This is under date of June 16th. On the following day I made another entry:—
"The song is, I think, less varied than either the solitary's or the red-eye's, but it grows more distinct from both as it is longer heard. Acquaintance will probably make it as characteristic and unmistakable as any of our four other vireo songs. But I do not withdraw what I said yesterday about its resemblance to the red-eye's and the solitary's. The bird seems quite fearless, and keeps much of the time in the lower branches. In this latter respect his habit is in contrast with that of the warbling vireo."
On the whole, then, the song of the Philadelphia vireo comes nearest to the red-eye's, differing from it mainly in tone and inflection rather than in form. In these two respects it suggests the [solitary vireo], though it never reproduces the indescribably sweet cadence, the real "dying fall," of that most delightful songster. At the risk of a seeming contradiction, however, I must mention one curious circumstance. On going again to Franconia, a year afterwards, and, naturally, keeping my ears open for Vireo philadelphicus, I discovered that I was never for a moment in doubt when I heard a red-eye; but once, on listening to a distant solitary,—catching only part of the strain,—I was for a little quite uncertain whether he might not be the bird for which I was looking. How this fact is to be explained I am unable to say; it will be least surprising to those who know most of such matters, and at all events I think it worth recording as affording a possible clue to some future observer. The experience, inconsistent as the assertion may sound, does not in the least alter my opinion that the Philadelphia's song is practically certain to be confused with the red-eye's rather than with the solitary's. Upon that point my companions and I were perfectly agreed while we had the bird before us, and Mr. Brewster's testimony is abundantly conclusive to the same effect. He was in the Umbagog forests on a special hunt for Philadelphia vireos (he had collected specimens there on two previous occasions), and after some days of fruitless search discovered, almost by accident, that the birds had all the while been singing close about him, but in every instance had passed for "nothing but red-eyes." [2]
For the benefit of the lay reader, I ought, perhaps, to have explained before this that the Philadelphia vireo is in coloration an exact copy of the [warbling vireo]. There is a slight difference in size between the two, but the most practiced eye could not be depended upon to tell them apart in a tree. Vireo philadelphicus is in a peculiar case: it looks like one common bird, and sings like another. It might have been invented on purpose to circumvent collectors, as the Almighty has been supposed by some to have created fossils on purpose to deceive ungodly geologists. It is not surprising, therefore, that the bird escaped the notice of the older ornithologists. In fact, it was first described,—by Mr. Cassin,—in 1851, from a specimen taken, nine years before, near Philadelphia; and its nest remained unknown for more than thirty years longer, the first one having been discovered, apparently in Canada, in 1884.[3]
Day after day, the bare, sharp crest of [ Mount Lafayette] silently invited my feet. Then came a bright, favorable morning, and I set out. I would go alone on this my first pilgrimage to the noble peak, at which, always from too far off, I had gazed longingly for ten summers. It is not inconsistent with a proper regard for one's fellows, I trust, to enjoy now and then being without their society. It is good, sometimes, for a man to be alone,—especially on a mountain-top, and more especially at a first visit. The trip to the summit was some seven or eight miles in length, and an almost continual ascent, without a dull step in the whole distance. The Tennessee warbler was singing; but perhaps the pleasantest incident of the walk to the Profile House—in front of which the mountain footpath is taken—was a [Blackburnian warbler] perched, as usual, at the very top of a tall spruce, his orange throat flashing fire as he faced the sun, and his song, as my notebook expresses it, "sliding up to high Z at the end" in his quaintest and most characteristic fashion. I spent nearly three hours in climbing the mountain path, and during all that time saw and heard only twelve kinds of birds: [redstarts], [ Canada warblers] (near the base), [ black-throated blues], [ black-throated greens], [Nashvilles], [black-polls], red-eyed vireos, snowbirds (no [white-throated sparrows]!), winter wrens, Swainson and [gray-cheeked thrushes], and yellow-bellied flycatchers. Black-poll and Nashville warblers were especially numerous, as they are also upon Mount Washington, and, as far as I have seen, upon the White Mountains generally. The feeble, sharp song of the black-poll is a singular affair; short and slight as it is, it embraces a perfect crescendo and a perfect decrescendo. Without question I passed plenty of white-throated sparrows, but by some coincidence not one of them announced himself. The gray-cheeked thrushes, which sang freely, were not heard till I was perhaps halfway between the Eagle Cliff Notch and the Eagle Lakes. This species, so recently added to our summer fauna, proves to be not uncommon in the mountainous parts of New England, though apparently confined to the spruce forests at or near the summits. I found it abundant on Mount Mansfield, Vermont, in 1885, and in the summer of 1888 Mr. Walter Faxon surprised us all by shooting a specimen on Mount Graylock, Massachusetts. Doubtless the bird has been singing its perfectly distinctive song in the White Mountain woods ever since the white man first visited them. During the vernal migration, indeed, I have more than once heard it sing in eastern Massachusetts. My latest delightful experience of this kind was on the 29th of May last (1889), while I was hastening to a railway train within the limits of Boston. Preoccupied as I was, and faintly as the notes came to me, I recognized them instantly; for while the gray-cheek's song bears an evident resemblance to the [veery's] (which I had heard within five minutes), the two are so unlike in pitch and rhythm that no reasonably nice ear ought ever to confound them. The bird was just over the high, close, inhospitable fence, on the top of which I rested my chin and watched and listened. He sat with his back toward me, in full view, on a level with my eye, and sang and sang and sang, in a most deliciously soft, far-away voice, keeping his wings all the while a little raised and quivering, as in a kind of musical ecstasy. It does seem a thing to be regretted—yes, a thing to be ashamed of—that a bird so beautiful, so musical, so romantic in its choice of a dwelling-place, and withal so characteristic of New England should be known, at a liberal estimate, to not more than one or two hundred New Englanders! But if a bird wishes general recognition, he should do as the robin does, and the bluebird, and the oriole,—dress like none of his neighbors, and show himself freely in the vicinity of men's houses. How can one expect to be famous unless he takes a little pains to keep himself before the public?
From the time I left my hotel until I was fairly above the dwarf spruces below the summit of Lafayette, I was never for many minutes together out of the hearing of thrush music. Four of our five summer representatives of the genus Turdus took turns, as it were, in the serenade. The [veeries—Wilson's thrushes]—greeted me before I stepped off the piazza. As I neared the Profile House farm, the [hermits] were in tune on either hand. The moment the road entered the ancient forest, the [olive-backs] began to make themselves heard, and halfway up the mountain path the [gray-cheeks] took up the strain and carried it on to its heavenly conclusion. A noble processional! Even a lame man might have climbed to such music. If the wood thrush had been here, the chorus would have been complete,—a chorus not to be excelled, according to my untraveled belief, in any quarter of the world.
To-day, however, my first thoughts were not of birds, but of the mountain. The weather was all that could be asked,—the temperature perfect, and the atmosphere so transparent as to be of itself a kind of lens; so that in the evening, when I rejoined my companions at the hotel, I found to my astonishment that I had been plainly visible while at the summit, the beholders having no other help than an opera-glass! It was almost past belief. I had felt some dilation of soul, it was true, but had been quite unconscious of any corresponding physical transformation. What would our aboriginal forerunners have said could they have stood in the valley and seen a human form moving from point to point along yonder sharp, serrated ridge? I should certainly have passed for a god! Let us be thankful that all such superstitious fancies have had their day. The Indian, poor child of nature,
"A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,"
stood afar off and worshiped toward these holy hills; but the white man clambers gayly up their sides, guide-book in hand, and leaves his sardine box and eggshells—and likely enough his business card—at the top. Let us be thankful, I repeat, for the light vouchsafed to us; ours is a goodly heritage; but there are moods—such creatures of hereditary influence are we—wherein I would gladly exchange both the guide-book and the sardine box for a vision, never so indistinct and transient, of Kitche Manitoo. Alas! what a long time it is since any of us have been able to see the invisible. "In the mountains," says Wordsworth, "did he feel his faith." But the poet was speaking then of a very old-fashioned young fellow, who, even when he grew up, made nothing but a peddler. Had he lived in our day, he would have felt not his faith, but his own importance; especially if he had put himself out of breath, as most likely he would have done, in accomplishing in an hour and forty minutes what, according to the guide-book, should have taken a full hour and three quarters. The modern excursionist (how Wordsworth would have loved that word!) has learned wisdom of a certain wise fowl who once taught St. Peter a lesson, and who never finds himself in a high place without an impulse to flap his wings and crow.
For my own part, though I spent nearly three hours on the less than four miles of mountain path, as I have already acknowledged, I was nevertheless somewhat short-winded at the end. So long as I was in the woods, it was easy enough to loiter; but no sooner did I leave the last low spruces behind me than I was seized with an importunate desire to stand upon the peak, so near at hand just above me. I hope my readers are none of them too old to sympathize with the boyish feeling. At all events, I quickened my pace. The distance could not be more than half a mile, I thought. But it was wonderful how that perverse trail among the boulders did unwind itself, as if it never would come to an end; and I was not surprised, on consulting a guide-book afterwards, to find that my half mile had really been a mile and a half. One's sensations in such a case I have sometimes compared with those of an essay-writer when he is getting near the end of his task. He dallied with it in the beginning, and was half ready to throw it up in the middle; but now the fever is on him, and he cannot drive the pen fast enough. Two days ago he doubted whether or not to burn the thing; now it is certain to be his masterpiece, and he must sit up till morning, if need be, to finish it. What would life be worth without its occasional enthusiasm, laughable in the retrospect, perhaps, but in itself pleasurable almost to the point of painfulness?