ear failed to catch
any sound, and we knew he had reached his climax and was
circling. Once we distinctly saw him whirling far above us. Then
he was lost in the obscurity, and in a few seconds there rained
down upon us the notes of his ecstatic song--a novel kind of
hurried, chirping, smacking warble. It was very brief, and when
it ceased, we knew the bird was dropping plummet-like to the
earth. In half a minute or less his "zeep," "zeep," came up again
from the ground. In two or three minutes he repeated his flight
and song, and thus kept it up during the half-hour or more that
we remained to listen: now a harsh plaint out of the obscurity
upon the ground; then a jubilant strain from out the obscurity
of the air above. His mate was probably somewhere within
earshot, and we wondered just how much interest she took in the
performance. Was it all for her benefit, or inspired by her
presence? I think, rather, it was inspired by the May night, by
the springing grass, by the unfolding leaves, by the apple bloom,
by the passion of joy and love that thrills through nature at
this season. An hour or two before, we had seen the bobolinks in
the meadow beating the air with the same excited wing and
overflowing with the same ecstasy of song, but their demure,
retiring, and indifferent mates were nowhere to be seen. It would
seem as if the male bird sang, not to win his mate, but to
celebrate the winning, to invoke the young who are not yet born,
and to express the joy of love which is at the heart of Nature.

When I reached home, I went over the fourteen volumes of
Thoreau's Journal to see if he had made any record of having
heard the "woodcock's evening hymn," as Emerson calls it. He had
not. Evidently he never heard it, which is the more surprising as
he was abroad in the fields and marshes and woods at almost all
hours in the twenty-four and in all seasons and weathers, making
it the business of his life to see and record what was going on
in nature.

Thoreau's eye was much more reliable than his ear. He saw
straight, but did not always hear straight. For instance, he
seems always to have confounded the song of the hermit thrush
with that of the wood thrush. He records having heard the latter
even in April, but never the former. In the Maine woods and on
Monadnock it is always the wood thrush which he hears, and never
the hermit.

But if Thoreau's ear was sometimes at fault, I do not recall that
his eye ever was, while