never hears them without feeling better for it. The chickadee in the
winter woods is an instance of this. If you feel dreary, _he_ does not.
Nothing can dampen his spirits. He hopped out of the nest a cheery
little chap, and it is never otherwise with him. In all his days he has
never had a regret, never transgressed any law, never been unhappy. The
voice of the chewink, too, is eminently sane, a mild, buoyant utterance
indicative of an even disposition. He is never more hopeful, nor less
so, but always exactly the same. Perhaps the birds have not what we
call _feeling_, but if not, why do they express themselves? What else
would prompt these songs? The clear sweet call of the bob-white is
full of hope, and there is a quality of tenderness in this voice. One
must believe it the outcome of the disposition and character of the
bird, of some refinement of feeling; just as the raucous call of the
English pheasant expresses grossness and density, and the quailing of
the hawk pure savagery.
If we may speak of the temperament of birds, the thrushes must be
accorded the religious temperament. They are the inspired singers;
their songs are eminently _sacred_ music. The woodthrush appears to be
actuated by other than merely commonplace and personal motives. Upon
him the forest has laid its spell, and he must deliver its message. He
flits about with a dignity befitting his high calling. There is no
abandon in his song; he does not sing about himself--has no moods--but
repeats his solemn chant. It breaks the stillness of the woods with a
sort of challenge to the gay fields beyond, like the call of the
muezzin from the minarets of the mosque--a summons to all twittering
sparrows and chattering squirrels to be silent and listen. That such
fervor, such solemnity and beauty of utterance should be unconscious
and unwitting seems incredible. Stand and listen to the hermit-thrush
and see if you can think idle thoughts. You must hear his message and
feel the spirit of his invocation--the voice of one crying in the
wilderness.
Why is the hermit moved to be thus didactic, while in the fields beyond
the field-sparrow lightly trills and the merry bobolink continually
bubbles over with song? Such merry jingles, such uncontrollable
outbursts of melody, such a rippling, bubbling medley as comes up from
the meadows, while the thrush solemnly intones within the twilight
shades of the woods! Surely in view of this we may speak of the
temperament and the personality of birds. If the bobolink's medley is
not evidence of a light heart, then are appearances deceptive indeed.
Care rests easily--if at all--upon his hopeful nature, but the burden
of his song is quite as well worth heeding as is that of the thrush.
One is lyric, the other didactic. The bobolink communicates his joyous
and irrepressible spirits, as the thrush his serene exaltation. It is
certain the wood birds are of a different temperament from the field
birds. Either they are influenced to their prevailing moods by their
environments, or they are attracted thereto by their own
peculiarities, as men are drawn to solitude or society.
The hidden, the subtle, find voice in the veery. His is perhaps the
most spiritual strain of all, himself the high priest of the mystic
lore of the forest. Of the thrush family he is the consecrated member,
as the robin is the worldling among them. I believe there is no other
bird voice so mysterious; so impersonal is it, so spiritlike, it
appears to emanate from a world of higher motive than ours. In the
devotional strain of the hermit, the forest prayer is breathed on the
mountains. No hymn could be less impassioned, less material, more truly
_spiritual_ than the song of this thrush; it is nearest the speech of
angels. Of all instruments the organ and the harp are alone capable of
producing any such effect. On rare occasions I have heard the veery
indulge in a reverie never to be forgotten. It appeared to be wholly
inspired and original as though the bird were improvising like some Abt
Vogler at his organ, rearing a palace of music. The motive was complex
and involved, and sung so _pianissimo_ as to be just audible, like the
love-song of the catbird, a rapt utterance which admitted one to the
sacred arcana of Nature.
It is not unprecedented for a bird to depart thus from its usual song
and to improvise. You may detect even the jay in this mood, though it
is wholly imitative with him. The love-song of the catbird and the
autumn reverie of the song-sparrow are perhaps the best instances. I am
not yet wholly familiar with the songs of the robin. It appears he is
still studying music, and adds a phrase or varies a theme occasionally.
He is the most romantic of the thrushes; his song is more personal and
less spiritual than the others. When, in early spring, the robins sing
together at sundown, there is an exquisite tenderness in their notes
which accords with the sweet youthfulness of the year. It is later in
the season, when his mate sits upon the nest, that the robin rises to
the heights of lyric beauty and pours out his soul from the top of the
tallest maple in the swamp,--a brave sweet love-song, sung with dignity
and without hesitation, that all his world may hear.
At dawn he is moved a little more to the rapt and religious expression
of the thrushes. Something there is in the solemnity of that hour which
touches the hearts of all little birds. What it is we shall perhaps
never know; shall never know enough of bird life to understand what
emotions they may have which so powerfully sway them and become evident
in their voices. The evidence is there; the cause is to be inferred.
While the birds are everywhere more or less affected by the approaching
day and give voice to their feelings, there appear to be musical
centers in the bird world in which the expression is more concerted
than in other localities,--favored sections where this hymn to Apollo
is memorable indeed and hardly to be described. It is a great chant
with all its solemnity, all its impressiveness.
Beginning with the desultory calls of wood-pewees, it is taken up by
song-sparrows, robins and catbirds, dominated by the devotional song of
the woodthrush who appears to act as chorister. Birds seem to
congregate from near and far and to inspire one another to unusual
efforts. The volume and stateliness of this chant, so measured and
rhythmical, carries with it vibrations of power and cannot fail to
communicate its influence to the listener, be he bird or man. Here is a
multitude of birds actuated by a unity of purpose, impelled by a single
motive, and though every one sings his own song, the myriad voices
blend in one concordant whole. To arouse suddenly from a sound sleep
in the woods at dawn while this chant is in progress, is like awakening
in another sphere, where sings the choir celestial. We slip from sleep
into the heaven of song, and it requires another awakening to bring us
to consciousness of this actual world about us.
They are the troubadours these birds, the wanderers whose souls are in
their voices. What bold romantic singers are the cardinal and the
rose-breasted grosbeak--the lords of song! When the cardinal comes
North he appears to feel out of his element and modestly withdraws. But
in the South he dominates the swamp and adjoining cotton-fields with
his rollicking, melodious voice. A gay minstrel, he compels attention.
These voices of the cypress swamp are clear and bright in contrast with
their dismal surroundings. The bell-like note of the tufted titmouse in
the treetops, and the brave, cheery song of the Carolina wren lighten
those fearsome shades. The wren carries his sunshine with him. There is
no minor in his song; he is never discouraged, any more than the
chickadee. Day after day that voice rings true--all's well with the
world. Brave voices singing in the wilderness, they lighten vaster
shades than any they know of, sound their note of courage and
well-being for other ears than theirs. What blessed transformation from
the songless ages--from that slimy reptilian world where was no music,
no song--to this unpaid minstrelsy of the woods and fields! They have
served us these many years--the sweet singers, the true birds of
paradise, with power to lift us from our dull, unmelodious thoughts
into their harmonious world.
As I was following the course of a mountain stream through the leafless
woods early in April, the silence was broken by a strange musical
alarm. It was the Louisiana water-thrush, but might have been the pipes
of Pan, so wild and woodland was it. The first notes were high and
startlingly loud and clear, while the song descended the scale and
became softer and softer till it died away. This is one of the bird
voices that are untamed, that seem to belong to impersonal Nature. It
is wholly savage--a piece of the wilderness, untouched by the presence
of man. These voices do not strike the human and sympathetic chords,
but ally one with the wilderness. Such are the cry of the loon, the
melody of the ruby kinglet and the song of the winter wren. The
kinglet's song has a cadence unlike any other, reminding one of water
murmuring underground, and for some reason a classic suggestion, as of
faun and satyr. It is more truly _sylvan_ than any other--sylvan in the
old Greek sense, so elusive and shy it is, so mysterious.
Such voices give no evidence of self-consciousness; they are as
impersonal as the winds or as the murmuring stream. But with the
catbird, the thrasher and the mocking-bird, pre-eminently vocalists,
there is a set and declamatory method which has the appearance of
affectation. Their songs are brilliant and elaborately phrased, but
they lack spontaneity, and in listening to them one wishes they had put
their powers to a different use. The thrasher is particularly
self-conscious and stagey, and yet he has a glorious voice. No bird has
a finer _quality_ of tone than he shows in some of his notes--clear,
mellow, vibratory as in the voices of really great tenors. It is that
quality which Nature alone supplies and no cultivation nor perfection
of method can give. When he speaks to his mate in an undertone his
voice would melt a heart of stone. There is a time, however, when the
catbird rises above any suspicion of self-consciousness and is
transported, and the listener with him, in a reverie of exceeding
beauty. It is a wondrous love-song, an incomparable madrigal, blending
with the morning sunshine and the first green leaves of the alders,
soft and low as faint murmurings of a stream, a fluid melody uttered
for chosen ears.
All too soon the only bird notes are those of the redeye and the pewee.
For music we have the tree-toads and cicada. The sounds of this season
are rhythmic and vibratory--virile songs of the year's manhood--the
mature year, lusty and vigorous. But how soon they dwindle and wane,
despite this sonorous protestation, grow silent and slip into the sear
and yellow, and thence into the leafless, the glittering, the sublime
aspects of winter! The last of September brings with it just a reminder
of the sweet and winsome sounds of spring. At this season the
song-sparrow indulges in a wonderfully ecstatic reverie, a bit of wild
melody charged with feeling as of some larger consciousness, some
tribal memories of that musical race, now finding voice in the waning
year. So continuous and varied is the theme, and withal so complex and
involved as compared with his usual simple and positive lay, that one
must look at him twice to make sure it is he, and not some unknown
minstrel from a distant shore.
Insects are the autumn singers and take the place of birds and frogs.
The crickets are as musical in their way as the thrush family, though
provided with but indifferent instruments. When you consider that these
crickets and locusts _will_ express themselves--will fill the day with
song--though they are without vocal organs and must perforce do with
legs and wings instead, you must respect them as musicians. It is a
distinctly aboriginal music as compared with that of the birds, as
tom-toms and pipes are to violins and cellos. And yet it is rhythmic
withal and not wanting in sweetness. Contrast these merry crickets with
the silent spider. There is no song in the annals of her race. She is
unsocial and unmusical like the savage birds of prey. Yet before bees
and birds had appeared on the earth there were crickets chirping.
Theirs is the most ancient chant of the world--the Song of Sex.
Autumn nights are melodious with a voice, which in the distance is so
like that of the hyla of early spring, though softer and more
throbbing, that it is often mistaken for a kind of tree-toad. Heard
near at hand it is singularly clear and almost bell-like, though
ventriloquial in its elusiveness and difficult to locate, for as you
approach, it ceases and is taken up by another a short distance away.
Even when standing directly in front of it, it appears to come from
several directions. It was only after prowling the woods with a lantern
that I discovered the identity of the sweet singer, a small insect of a
pale green hue, not over an inch in length, looking like a sort of
locust, though classed with the crickets. The translucent wings are of
a delicate ivory-white and the antennæ very long.
This cricket was hanging to the edge of a grape leaf when the rays of
the lantern fell upon him. He perhaps took it for moonlight, for on a
sudden the wings were erected until at right angles to the body, and
then, as it were automatically, and with the precision of a pendulum,
they moved to and fro, partly crossing their bases and thus scraping
the veins of the middle portion--and the mysterious singer of the night
stood revealed.
The quality of the tone--the timbre--suggests the sound made by rubbing
the rim of a glass bowl, the horny plate of the wing giving it great
resonance. It appears to be pitched to A below middle C, though some
may be A sharp or even B. The overtones make it difficult to determine
the pitch. The chirping keeps up a good part of the night, and in the
wee small hours takes on an uncertain quaver, as if the little singer
had fallen asleep and were droning drowsily in its slumbers.
An insect which may be the same one--certainly an allied species--has a
day-song somewhat different from this song of the night, a shrilling in
place of a chirp. This is made by elevating the wings in the same
manner as at night, but instead of rubbing them one across the other in
regular time, they are rapidly and continuously vibrated like an
electric bell. The rapidity of the vibration raises the pitch, though
the quality of the tone is but little different.
There is in this day-song no suggestion of the blistering, feverish
shrill of the dog-day cicada, but a far-off dreamy sound. A little
before sunset it gradually gives way to that of the night. Day
inevitably inspires one song and night another, as if these reacted to
bring out two sets of emotions. And yet there is but one theme: the
minstrels sing always of that, but serenade the fair one after one
fashion by day and more serenely by the light of the stars. She, having
apparently no ears, hears none the less, and perhaps detects variations
in this monotonous ditty and even distinguishes the fine quality of
some particular voice--some clearness of tone, some pathetic _tremulo_
indicative of a cricket's feelings. For is not this a song-festival of
all the grasshoppers? I noticed a common short-horned grasshopper
stridulating in the sunshine, which he did by taking short flights and
rapidly opening and shutting his wings like an accordion. This produced
a series of dry, crackling sounds as the wing was scraped against the
wing-cover. After thus exhibiting his powers, a female at length came
from some little distance and lit beside him, as much as to say, "If
you can sing like that I am yours forevermore."
One feels some sympathy with these sweet singers of the fields in
knowing what a little life is theirs, how short is the span. For the
most part they have but a few months to sport in the sunshine. This
epithalamium is at the same time a requiem. In October it rises, a
universal threnody, the death-song of the insects. Over all the land,
wasps and bees and butterflies fall like leaves. Death overtakes them
on the wing. They lie down to sleep, like travelers lost in the snow.
WILD GARDENS
Improvement easily becomes an affectation, from which all healthy
natures suffer periodic reactions that take them to the mountains and
the forest, to those primeval estates loved of wild bees, of the
phoebe and the wren. One feels a sympathy with those renegade plants
known as garden escapes--star of Bethlehem, bouncing-bet, and the
rest--which have run away from the garden for the freedom of the woods
and highways. The conventionalities of spade and hoe are odious to
them. They wander far from the assemblage of the elect; they will live
wild and free, these Philistines, following the open road wherever it
may lead, with a sort of tramp instinct. Even the staid and domestic
apple will break away from the fold to seek the unregenerate society of
the pastures.
The hemlock woods, the meadow and the bog are wild gardens which
require no cultivating themselves, but only a certain cultivation and
appreciation in us, which they repay with gentle and unfailing
interest year after year. What we get from them will depend on what we
take to them.
Flowers are nothing away from their haunts. We must have the field in
which the clover blossomed--bees and all, the cranberry-bog, the mossy
bank of the violet, the white birch on which the polyporus grew. Take,
for example, the clintonia, solitary amidst fallen spruce logs on the
mountain slope. Imagine it transferred to a trim garden! If you have
really seen that flower of the solitudes, you have seen the mossy rock
overhanging it, the spruce cones lying thick about; sniffed the balsam
and heard the veery on the mountain. Or consider this mountain sheep
pasture with its clumps of stunted spruce and balsam, its scattered
boulders and patches of sensitive fern, its reddening sorrel and
running cinquefoil; bluets lie over the ground like a light fall of
snow; pasture stones are incrusted with parmelias and set in a frame of
hair-cap moss and reindeer lichens, incomparable mosaics; wild
strawberries nestle among dainty speedwells, half hidden under the bent
grass. It is a whole, an homogeneous piece of work, like a tapestry.
There is not a bog-rush nor a buttercup to be spared.
From the first fragrant spicebush to the last witch-hazel, no
cultivated shrub is to be compared with them, for the virtue of the
wild is not to be transplanted and is never imprisoned in flower-beds.
These shrubs of the pasture have a personality derived from immemorial
contact with the virgin and uncultivated soil. They have been nourished
by the very juices of earth and by the bone and sinew of the mountains.
If you would have the barberry, you must move the pasture itself. It is
of wild gardens solely, an untamed and untamable beauty. And so it is
with the dogwood, for what is this but sunshine in the May woods--rifts
of light breaking here and there through the overarching green of oak
and tulip trees? It were as easy to catch sunbeams as to carry this
away.
The mountain is the mother of these wild gardens; a vigorous dame to
bring forth so gentle a brood--as the slopes of Vesuvius produce a
mellow wine which has taken only a kindly warmth from the raging heart
of the volcano. All her fairest virtues have blossomed in her children;
her graces would remain unsuspected but for them. Let the gods but
fling down a bit of rock anywhere and presently, after a few ages, it
shall dissolve into violets and anemones. Grind it to powder by the
wayside and you have only made it into thistles and burdock; scatter it
over the fields and it becomes daisies and sunflowers.
Imperceptibly, granite melts at its outer edge into a fringe of
dicksonia and wild rose. Limestone will bring forth a richer garden
than sandstone, as though, like the rock-maple, it had more sweetness
in its veins than another. Some of the most delightful gardens arise
from disintegrating basalt. Perchance this rock retains a little of its
old volcanic heat and has more of the finer graces in its make-up than
that which was coldly laid down under water. Fiery lava, tempered and
mollified by Time, has become kindly and amenable. Where was only
desolation, after countless days the dicentra hangs out its white flags
in truce to the warring elements. The sand hillocks of the terminal
moraine are the chosen land of mountain laurel, and there are untold
acres where this constitutes almost the sole undergrowth. What a
hanging garden, when, on a level with the eye, one continuous bloom
spreads through the twilight of the woods--the single buds like
miniature urns of rose quartz so delicately are they sculptured,--here
a warm rosy tint and there a ghostly pallid blossom. This soil, the
detritus of glacial torrents, despite its many washings, has not given
up all its gold, but is rich in arbutus and in _pedata_ violets. It is,
after all, granite, the mother-lode of the earth; granite after endless
transmutations but still retaining some of its virtues.
To the first flowers belongs a charm, the most exquisite of any,
something tender and appealing, as though they enshrined the fairest
virtues of the year--its modesty, its purity, its sweetness--in
violets, anemones and bloodroot. This charm, so elusive, has never been
described, nor shall be indeed. It is like music which is a language in
itself and will bear no translation. The bee must approach these with
some humility and more gentleness than is shown to the sturdy blossoms
of summer. They are eminently the "gentle race" of flowers, born in the
enchanted time.
We go with hungry eyes at this season. By midsummer we have been well
feasted and no longer see individual blossoms so much as masses of
bloom. Bloodroot and hepatica are like the dewdrops of early morning
which disappear before the sun. They can be found just once in a
year; after that they will not appear the same. It is cheering to
come upon such a fair company of spring beauty where but a few days
since were none; to enter a stretch of woodland and find it populous
with these friends of a lifetime, now returned to their old haunts. We
do not commonly reflect that they have been under the snow all the
while. Scattered among them, the anemones lie in drifts, like a late
flurry of snow and quite as evanescent, lingering in the shadows only.
These are the delicate children of April; May is their foster-mother.
Contact with them is like the glimpse of a _spirituelle_ face. But the
adder's-tongue which nestles by the brook has more fire in its veins
than the rest. Its spotted leaves give it an almost feline beauty as it
droops with the southern languor of the lily.
[Illustration: WILD GARDENS COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY RUDOLF EICKEMEYER]
Serenity dwells with the woodland flowers. There is about them some
subtle refinement and exclusiveness. They appear fit symbols of
lowliness and modesty. A strip of woodland beside the turnpike is like
an ancient chapel left amid the din and hubbub of city streets. The
sturdier plants, both coarse and gay, halt at the edge of the wood.
Within, the light is subdued; nothing obtrudes upon the eye or ear. It
is obvious that the cathedral had its origin in the forest. What a fair
and devout congregation has jack-in-the-pulpit, where the Canada violet
stands side by side with the medeola and the painted trillium. The
medeola declines its unfertilized flower, so that its maiden life is
hid from view beneath the tri-leaved canopy, and only in its mature and
matronly days does it begin to ascend and take a position where the
seed shall crown the plant and be in evidence. From what insect
despoiler is this shy virgin so carefully hid?