ws and the Orioles. There are many other
distinguished arrivals, indeed nine tenths of the birds are here by the
last week in May, yet the Swallows and Orioles are the most conspicuous.
The bright plumage of the latter seems really like an arrival from the
tropics. I see them flash through the blossoming trees, and all the
forenoon hear their incessant warbling and wooing. The Swallows dive and
chatter about the barn, or squeak and build beneath the eaves; the
Partridge drums in the fresh unfolding woods; the long, tender note of
the Meadow-Lark comes up from the meadow; and at sunset, from every
marsh and pond come the ten thousand voices of the Hylas. May is the
transition month, and exists to connect April and June, the root with
the flower.

With June the cup is full, our hearts are satisfied, there is no more to
be desired. The perfection of the season, among other things, has
brought the perfection of the song and plumage of the birds. The master
artists are all here; and the expectations excited by the Robin and the
Song-Sparrow are fully justified. The Thrushes have all come; and I sit
down upon the first rock, with hands full of the pink Azalea, to listen.
With me, the Cuckoo does not arrive till June; and often the Goldfinch,
the King-Bird, the Scarlet Tanager delay their coming till then. In the
meadows the Bobolink is in all his glory; in the high pastures the
Field-Sparrow sings his breezy vesper-hymn; and the woods are unfolding
to the music of the Thrushes.

The Cuckoo is one of the most solitary birds of our forests, and is
strangely tame and quiet, appearing equally untouched by joy or grief,
fear or anger. Is he an exile from some other sphere, and are his
loneliness and indifference the result of a hopeless, yet resigned soul?
Or has he passed through some terrible calamity or bereavement, that has
overpowered his sensibilities, rendering him dreamy and semi-conscious?
Something remote seems ever weighing upon his mind. He deposits his eggs
in the nests of other birds, having no heart for work or domestic care.
His note or call is as of one lost or wandering, and the farmer says is
prophetic of rain. Amid the general joy and the sweet assurance of
things, I love to listen to this strange clairvoyant call. Heard a
quarter of a mile away, coming up from the dark bosom of the forest or
out from the sombre recesses of the mountain, like the voice of a
muezzin calling to prayer in the Oriental twilight, i