720 
He sings the song, but it pleases not now, 
For I did not bring home the river and sky;— 
He sang to my ear,—they sang to my eye. 
I have never yet séen aicagea hird that I 
®wanted,—at least, not on account of its song, 
—nor a wild flower that I desired to transfer 
tomy garden. A caged skylark will sing its 
song sitting on a bit of turf in the bottom of 
the cage; but you want to stop your ears, it 
is so harsh and sibilant and penetrating. But 
up there against the morning sky, and above 
the wide expanse of fields, what delight we 
have in it! It is not the concord of sweet 
sounds: it is the soaring spirit of gladness 
and ecstasy raining down upon us from 
«(heaven’s gate.» Then, to the time and the 
place, if one could only add the association, 
or hear the bird through the vista of the 
years, the song touched with the magic of 
youthful memories! A number of years ago 
a friend in England sent me a score of sky- 
larks in a cage. I gave them their liberty in 
a field near my place. They drifted away, and 
I never heard them or saw them again. But 
one Sunday a Scotchman from a neighbor- 
ing city called upon me, and declared with 
visible excitement that on his way along the 
road he had heard a skylark. He was not 
dreaming; he knew it was a skylark, though 
he had not heard one since he had left the 
banks of the Doon, a quarter of a century or 
more before. What pleasure it gave him! 
How much more the song meant to him than 
it would have meant to me! For the mo- 
ment he was on his native heath again. 
Then I told him about the larks I had liber- 
ated, and he seemed to enjoy it all over again 
with renewed appreciation. Many years ago 
some skylarks were liberated on Long Island, 
and they became established there, and may 
now occasionally be heard in certain local- 
ities. One summer day a friend of mine was 
out there observing them; a lark was soaring 
and singing in the sky above him. An old 
Irishman came along, and suddenly stopped 
as if transfixed to the spot; a look of mingled 
delight and incredulity came into his face. 
Was he indeed hearing the bird of his youth? 
He took off his hat, turned his face skyward, 
and with moving lips and streaming eyes 
stood a long time regarding the bird. « Ah,» 
my friend thought, «if I could only hear that 
song with his ears!» How it brought back his 
youth and all those long-gone days on his 
native hills! The power of bird-songs over 
us isso much a matter of association. Hence 
it is that every traveler to other countries 
finds the feathered songsters of less merit 
THE CENTURY MAGAZINE. 
than those he left behind. The traveler does 
not hear the birds in the same receptive, un- 
critical frame of mind as does the native; 
they are not in thesame way the voices of the 
place and the season. What music can there 
be in that long, piercing, far-heard note of 
the first meadow-lark in spring to any but 
a native, or in the «o-ka-lee» of the red- 
shouldered starling as he rests upon the 
willows in March? A stranger would proba- 
bly recognize melody and a wild woodsy 
quality in the flutings of the veery thrush; 
but how much more they would mean to him 
after he had spent many successive Junes 
threading our Northern trout-streams and 
encamping on their banks! The veery will 
come early in the morning, and perch above 
your tent, and again at sundown, and blow 
his soft, reverberant note for minutes at a 
time. The strain repeats the echoes of the 
limpid stream in the halls and corridors of 
the leafy woods. 
While in England in 1882, I rushed about 
two or three counties in late June and early 
July, bent on hearing the song of the night- 
ingale, but missed it by a few days, and in 
some cases, as it seemed, only by a few hours. 
The nightingale seems to be wound up to go 
only so long, or till about the middle of June, 
and it is only bya rare chance that you hear 
ohe after that date. Then I came home to 
hear a nightingale in song in winter in a 
friend’s house in the city. It was a curious 
let-down to my enthusiasm. A caged song 
in a city chamber in broad daylight, in lieu 
of the wild, free song in the gloaming of an 
English landscape! I closed my eyes, ab- 
stracted myself from my surroundings, and 
tried my best to fancy myself listening to 
the strain back there amid the scenes I had 
haunted about Hazelmere and Godalming, but 
with poor success, I suspect. The nightin- 
ale’s song, like the lark’s, wants vista, wants 
all the accessories of time and place. The 
song is not all in the singing, any more than 
the wit is all in the saying. It is in the occa- 
sion, the surroundings, the spirit of which it is 
the expression. My friend said that the bird 
did not fully let itself out. Its song was a bril- 
liant medley of notes,—no theme that I could 
detect, —like the lark’s song in this respect; 
all the notes of the field and forest appeared 
to be the gift of this bird, but what tone, what 
accent, like that of a great poet! 
Nearly every May I am seized with an im- 
pulse to go back to the scenes of my youth, 
and hear the bobolinks in the home meadows 
once more. I am sure they sing there better 
than anywhere else. They probably drink 
