As I come over the hill, I hear the wood thrush

June 22. 

As I come over the hill, I hear the wood thrush singing his evening lay. This is the only bird whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thought, my fancy and imagination. 

It lifts and exhilarates me. It is inspiring. It changes all hours to an eternal morning. This minstrel sings in a time in which no event in the village can be contemporary. 

I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.

All that is ripest and fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood thrush.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 22, 1853

As I come over the hill, I hear the wood thrush singing his evening lay . See June 22, 1851:

I hear around me, but never in sight,

the many wood thrushes whetting their notes.

Always rising or falling to a new strain,

after a  pause they deliver again!

saying ever a new thing,   

the wood thrush discharges his song

like a bolas, or a piece of jingling steel.

 See also  June 22, 1856 ("R. W. E. imitates the wood thrush by he willy willy — ha willy willy — O willy O.") and  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wood Thrush

As I come over the hill, I hear the wood thrush singing his evening lay. This is the only bird whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thought, my fancy and imagination. It lifts and exhilarates me. It is inspiring. It is a medicative draught to my soul. It is an elixir to my eyes and a fountain of youth to all my senses. It changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness. It rein states me in my dominion, makes me the lord of creation, is chief musician of my court. This minstrel sings in a time, a heroic age, with which no event in the village can be contemporary. How can they be contemporary when only the latter is temporary at all ? How can the infinite and eternal be contemporary with the finite and temporal? So there is something in the music of the cow-bell, something sweeter and more nutritious, than in the milk which the farmers drink. This thrush's song is a ranz des vaches to me. I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.1 I would go after the cows, I would watch the flocks of Admetus there forever, only for my board and clothes. A New Hampshire everlasing and unfallen. How wonderfully moral our whole life! There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails. It is sung of in the music of the harp. This it is which thrills us. The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universe Insurance Company. One little goodness is all the assessment. All that was ripest and fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood thrush. It is the mediator between barbarism and civilization. It is unrepentant as Greece.