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Updated: May 31, 2025
I have no more learning about bird-music than would help me to guess that a dull dissyllabic refrain in the heart of the wood came from the cuckoo; and when at moments I heard a twitter of fuller tone, with a more suggestive modulation, I could only <i>hope</i> it was the nightingale.
"Wait for me," she said; "I am not dressed. Run to the cabin and wake Moses, dear!" She heard him open the door; the deadened thunder of the cannonade filled the house for an instant, shut out by the closing door, only to swell again to an immense unbroken volume of solemn harmony. The bird-music had ceased; distant hilltops grew brighter.
Otherwise everything outside was strangely silent; as the hot hours of midday and early afternoon went by there was no note of bird-music, nor any sound of wind in the elm-tops. Just a little breeze stirred from time to time, enough to make the slats of the half-drawn Venetian blind rattle faintly.
Rap went up to Orchard Farm one morning very early to take Nat for a walk through the fields, down to the river, to see some birds that had arrived in the night. It was only five o'clock, but Dr. Hunter was walking to and fro in the garden, listening to the burst of bird-music as eagerly as if it were for the first time in his life.
Down the stair he slipped, and out of the door, into the well-nigh intoxicating beauty of the southern summer's night. Indeed, the odors of the dew-drenched flowers the moonlight the bird-music, together with his remembrance of his lady's greeting, went to his head like wine.
And something of the same dissatisfaction, though more tinged with melancholy, has been felt by many who stood beside the closing grave and heard the same bird-music making harsh discord with the rumbling of the clods falling on the lid of the coffin, and who saw the pleasant sunshine tinging the very sods that were in a few moments to form an impassable barrier between the beloved dead and the miserable living.
Aunt Madge bade the children look out of the window at a bird's nest, which was snuggled into one corner of the piazza-roof, so high up that nobody could reach it without a very tall ladder. "Now," said aunt Madge, "the very first thing Grace hears in the morning will probably be bird-music." Grace clapped her hands.
The day and the event have become so interwoven with each other, that I cannot separate them. I think of his placid face, sleeping its last still sleep; and through the open window, I see the springing grass and the bursting buds. My ears are filled with bird-music, and all other sounds are hushed in this Sabbath stillness. All I see and hear seems to be hallowed by his departed spirit.
Science tells us how the bird-music, which is one of nature's foremost charms, has risen out of the bird's cry of distress in the morning of time; how originally the music of field and forest was nothing more than an exclamation caused by the bird's bodily pain and fear, and how through the ages the primal note of anguish has been evolved and differentiated until it has risen into the ecstasy of the lark, melted into the silver note of the dove, swelled into the rapture of the nightingale, unfolded into the vast and varied music of the sky and the summer.
There was a Sabbath stillness in the air to-day, sweetened, as it were, by the bubbling of bird-music in the pleasaunce behind the hall and the high woods beyond. On the strips of rough turf before the gate and within it bloomed the spring flowers, white and blue. A hound lay stretched in the sunshine on the hall steps; twitching his ears to keep off a persistent fly.
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