are, many of them, heard there no
longer. Some are dead; some have retired to private life. But the birds
never die. Every spring they come trooping back for their all-summer
session. The turkey-buzzard still floats majestically over the city; the
chat still practices his lofty tumbling in the suburban pastures,
snarling and scolding at all comers; the flowing Potomac still yields "a
blameless sport" to the fish-crow and the kingfisher; the orchard oriole
continues to whistle in front of the Agricultural Department, and the
crow blackbird to parade back and forth over the Smithsonian lawns.
Presidents and senators may come and go, be praised and vilified, and
then in turn forgotten; but the birds are subject to no such mutations.
It is a foolish thought, but sometimes their happy carelessness seems
the better part.

MINOR SONGSTERS.

The lesser lights, the dearer still
That they elude a vulgar eye.

BROWNING.

Listen too,
How every pause is filled with under-notes.

SHELLEY.

MINOR SONGSTERS.

Among those of us who are in the habit of attending to bird-songs, there
can hardly be anybody, I think, who has not found himself specially and
permanently attracted by the music of certain birds who have little or
no general reputation. Our favoritism may perhaps be the result of early
associations: we heard the singer first in some uncommonly romantic
spot, or when we were in a mood of unusual sensibility; and, in greater
or less degree, the charm of that hour is always renewed for us with the
repetition of the song. Or if may be (who will assert the contrary?)
that there is some occult relation between the bird's mind and our own.
Or, once more, something may be due to the natural pleasure which
amiable people take (and all lovers of birds may be supposed, _a
priori_, to belong to that class) in paying peculiar honor to merit
which the world at large, less discriminating than they, has thus far
failed to recognize, and in which, therefore, as by "right of
discovery," they have a sort of proprietary interest. This, at least, is
evident: our preference is not determined altogether by the intrinsic
worth of the song; the mind is active, not passive, and gives to the
music something from itself,--"the consecration and the poet's dream."

Furthermore, i