wood, of paths by the riverside and flowers that 

 smiled a bright welcome to our rambling, of lingering de- 

 partures from home, and of old by-ways overshadowed by 

 trees and hedged with roses and viburnums, that spread 

 their shade and their perfume around our path to gladden 

 our return. By this pleasant instrumentality has Nature 

 provided for the happiness of those who have learned to be 

 delighted with the survey of her works, and with the 

 sound of those voices which she has appointed to commu- 

 nicate to the human soul the joys of her inferior creation. 



7. The singing-birds, with reference to their songs, 

 may be divided into four classes. First, the rapid singers, 

 whose song is uninterrupted, of considerable length, and 

 uttered with fervor, and in apparent ecstasy. Second, the 

 moderate singers, whose notes are slowly modulated, but 

 without pauses or rests between their different strains. 

 Third, the interrupted singers, who seldom modulate their 

 notes with rapidity, and make decided pauses between their 

 several strains, of which there arc in general from five to 

 eight or nine. Fourth, the warblers, whose notes consist 

 of only one or two strains, not combined into a song. 



