Scott not only makes a masterly and felicitous use of concrete tone-color epithets in phrasing the songs of birds, but he also knows how important and eloquent in music as such, as well as in the songs of birds, are pauses or silences, and uses this appreciation of silences exquisitely. Scott’s artistry in both these respects is finely shown in these lines:— Hidden above there, half asleep, a thrush Spoke a few _silver words upon the hush_— _Then paused self-charmed to silence_. Scott, in truth, on the side of exquisite realistic concretion of the notes and cadences of bird-songs, has the ear of a _naturalist_—and a better ear than Thoreau or Burroughs. Scott is the ‘bird-musician’ _par excellence_. Witness the naturalist’s exquisite ear for concrete realism in these lines:— She would hear the partridge drumming in the distance, Rolling out his _mimic thunder_ in the sultry noons; Hear beyond the silver reach in _ringing wild persistence_ Reel remote the _ululating laughter_ of the loons. Carman would have stopped with the general word ‘drumming’ in the phrase ‘hear the partridge drumming’—not so Scott; he must realistically concrete the reverberance of the drumming in the phrase ‘rolling out his mimic thunder.’ And what realistic concretion is in the phrases ‘in ringing wild persistence,’ and ‘ululating laughter!’ Carman half hears. Scott hears with the ear of the naturalist _and_ the musician. Again, only the ear of the naturalist and the musician in Scott could have so exquisitely, veraciously, concreted the ‘note’ of the white-throat sparrow and the lovely cadences of the vireo as in these lines:— While the white-throat never-resting, Even in the deepest night _rings his crystal bell_. And:— A vireo turns his _slow_ _Cadence_, as if he gloated Over the last phrase he floated; Each one he moulds and mellows _Matching it with his fellows_: So have you noted How the oboe croons, The canary-throated, In the gloom of the violoncellos And bassoons. Scott knows the ‘voices’ of instruments as intimately as those of birds and other feathered wild creatures. How finely he combines a concrete use of his two-fold musical knowledge in this respect in the following ingenious and original bit of verbal instrumentation:— And in the two-fold dark I hear the owl _Puff at his velvet horn_. The reader must be a naturalist and, as well, have been a bandsman or orchestral instrumentalist to feel the felicitous realism and descriptive exactitude of Scott’s art, or rather inspiration, in inventing that figure of the owl as a musician. The humor of it also is exquisite.