more of an evening than a morning hymn, though I hear it at all
hours of the day. It is very simple, and I can hardly tell the
secret of its charm. "O spheral, spheral!" he seems to say; "O holy,
holy! O clear away, clear away! O clear up, clear up!" interspersed
with the finest trills and the most delicate preludes. It is not a
proud, gorgeous strain, like the tanager's or the grosbeak's;
suggests no passion or emotion,--nothing personal,--but seems to be
the voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one attains to in his best
moments. It realizes a peace and a deep, solemn joy that only the
finest souls may know. A few nights ago I ascended a mountain to see
the world by moonlight, and when near the summit the hermit
commenced his evening hymn a few rods from me. Listening to this
strain on the lone mountain, with the full moon just rounded from
the horizon, the pomp of your cities and the pride of your
civilization seemed trivial and cheap.

I have seldom known two of these birds to be singing at the same
time in the same locality, rivaling each other, like the wood thrush
or the veery. Shooting one from a tree, I have observed another take
up the strain from almost the identical perch in less than ten
minutes afterward. Later in the day, when I had penetrated the heart
of the old Barkpeeling, I came suddenly upon one singing from a low
stump, and for a wonder he did not seem alarmed, but lifted up his
divine voice as if his privacy was undisturbed. I open his beak and
find the inside yellow as gold. I was prepared to find it inlaid
with pearls and diamonds, or to see an angel issue from it.

He is not much in the books. Indeed, I am acquainted with scarcely
any writer on ornithology whose head is not muddled on the subject
of our three prevailing song-thrushes, confounding either their