3. In the golden lightning

Of the sunken sun,

O'er which clouds are bright'ning,

Thou dost float and run,

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

4. The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;

Like a star of heaven

In the broad daylight,

Thou art unseen, but, yet, I hear thy shrill delight.

5. What thou art, we know not;

What is most like thee?

From rainbow clouds there flow not.

Drops so bright to see,

As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

6. Like a poet hidden.

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

7. Teach us, sprite or bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine;

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

8. Chorus hymeneal,

Or triumphal chaunt,

Matched with thine would be all

But an empty vaunt-

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

9. What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves, or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

10. Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

11. We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught:

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

12. Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know:
Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow,

The world should listen then as I am listening now.

Shelley.

ings; but how consummate is this art, and how skillfully is the nest concealed! We occasionally light upon it, but who, unaided by the movements of the bird, could find it out? During the present season I went to the woods nearly every day for a fortnight, without making any discoveries of this kind; till one day, paying them a farewell visit, I chanced to come upon several nests.

2. A black and white creeping warbler suddenly became much alarmed as I approached a crumbling old stump in a dense part of the forest. He alighted upon it, chirped sharply, ran up and down its sides, and finally left it with. much reluctance. The nest, which contained three young birds nearly fledged, was placed upon the ground at the foot of the stump, and in such a position that the color of the young harmonized perfectly with the bits of bark, sticks, etc., lying about. My eye rested upon them for the second time before I made them out. They hugged the nest very closely, but, as I put down my hand, they all scampered off with loud cries for help, which caused the parent-birds to place themselves almost within my reach. The nest was merely a little dry grass arranged in a thick bed of dry leaves.

3. This was amid a thick undergrowth. Moving on into a passage of large, stately hemlocks, with only here and there a small beech or maple rising up into the perennial twilight, I paused to make out a note which was entirely new to me. It is still in my ear. Though unmistakably a bird-note, it yet suggested the bleating of a tiny lambkin. Presently the birds appeared-a pair of the solitary vireo. They came flitting from point to point, alighting only for a moment at a time, the male silent, but the female uttering this strange, tender note. It was a rendering into some new sylvan dialect of the human sentiment of maidenly It was really pathetic in its sweetness and childlike confidence and joy.

4. I soon discovered that the pair were building a nest upon a low branch a few yards from me. The male flew cautiously to the spot and adjusted something, and the twain moved on, the female calling to her mate, at intervals, love-e, love-e, with a cadence and tenderness in the tone that rang in the ear long afterward. The nest was suspended to the fork of a small branch, as is usual with the vireos, plentifully lined with lichens, and bound and rebound with masses of coarse spider-webs. There was no attempt at concealment except in the neutral tints, which made it look like a natural growth of the dim, gray woods.

5. Continuing my random walk, I next paused in a low part of the woods, where the larger trees began to give place to a thick second growth that covered an old barkpeeling. I was standing by a large maple, when a small bird darted quickly away from it, as if it might have come out of a hole near its base. As the bird paused a few yards from me, and began to chirp uneasily, my curiosity was at once excited. When I saw it was the female mourning ground-warbler, and remembered that the nest of this bird had not yet been seen by any naturalist—that not even Dr. Brewer had ever seen the eggs-I felt that here was something worth looking for.

6. So I carefully began the search, exploring inch by inch the ground, the base and roots of the tree, and the various shrubby growths about it, till, finding nothing, and fearing I might really put my foot in it, I bethought me to withdraw to a distance and after some delay return again, and, thus forewarned, note the exact point from which the bird flew. This I did, and, returning, had little difficulty in discovering the nest. It was placed but a few feet from the maple-tree, in a bunch of ferns, and about six inches from the ground. It was quite a massive nest, composed entirely of the stalks and leaves of dry grass, with an inner lining of fine, dark brown roots.