Long before I had the memorable
experience of standing with him on the banks of the Willowemoc
and listening at twilight to the slow, divine chant of the hermit
thrush, I had heard it in my dreams, because of that inimitable
description of its song in "Wake-Robin." It does, indeed, seem
to be "the voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one attains to in
his best moments." As one listens to its strain in the hush of
twilight, the pomp of cities and the pride of civilization of a
truth seem trivial and cheap.
What a near, human interest our author makes us feel in the birds,
how we watch their courtships, how we peer into their nests, and
how lively is our solicitude for their helpless young swung in
their "procreant cradles," beset on all sides by foes that fly
and creep and glide! And not only does he make the bird a visible
living creature; he makes it sing joyously to the ear, while all
nature sings blithely to the eye. We see the bird, not as a mass
of feathers with "upper parts bright blue, belly white, breast
ruddy brown, mandibles and legs black," as the textbooks have it,
but as a thing of life and beauty: "Yonder bluebird with the earth
tinge on his breast and the sky tinge on his back,--did he come
down out of heaven on that bright March morning when he told us so
softly and plaintively that, if we pleased, spring had come?" Who
is there in reading this matchless description of the bluebird that
does not feel the retreat of winter, that does not feel his pulse
quicken with the promise of approaching spring, that does not feel
that the bird did, indeed, come down out of heaven, the heaven of
hope and promise, even though the skies are still bleak, and the
winds still cold? Who, indeed, except those prosaic beings who are
blind and deaf to the most precious things in life?
"I heard a bluebird this morning!" one exclaimed exultantly, so
stirred as to forget momentarily her hearer's incapacity for
enthusiasm.
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