is sound
rising pure and serene, as if a spirit from some remote height were
slowly chanting a divine accompaniment. This song appeals to the
sentiment of the beautiful in me, and suggests a serene religious
beatitude as no other sound in nature does. It is perhaps more of an
evening than a morning hymn,

though I hear it at all hours of the day. It is very simple, and I
can hardly tell the secret of its charm. "O spheral, spheral!" he
seems to say; "O holy, holy! O clear away, clear away! O clear up,
clear up!" interspersed with the finest trills and the most delicate
preludes. It is not a proud, gorgeous strain, like the tanager's or
the grosbeak's; suggests no passion or emotion,--nothing
personal,--but seems to be the voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one
attains to in his best moments. It realizes a peace and a deep, solemn
joy that only the finest souls may know. A few nights ago I ascended a
mountain to see the world by moonlight, and when near the summit the
hermit commenced his evening hymn a few rods from me. Listening to
this strain on the lone mountain, with the full moon just rounded from
the horizon, the pomp of your cities and the pride of your
civilization seemed trivial and cheap.

I have seldom known two of these birds to be singing at the same time
in the same locality, rivaling each other, like the wood thrush or the
veery. Shooting one from a tree, I have observed another take up the
strain from almost the identical perch in less than ten minutes
afterward. Later in the day, when I had penetrated the heart of the
old Barkpeeling, I came suddenly upon one singing from a low stump,
and for a wonder he did not seem alarmed, but lifted up his divine
voice as if his privacy was undisturbed. I open his beak and find the
inside yellow as gold. I was prepared to find it inlaid with pearls
and diamonds, or to see an angel issue from it.

He is not much in the books. Indeed, I am acquainted with scarcely
any writer on ornithology whose head is not muddled on the subject of
our three prevailing song-thrushes, confounding either their figures
or their songs. A writer in the "Atlantic" [Footnote: For December,
1853] gravely tells us the wood thrush is sometimes called the hermit,
and then, after describing the song of the hermit with great beauty
and correctness, cooly ascribes it to the veery! The new Cyclopaedia,
fresh from the study of Audubon, says the hermit's song consists of a
single plaintive not