Thy sky is ever clear;
Thou hast no sorrow in thy song,
No winter in thy year."

The European cuckoo is evidently a much gayer bird than ours, and
much more noticeable.

"Hark, how the jolly cuckoos sing
'Cuckoo!' to welcome in the spring,"

says John Lyly three hundred years agone. Its note is easily
imitated, and boys will render it so perfectly as to deceive any
but the shrewdest ear. An English lady tells me its voice reminds
one of children at play, and is full of gayety and happiness. It is
a persistent songster, and keeps up its call from morning to night.
Indeed, certain parts of Wordsworth's poem--those that refer to the
bird as a mystery, a wandering, solitary voice--seem to fit our
bird better than the European species. Our cuckoo is in fact a
solitary wanderer, repeating its loud, guttural call in the depths
of the forest, and well calculated to arrest the attention of a
poet like Wordsworth, who was himself a kind of cuckoo, a solitary
voice, syllabling the loneliness that broods over streams and
woods,--

"And once far off, and near."

Our cuckoo is not a spring bird, being seldom seen or heard in the
North before late in May. He is a great devourer of canker-worms,
and, when these pests appear, he comes out of his forest seclusion
and makes excursions through the orchards stealthily and quietly,