Fresh fields Author's ed Author:John Burroughs Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SONG-BIRDS. THE charm of the songs of birds, like that of a nation's popular airs and hymns, is so little a question of intrinsic musica... more »l excellence, and so largely a matter of association and suggestion, or of subjective colouring and reminiscence, that it is perhaps entirely natural for every people to think their own feathered songsters the best. What music would there not be to the homesick American, in Europe, in the simple and plaintive note of our bluebird, or the ditty of our song-sparrow, or the honest carol of our robin ; and what to the European traveller in this country in the burst of the blackcap, or the redbreast, or the whistle of the merlin! The relative merit of bird-songs can hardly be settled dogmatically; I suspect there is very little of what we call music or of what could be noted on the musical scale, in even the best of them; they are parts of nature, and their power is in the degree in which they speak to our experience. F. F. L When the Duke of Argyll, who is a lover of the birds and a good ornithologist, was in this country, he got the impression that our song-birds were inferior to the British, and he refers to others of his countrymen as of like opinion. No wonder he thought our robin inferior in power to the missel-thrush, in variety to the mavis, and in melody to the blackbird. Robin did not and could not sing to his ears the song he sings to ours. Then it is very likely true that his Grace did not hear the robin in the most opportune moment and season, or when the contrast of his song with the general silence and desolation of nature is the most striking and impressive. The nightingale needs to be heard at night, the lark at dawn rising to meet the sun; and robin, if you would know the magic of his voice, should be he...« less