n air or odor, that he
is forever upon the wing, and never deigns to pick a seed or crumb from
the earth? Is he an embodied thought projected from the brain of some
mad poet in the dim past, and sent to teach us a higher geometry of
curves and spirals? See him with that feather high in air, dropping it
and snapping it up again in the very glee of superabundant vitality, and
in his sudden evolutions and spiral gambollings seeming more a creature
of the imagination than of actual sight!

And, again, their coming and going, how curious and suggestive! We go
out in the morning, and no Thrush or Vireo is to be heard; we go out
again, and every tree and grove is musical; yet again, and all is
silent. Who saw them come? who saw them depart? This pert little
Winter-Wren, for instance, darting in and out the fence, diving under
the rubbish here and coming up yards away,--how does he manage with
those little circular wings to compass degrees and zones, and arrive
always in the nick of time? Last August I saw him in the remotest wilds
of the Adirondack, impatient and inquisitive as usual; a few weeks
later, on the Potomac, I was greeted by the same hardy little busybody.
Does he travel by easy stages from bush to bush and from wood to wood?
or has that compact little body force and courage to brave the night and
the upper air, and so achieve leagues at one pull? And yonder Bluebird,
with the hue of the Bermuda sky upon his back, as Thoreau would say, and
the flush of its dawn upon his breast,--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?

About the middle of September I go out in the woods, and am attracted by
a faint piping and lisping in the tops of the Oaks and Chestnuts. Tiny
figures dart to and fro so rapidly that it pains the eye to follow them,
and I discover that the Black-Poll Warbler is paying me a return visit.
Presently I likewise perceive a troop of Redstarts, or Green-Backed
Warblers, or Golden and Ruby-Crowned Wrens, flashing through the
Chestnut-branches, or hanging like jewels on the Cedar-sprays. A week of
two later, and my darlings are gone, another love is in my heart, and
other voices fill my ears. But so unapparent and mysterious are the
coming and going, that I look upon each as a special Providence, and
value them as visitants from another sphere.

The migration of the Pigeons, Ducks, and Geese is obvious enoug