t 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. "Well,
and did it sound any different from what it did last year, and the year
before, and the year before that?" inquired in measured, world-wearied
tones the dampener of ardors. No, my poor friend, it did not. And just
because it sounded the same as it has in all the succeeding springs
since life was young, it touched a chord in one's heart that must be
long since mute in your own, making you poor, indeed, if this dear
familiar bird voice cannot set it vibrating once more.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's Our Friend John Burroughs, by Clara Barrus

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR FRIEND JOHN BURROUGHS ***

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