Thrush

a family of singing birds, including the American robin and the bluebird. The so-called brown thrush or brown thrasher, a fine singer, belongs to another family, being related to the catbird and to the mockingbird. There are over 150 world thrushes, some twelve of which are found in the wooded regions of the United States and Canada. The most celebrated singers are the wood thrush, the hermit thrush, and the veery or Wilson's thrush. The prevailing color of all three is cinnamon or olive brown with spotted breasts. The hermit builds on the ground. The two others build in underbrush. The eggs are from three to five--of a greenish blue, like those of the robin, but smaller. Thoreau says:

The wood thrush's is no opera music; it is not so much the composition as the strain, the tone, that interests us, cool bars of melody from the atmosphere of everlasting morning or evening. . . . Though heard at noon, there is the liquid coolness of things drawn from the bottom of springs. The thrush's song alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest.

I admire the moderation of this master. There is nothing tumultuous in his song. He launches forth one strain of pure, unmatchable melody, and then he pauses and gives the hearer and himself time to digest this, and then another and another at suitable intervals. Men talk of the rich song of other birds, the thrasher, mockingbird, nightingale. But I doubt, I doubt.

In a poem written by Oliver Wendell Holmes for a banquet in honor of Whittier's seventieth birthday, he paid the modest Quaker poet the delicate compliment of calling him