TO THE MEMORY OF My Mother, WHOSE BEAUTIFUL GENIUS IN ART, HER NEW DAUGHTER HAS STRIVEN WORTHILY TO PERPETUATE, This Book, THE FIRST FLOWER OF OUR LIVES, IS INSCRIBED. WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. CHAPTER I. NATURE AND HER HARMONIES. I LOVE Song-birds with a singular affection. Out of the bottom of my heart I love them-for of all God's creatures, except a clear-eyed, innocent child, they have been to me a wonder and a miracle. I never could get done wondering to hear them sing. It sounds so strange to me that anything could be happy enough to sing but angels and young girls! Singing, when we come to think of it, seems properly to be the language of a deathless being the right form in which the exultings of an Immortal should be poured among the waves of shoreless sound. That a sweet sound should ever cease to be, appears to me unnatural-at least unpoetical-for, let its vibrations once begin, though they may soon die to our gross sense, must they not go widening, circling on, stinging the sense of myriad other lives with a mysterious pleasantness (such as will overcome us in a wood upon an April day), until the uttermost bound of our poor space be past, and yet the large circumference go spread and spreading tremulous among the girdling stars? It may be so for all we can tell! If it be so, how quaint it is to hear these little feathered creatures, from some frail |