three of them flew over me, one of them crying “chirp?”
     I now came to a turn in the road - and here among a lot of dead branches and rubbish in the midst of a swampy stream that flowed along the road, was a pair of song-sparrows. He was singing a mad solo to his lady-love - a glorious song. A song-sparrow song - his very name gives him away - a song sparrow’s song seems to me to be a lot of happy melody crowded in the little bird’s throat, which rippes impetuously in a hurried flood of secret notes - the song of spring. Could Shakespeare have heard him he would have repeated again:
“Under the greenwood tree,
Who loves to lie with me
And tune his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat.
Come hither, come hither, come hither
Here shall he see,
No enemy but winter and rough weather”
but the notes of the song sparrow banish “winter and rough weather”.
           Altho the skies are grey and it is cold, still the whisper of the wind, the whistle of the cardinal, the hoarse cry of the crow, the distant call of a peter-bird, the subdued murmurs of the brook