WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. 
CHAPTER 1. 
NATURE AND HER HARMONIES. 
o 
I LOVE song-birds with a singular affection. Out of tlie 
bottom of my heart I love them — ^for of all God's creatures, 
except a clear-eyed, innocent child, they have been to me a 
wonder and a miracle. 
I never could get done wondering to hear them sing. It 
sounds so strange to me that anything could be happy 
enough to sing but angels and young girls ! 
Singing, when we come to think of it, seems properly to be 
the language of a deathless being — the right form in which 
the exultings of an Immortal should be poured among the 
waves of shoreless sound. 
That a sweet sound should ever cease to be, appears to me 
unnatural — at least unpoetical — ^for, let its vibrations once 
begin, though they may soon die to our gross sense, must 
they not go widening, circling on, stinging the sense of my- 
riad other lives with a mysterious pleasantness (such as will 
overcome us in a wood upon an April day), until the utter- 
most bound of our poor space be past, and yet the large cir- 
cumference go spread and spreading tremulous among the 
girdling stars ? 
It may be so for all we can tell ! If it he so, how quaint 
it is to hear these little feathered creatures, from some frail 
