the hylas. May is the transition month, and exists to connect April
and June, the root with the flower.

With June the cup is full, our hearts are satisfied, there is no more
to be desired. The perfection of the season, among other things, has
brought the perfection of the song and the plumage of the birds. The
master artists are all here; and the expectations excited by the robin
and the song sparrow are fully justified. The thrushes have all come;
and I sit down upon the first rock, with hands full of the pink
azalea, to listen. With me the cuckoo does not arrive till June; and
often the goldfinch, the kingbird, the scarlet tanager delay their
coming till then. In the meadows the bobolink is in all his glory; in
the high pastures the field sparrow sings his breezy vesper-hymn; and
the woods are unfolding to the music of the thrushes.

The cuckoo is one of the most solitary birds of our forests, and is
strangely tame and quiet, appearing equally untouched by joy or grief,
fear or anger. Something remote seems ever weighing upon his mind. His
note or call is as of one lost or wandering, and to the farmer is
prophetic of rain. Amid the general joy and the sweet assurance of
things, I love to listen to the strange clairvoyant call. Heard a
quarter of a mile away, from out the depths of the forest, there is
something peculiarly weird and monkish about it. Wordsworth's lines
upon the European species apply equally well to ours:--"O blithe
new-comer! I have heard, I hear thee and rejoice: O cuckoo! shall I
call thee bird? Or but a wandering voice?

"While I am lying on the grass,
Thy loud note smites my ear!
From hill to hill it seems to pass,