many of such
citizens. I esteem him, also, as the only one of his delicate,
insectivorous race who has the hardihood to spend the winter--sparingly,
but with something like regularity--within the limits of New England. He
has a genius for adapting himself to circumstances; picking up his daily
food in the depths of a mountain forest or off the panes of a
dwelling-house, and wintering, as may suit his fancy or convenience, in
the West Indies or along the sea-coast of Massachusetts.

One advantage of a sojourn at the summit of any of our wooded New
England mountains is the easy access thus afforded to the upper forest.
While I was here upon Mount Mansfield I spent some happy hours almost
every day in sauntering down the road for a mile or two, looking and
listening. Just after leaving the house it was possible to hear three
kinds of thrushes singing at once,--gray-cheeks, olive-backs, and
hermits. Of the three the hermit is beyond comparison the finest singer,
both as to voice and tune. His song, given always in three detached
measures, each higher than the one before it, is distinguished by an
exquisite liquidity, the presence of _d_ and _l_, I should say, as
contrasted with the inferior _t_ sound of the gray-cheek. If it has
less variety, and perhaps less rapture, than the song of the
wood-thrush, it is marked by greater simplicity and ease; and if it does
not breathe the ineffable tranquillity of the veery's strain, it comes
to my ear, at least, with a still nobler message. The hermit's note is
aspiration rather than repose. "Peace, peace!" says the veery, but the
hermit's word is, "Higher, higher!" "Spiritual songs," I call them both,
with no thought of profaning the apostolic phrase.

I had been listening to thrush music (I think I could listen to it
forever), and at a bend of the road had turned to admire the wooded side
of the mountain, just here spread out before me, miles and miles of
magnificent hanging forest, when I was attracted by a noise as of
something gnawing--a borer under the bark of a fallen spruce lying at my
feet. Such an industrious and contented sound! No doubt the grub would
have said, "Yes, I could do _this_ forever." What knew he of the
beauties of the picture at which I was gazing? The very light with which
to see it would have been a torture to him. Heaven itself was under the
close bark of that decaying log. So peradventure, may we ourselves be
living in darkness without knowing it, while s