39 6 
The Ohio Naturalist. 
[Vol. Ill, No. 5, 
illustrate my meaning. I have verified the experience through 
several Aprils. The first hearing was in this manner. For a 
long time I had been sitting still to watch the Hermit flitting and 
returning among the naked copses by the old river-bed ; and 
what with his nearness and the fresh April song about me, the 
memory of his song came to me clear and clearer. Let not Science 
reproach me for this ! — I was fancying what old law, what jealous 
traveler’s silence on the way to the happier north his home, kept 
unuttered in the bird’s white breast that high romance, the voice 
of our best dreamer, even the memory of which made sunset flash 
across the mountain lakes to me. The memory, the fancy, grew 
so vividly upon me that I smiled to find myself placing actually 
somewhere, across the Olentangy, upstream, downstream, the 
phantom singing of my own creation. Then I woke to the reali- 
zation that it was an actual song, a Hermit Thrush really singing, 
but very far away. And last of all, I saw the dappled throat of 
my Thrush, which was always here and there about the leafless 
thickets, near me in the sun, saw his throat ruffling, and knew 
that he was the singer of the song that seemed, across the river 
or across the years, so far away. 
I ask pardon for such unedifying rhapsody, but the quality 
thus suggested is characteristic of the autumnal songseason. 
Some birds apparently change the form as well as the quality of 
their song, making of it an entirely new composition ; the Bob- 
white, for instance, and (I think) the Chickadee ; and the Caro- 
lina Wren in September has often set me hunting down a new 
song, surprising me at length to find him, that piper of indomita- 
ble and far- ringing cheerfulness, now singing a secret bubbling 
continuous Goldfinch-like song. But most of our birds, without 
changing the form of their song, change the tone-color as I have 
described. So the Catbird sings, so the Brown Thrush ; at your 
shoulder, may be, but seeming a half mile away ; so sing our most 
frequent autumnal vocalists, the Meadowlarks, Cardinals, Song- 
sparrows, Robins ; half-song, a whisper-song, an echo, a ventril- 
oquism. It is, I suppose, simply that they sing with half-voice, 
as we might hum to ourselves a melody that haunts us through 
the day’s work. 
But it is easier for me to deal with effects than with causes, and 
I shall not this time apologize, for these are my last words. The 
autumnal song seems to me not less beautiful than that of April ; 
not the same triumphant, but memorial, charged with emotion, 
an art wrecked by its own beautiful joy ; autumn’s fit utterance, 
when even Anosia, the red monarch of all the butterflies, migrates 
among the departing birds and the unreturning leaves ; and when 
always across the sky, in October, in November, as long as the 
Witch-Hazel is in flower, the Bluebirds play their pipes of passage. 
