body, compared with the fresh and living creature, as it tilts,
trembles, and warbles on the bough before you! Observe that robin in the
oak-tree's top: as he sits and sings, every one of the dozen different
notes which he flings down to you is accompanied by a separate flirt and
flutter of his whole body, and, as Thoreau says of the squirrel, "each
movement seems to imply a spectator," and to imply, further, that the
spectator is looking through a spy-glass. Study that song-sparrow: why
is it that he always goes so ragged in spring, and the bluebird so
neat? is it that the song-sparrow is a wild artist, absorbed in the
composition of his lay, and oblivious of ordinary proprieties, while the
smooth bluebird and his ash-colored mate cultivate their delicate warble
only as a domestic accomplishment, and are always nicely dressed before
sitting down to the piano? Then how exciting is the gradual arrival of
the birds in their summer-plumage! to watch it is as good as sitting at
the window on Easter Sunday to observe the new bonnets. Yonder, in that
clump of alders by the brook, is the delicious jargoning of the first
flock of yellow-birds; there are the little gentlemen in black and
yellow, and the little ladies in olive-brown; "sweet, sweet, sweet" is
the only word they say, and often they will so lower their ceaseless
warble, that, though almost within reach, the little minstrels seem far
away. There is the very earliest cat-bird, mimicking the bobolink before
the bobolink has come: what is the history of his song, then? is it a
reminiscence of last year? or has the little coquette been practising it
all winter, in some gay Southern society, where cat-birds and bobolinks
grow intimate, just as Southern fashionables from different States
may meet and sing duets at Saratoga? There sounds the sweet, low,
long-continued trill of the little hair-bird, or chipping-sparrow, a
suggestion of insect sounds in sultry summer, and produced, like them,
by a slight fluttering of the wings against the sides: by-and-by we
shall sometimes hear that same delicate rhythm burst the silence of the