d, only by a
few hours. The nightingale seems to be wound up to go only so long, or
till about the middle of June, and it is only by a rare chance that
you hear one after that date. Then I came home to hear a nightingale
in song one winter morning in a friend's house in the city. It was a
curious let-down to my enthusiasm. A caged song in a city chamber in
broad daylight, in lieu of the wild, free song in the gloaming of an
English landscape! I closed my eyes, abstracted myself from my
surroundings, and tried my best to fancy myself listening to the
strain back there amid the scenes I had haunted about Haslemere and
Godalming, but with poor success, I suspect. The nightingale's song,
like the lark's, needs vista, needs all the accessories of time and
place. The song is not all in the singing, any more than the wit is
all in the saying. It is in the occasion, the surroundings, the spirit
of which it is the expression. My friend said that the bird did not
fully let itself out. Its song was a brilliant medley of notes,--no
theme that I could detect,--like the lark's song in this respect; all
the notes of the field and forest appeared to be the gift of this
bird, but what tone! what accent! like that of a great poet!

Nearly every May I am seized with an impulse to go back to the scenes
of my youth, and hear the bobolinks in the home meadows once more. I
am sure they sing there better than anywhere else. They probably drink
nothing but dew, and the dew distilled in those high pastoral regions
has surprising virtues. It gives a clear, full, vibrant quality to the
birds' voices that I have never heard elsewhere. The night of my
arrival, I leave my southern window open, so that the meadow chorus
may come pouring in before I am up in the morning. How it does
transport me athwart the years, and make me a boy again, sheltered by
the paternal wing! On one occasion, the third morning after my
arrival, a bobolink appeared with a new note in his song. The note
sounded like the word "baby" uttered with a peculiar, tender
resonance: but it was clearly an interpolation; it did not belong
there; it had no relation to the rest of the song. Yet the bird never
failed to utter it with the same joy and confidence as the rest of his
song. Maybe it was the beginning of a variation that will in time
result in an entirely new bobolink song.

On my last spring visit to my native hills, my attention was attracted
to another songster not seen or h