The light showers through which I drove over the hills from Littleton were gone before sunset, and as the twilight deepened I strolled up the Butter Hill road as far as the grove of red pines, just to feel the ground under my feet and to hear the hermit thrushes. How divinely they sang, one on either side of the way, voice answering to voice, the very soul of music, out of the darkening woods! I agree with a friendly correspondent who wrote me, the other day, fresh from a summer in France, that the nightingale is no such singer. I have never heard the nightingale, but that does not alter my opinion. Formerly I wished that the hermit, and all the rest of our woodland thrushes, would practice a longer and more continuous strain. Now I think differently; for I see now that what I looked upon as a blemish is really the perfection of art. Those brief, deliberate phrases, breaking one by one out of the silence, lift the soul higher than any smooth-flowing warble could possibly do. Worship has no gift of long-breathed fluency. If she speaks at all, it is in the way of ejaculation: “Therefore let thy words be few,” said the Preacher,--a text which is only a modern Hebrew version of what the hermit thrush has been saying here in the White Mountains for ten thousand years. One of the principal glories of Franconia is the same in spring as in autumn,--the colors of the forest. There is no describing them: greens and reds of all tender and lovely shades; not to speak of the exquisite haze-blue, or blue-purple, which mantles the still budded woods on the higher slopes. For the reds I was quite unprepared. They have never been written about, so far as I know, doubtless because they have never been seen. The scribbling tourist is never here till long after they are gone. In fact, I stayed late enough, on my present visit, to see the end of them. I knew, of course, that young maple leaves, like old ones, are of a ruddy complexion;[4] but somehow I had never considered that the massing of the trees on hillsides would work the same gorgeous, spectacular effect in spring as in autumn,--broad patches of splendor hung aloft, a natural tapestry, for the eye to feast upon. Not that May is as gaudy as September. There are no brilliant yellows, and the reds are many shades less fiery than autumn furnishes; but what is lacking in intensity is more than made up in delicacy, as the bloom of youth is fairer than any hectic flush. The glory passed, as I have said. Before the 1st of June it had deepened, and then disappeared; but the sight of it was of itself enough to reward my journey.