The surpassing glory of the veery’s song, as all lovers of American bird music may be presumed by this time to know, lies in its harmonic, double-stopping effect,—an effect, or quality, as beautiful as it is peculiar. One day, while I stood listening to it under the best of conditions, admiring the wonderful arpeggio (I know no less technical word for it), my pencil suddenly grew poetic. “The veery’s fingers are quick on the harp-strings,” it wrote. His is perfect Sunday music,—and the hermit’s no less so. And in the same class I should put the simple chants of the field sparrow and the vesper. The so-called “preaching” of the red-eyed vireo is utter worldliness in the comparison.
Happy Franconia! This year, if never before, it had all five of our New England Hylocichlæ singing in its woods: the veery and the hermit everywhere in the lower country, the wood thrush in the maple forest before mentioned, the olive-back throughout the Notch and its neighborhood, and the gray-cheek on Lafayette; a quintette hard to match, I venture to think, anywhere on the footstool. And after them—I do not say with them—were winter wrens, bobolinks, rose-breasted grosbeaks, purple finches, solitary vireos, vesper sparrows, field sparrows, white-throated sparrows, song sparrows, catbirds, robins, orioles, tanagers, and a score or two beside.
One other bright circumstance I am bound in honor to speak of,—the abundance of swallows; a state of affairs greatly unlike anything to be met with in my part of Massachusetts: cliff swallows and barn swallows in crowds, and sand martins and tree swallows by no means uncommon. But for the absence of black martins,—a famous colony of which the tourist may see at Concord, while the train waits,—here would have been a second quintette worthy to rank with the thrushes; the flight of one set being as beautiful, not to say as musical, as the songs of the other. As it was, the universal presence of these aerial birds was a continual delight to any man with eyes to notice it. They glorified the open valley as the thrushes glorified the woods.
We shall never again see the like of this, I fear, in our prosier Boston neighborhood. Within my time—within twenty years, indeed—barn swallows summered freely on Beacon Hill, plastering their nests against the walls of the State House and the Athenæum, and even under the busy portico of the Tremont House. I have remembrance, too, of a pair that dwelt, for one season at least, above the door of the old Ticknor mansion, at the head of Park Street. Those days are gone. Now, alas, even in the suburban districts, we may almost say that one swallow makes a summer. An evil change it is, for which not even the warblings of English sparrows will ever quite console me. Yet the present state of things, the reoccupation of Boston by the British, if you please to call it so, is not without its grain of compensation. It makes me fonder of “old Francony.” Skeptic or man of faith, naturalist or supernaturalist, who does not like to feel that there is somewhere a “better country” than the one he lives in?
A DAY IN JUNE
THE FORENOON
“The air that floated by me seem’d to say,
‘Write! thou wilt never have a better day,’
And so I did.”
Keats.