You sometimes hear the warblings of unknown birds from the southern countries, repeated at a distance by the echoes of the forest.

a voice, to which the vocal rill, The lark's extatic harmony is rude; Distant it swells with many a holy trill, Now breaks wide warbling from yon orient cloud.

New-born flocks, In rustic dance, Frisking ply their feeble feet; Forgetful of their wintry trance, The birds his presence greet; But chief the sky-lark warbles high His trembling, thrilling ecstasy, And, lessening from the dazzled sight, Melts into air and liquid light.

The Bobolink usually commences his warbling just after sunrise, when the Robin, having sung from the earliest dawn, brings his performance to a close.

[Footnote 25: 'Warblings:' the succession of poets after Milton's time.

From wood to wood redoubling thunders roll, And bellow through the vales; the moving storm 520 Thickens amain, and loud triumphant shouts, And horns shrill-warbling in each glade, prelude To his approaching fate.

I once heard a crow imitate the warbling of a small bird, in a tone so entirely at variance with his ordinary voice, that, though assured by one who had heard him before, that it was a crow and nothing else, it was only on the clearest proof that I could satisfy myself of the fact.

Meadow-larks and song-sparrows kept up a faint warbling about us, but the crickets, which yesterday had here and there made a thin music, as of straggling bands of survivors of the Summer, were numbed into silence again.

In his courtship he uses the tenderest expressions, and caresses his mate by sitting close by her, and singing his most endearing warblings.

It was the measure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by.

Saul had taken down that wild warble of Longfellow's, "Hiawatha."