grove or
the meadow would separate itself more from the background of nature,
and be a greater challenge to the ear, than is the strain of the
thrush or the song of the sparrow. There is something elusive,
indefinite, neutral, about bird-songs that makes them strike
obliquely, as it were, upon the ear; and we are very apt to miss them.
They are a part of nature, the Nature that lies about us, entirely
occupied with her own affairs, and quite regardless of our presence.
Hence it is with bird-songs as it is with so many other things in
nature--they are what we make them; the ear that hears them must be
half creative. I am always disturbed when persons not especially
observant of birds ask me to take them where they can hear a
particular bird, in whose song they have become interested through a
description in some book. As I listen with them, I feel like
apologizing for the bird: it has a bad cold, or has just heard some
depressing news; it will not let itself out. The song seems so casual
and minor when you make a dead set at it. I have taken persons to hear
the hermit thrush, and I have fancied that they were all the time
saying to themselves, "Is that all?" But should one hear the bird in
his walk, when the mind is attuned to simple things and is open and
receptive, when expectation is not aroused and the song comes as a
surprise out of the dusky silence of the woods, then one feels that
it merits all the fine things that can be said of it.

One of our popular writers and lecturers upon birds told me this
incident: He had engaged to take two city girls out for a walk in the
country, to teach them the names of the birds they might see and hear.
Before they started, he read to them Henry van Dyke's poem on the song
sparrow,--one of our best bird-poems,--telling them that the song
sparrow was one of the first birds they were likely to hear. As they
proceeded with their walk, sure enough, there by the roadside was a
sparrow in song. The bird man called the attention of his companions
to it. It was some time before the unpracticed ears of the girls could
make it out; then one of them said (the poem she had just heard, I
suppose, still ringing in her ears), "What! that little squeaky
thing?" The sparrow's song meant nothing to her at all, and how could
she share the enthusiasm of the poet? Probably the warble of the
robin, or the call of the meadowlark or of the highhole, if they
chanced to hear them, meant no more to these