Part 6

There are two distinct grounds on which these birds are to be preserved and encouraged. The first ground is the refining pleasure which they give to every person of true susceptibility. Thousands there are who live in the country who will regard this as sheer sentimentality. They are robust people, who drive around all day with vigorous industry, and have always done so, until at length their very standard of manhood is made up of some kind of physical force. He is a man that can lift the largest weight, run the longest and fastest, cut the most grain, climb most lithely, wrestle the most dextrously. And if he can make a shrewd bargain, has an eye for the points in an ox or horse, has the knack of making money, and a good-natured way of pushing about among men, he is considered, and considers himself, to be a real up-and-down man!

But where are the finer traits? God made blossom bulbs in every nature, and if men do not blossom they are deficient in the higher elements.

To disregard qualities of beauty, in form, color, motion, and song, is so far to indicate a deformity of one’s own nature. We never think one to be more manly who cares nothing for the unmarketable graces of the natural world, than he who makes them a part of his daily enjoyment.

The argument is conclusive to a fine nature, when one says, “Birds are too beautiful to be killed.” It may be replied that noxious insects and animals are beautiful, too, and yet are destroyed by the humane and refined, because they are mischievous. We admit the statement, and are willing to apply it to birds. When they are really destructive to crops, or when they are, at proper seasons, needful for food, it is no inhumanity to take their lives. They must take their part and lot with the whole creation, which everywhere eats and is eaten.

But to return to our robin. There is no season of the year when the robin does not prevent more mischief than he accomplishes. He is an enormous eater, and, for the most part, he prefers a meat diet. No one who has not taken pains to observe and estimate can form any conception of the insects and worms devoured by the robin between March and August—that is, during the whole nesting period. One robin eats, in a single season, what, if built into a solid form, would be more than a whole ox. Fruit is but a small part of his diet; cherries, strawberries, and grapes, for a while, suffer from his depredations. Yet, if there were no birds these very things would suffer far more. Insects are more to be dreaded than birds. They elude our vigilance, they work secretly, they swarm in such numbers as to defy man’s power. But birds keep them down. They destroy myriads of eggs, of grubs, of tender worms, and of fruit-loving insects. To destroy birds for the sake of saving fruit is like throwing down the fence about one’s garden to keep the pigs out! Even admit, as some do and we do not, that blackbirds and crows deserve to be shot for destroying the planter’s seed. We claim that the robin does not belong to their company. He preserves a hundred-fold more than he destroys.

On every ground, then, of humanity, of good taste, and of thrift, robins should be spared. They are our best friends. They are, beyond all question, the finest song-bird of the temperate zone. They are a watch and guard against insect depredations in orchard and garden, and, with other birds, they make possible the raising of fruit, which, without them, it is no exaggeration to say, would be utterly impossible. They are, next to the wren and sparrows, the most companionable of birds, hovering about the dwellings of man, and following him, step by step, as he subdues the wilderness, and singing the song of triumph for the axe and the plow.

One word as to the robin’s song. Whoever has read Audubon’s description of the wood-thrush’s song, and the still more glowing account by a writer in the Atlantic Monthly of two or three years ago, will surely be disappointed on first hearing it. In any proper sense, it has no song, but only a few sweet sentences, which it utters in a sad and almost melancholy way, sitting solitary in some forest edge, or tree overhanging a brook. The bird is a recluse. So, one imagines a tender-hearted woman, disappointed in love, yet not embittered, might sing from the casement of a nunnery a hymn of mingled resignation and regret. But, to compare this monosyllabic song of the wood-thrush to the robin’s, is like comparing a ballad to an oratorio, or the tinkling of a guitar to the sweet tone of a piano-forte under the hands of some Perabo.

The robin is an out-door bird. He lives in the sunshine. He attracts no sympathy by delicate ways. He is altogether robust, and full of dashing life. When twenty or thirty robins between three and four o’clock in a June morning are at full voice, it would be no exaggeration to compare it to a rain of music. It is no dainty thrumming,—no parceling out of a sweet note or two, with more rests than notes. It is a musical rush, the exultation of a healthy, hearty bird, that sings by the half-hour, without pause, and is ever ready to sing again.

The evening song of the robin I most love to hear. Heard from the top of some orchard tree, or of some meadow maple, while his note has the fire and brilliancy of his morning song, there is in it a slight undertone of sadness. Indeed, this evening song seems to be a mate-call. For ten or fifteen minutes the bird will send out its mellow call over all the region, if peradventure the truant mother may come home. A slight impatience mixes with its closing notes. He flies to a neighboring tree, utters two or three sharp single notes, and then, beginning again, swells out his long call louder than before, warbling five to ten minutes. He pauses. No bird returns. He sits silent.

Perhaps he remembers that there had been a little domestic quarrel during the day, and if his mate is dead, he may never be able to say to her, “I am sorry.” A nest full of little birds needs the mother. The twilight is deepening. Once more, its brilliance now toned down by an unmistakable sadness, he sends out far and near through the dew-damp air a song which is more a lamentation than a call. If there be no response, he flies silently away, and the air rests.

But, sometimes, just as his song is ending, it breaks out into a sharp note of surprise. A flutter is heard, and two birds fly hastily away. The wanderer has come home again!

Can one, all summer long, follow birds with sympathy, and enter into their gentle life, throwing around it, by the imagination, the charm of the affections, and then consent to their destruction as if they had been mere birds from a coop? Shoot and eat my birds? It is but a step this side of cannibalism. The next step beyond, and one would hanker after Jenny Lind or Miss Kellogg.

VIII.

SOUNDS OF TREES.

July 24th.

The sounds and motions of trees constitute subtle but important elements of pleasure. It is not enough that a tree have a comely form as a whole; that it cast a dense shade in the sultry days of summer; that, perhaps, it yield a nut or fruit; and that, finally, when it gives up its life to the inevitable ax, its prostrate trunk shall furnish good timber. Besides these uses of bodily comfort and of economy, a tree, like a rich-hearted person, has a hundred nameless ways which we hardly stop to analyze, but which, were they suddenly taken away, we should miss.

The murmuring of trees is profoundly affecting to a sensitive spirit. In some moods of imagination one cannot help feeling that trees have a low song, or a conversation of leaves. They whisper, or speak, or cry out, and even roar. No one knows this last quality so well as those who have been in old oak forests in a storm, with violent wind. A dense forest opposes such a resistance to the free passage of the air, that the sound is much deadened. But in a park or oak-opening, where spaces are left for the motion of the air, and among open-branched trees, a storm moves with such power and majesty, that not even the battles of thunder-clouds are more sublime, and, under certain circumstances, it becomes terrific. At the beginning of the tempest, the trees sway and toss as if seeking to escape; as the violence increases, the branches bounce back, the leaves, turning their white under sides to the light, fairly scream. The huge boughs creak and strain like a ship in a storm. Now and then some branches which have grown across each other are drawn back and forth, as if demons were scraping infernal bass-viols. Occasionally a branch breaks with a wild crash, or some infirm tree, caught unawares in a huge puff of the storm, goes down with crashing as it falls, and with a thunder-stroke when it reaches the ground. I would go farther to hear a storm-concert in an old forest, than any music that man ever made. No one who is familiar with forest sounds but is sure, when he hears Beethoven’s music, that much of it was inspired by the sounds of winds among trees.

There are milder joys, however, in tree converse. Only this morning I awakened to hear it rain. That steady splash of drops which a northeast wind brings on is not easily mistaken. I flatter myself that my ear is too well trained to all the ordinary sounds of nature to be easily deceived. I rise, and throw back the blinds, when lo! not a drop is falling. It is the wind in my maple-trees. I had thought of that, and listened with the most discriminating attention, and was sure that it was rain!

Twice in our life we lived in houses built on the edge of the original forests. These had been thinned out, and recesses opened up. It happened in both cases that an ash and a hickory had been left, which shot up, without side branches, to a great height. The trunks were supple and tough. Whenever the winds moved gently, these long and lithe trees moved with singular grace and beauty. As there was no perceptible wind along the ground, their movements seemed voluntary. And yet there was in it that kind of irresolution which one sees in sleep-walking. But as soon as the breath became a breeze, the wide circles through which these rooted gymnasts moved was wonderful. They seemed going forth in every direction, and yet surely and quickly springing back to position again. And in every motion, such was their elasticity, they manifested the utmost grace. The sighing of winds in a pine forest has no parallel sound except upon the sea-shore. Of all sounds of leaves it is the sweetest and saddest, to certain moods of summer leisure.

The pine sings, like the poet, with no every-day voice, but in a tone apart from all common sounds. It has the power to change the associations, and to quicken the poetic sensibility, as no other singing tree can do. Every one should have this old harper, like a seer or a priest among trees, about his dwelling. Under an old pine would naturally be found the young maiden, whose new lover was far across the seas. In the sounds that would descend she could not fail to hear the voices of the sea,—the roar of winds, the plash of waves running in upon the shore. A young mother, whose first-born had returned to God who gave it, would go at twilight to the pines; for, to her ear, the whole air must needs seem full of spirit voices. They would sing to her thoughts in just such sad strains as soothe sorrow. Nor would it be strange if, in the rise and fall of these sylvan syllables, she should imagine that she heard her babe again, calling to her from the air.

Every country place should have that very coquette among trees, the aspen. It seems never to sleep. Its twinkling fingers are playing in the air at some arch fantasy almost without pause. If you sit at a window with a book, it will wink and blink, and beckon, and coax, till you cannot help speaking to it! That must be a still day that does not see the aspen quiver! A single leaf sometimes will begin to wag, and not another on the whole tree will move. Sometimes a hidden breath will catch at a lower branch, then, shifting, will leave that still, while it shakes a topmost twig. Though the air may move so gently that your cheek does not feel it, this sensitive tree will seem all a shiver, and turn its leaves upward with shuddering chill. It is the daintiest fairy of all the trees. One should have an aspen on every side of his house, that no window should be without a chance to look upon its nods and becks, and to rejoice in its innocent witcheries. I have seen such fair sprites, too, in human form. But one does not get off so easily, if he sports too much with them. The aspen leaf makes no wounds. Its frolics spin no silken threads which one cannot follow, and which will not break!

The musical qualities of trees have not been considered enough, in planting around our dwellings. The great-leaved magnolias have no fine sound. Willows have but little. Cedars, yew-trees, and Lombardy poplars are almost silent. It is said that the Lombardy poplar is the male tree, the female having never come over. It is very likely. It is stiff enough to be an old bachelor. It spreads out no side branches. Its top dies early. It casts a penurious shadow.

But my hand is tired. The winds move; all the leaves call me. Let me go forth.

This ocean above me is sure to cure trouble. The winds sound, the trees sing. My soul yearns. Its thoughts and moods below may roll like a disturbed sea; but, drawn up into the heavenly air, like the waters of the sea, they forget their wrath, and descend again in gentle dews and nourishing rains.

IX.

UNVEILED NONSENSE.

August 28th.

MY DEAR MR. BONNER: Are you not a censor of all your contributors? Do you not read cautiously all matter sent to the Ledger, to prevent the entrance thereinto of any injurious sentiments? And yet you have allowed blasphemy in your columns? You have! Or else the Christian Intelligencer, the Dutch Reformed religious journal of New York, by one of its contributors, is greatly mistaken. An article appears there signed “Puritan,” and entitled “Veiled Profanity.” It begins with an extract from an article of one of your contributors:—