There is silence now in the woods. That spirit of the south wind, that phantom voice of the green tides of May, has passed: that which was a wandering dream is become a haunting memory. Whence is the cuckoo come, whither does the cuckoo go? When our leaves grow russet and the fern clothes herself in bronze and pale gold, what land hears that thrilling call in ancient groves, or above old unvisited forests, or where arid declivities plunge into the gathering sands of the desert? Whither is gone Sinlinda, the summer bird, as the Esthonians call her: she who has been a voice in the far Orkneys (a daughter, it may be, of that cuckoo-queen who bore Modred to King Arthur, Modred the Pict who afterward wrought so great evil upon Arthur and his knights), or cried the sighing of vain love above the hills of the Gael, or in Sweden swung on the north wind as the _sorg-gök_, uttering ‘sorrow,’ or floated out of the east as the _tröste-gök_, calling ‘consolation’? When Finland loses her, and the Baltic peasant no more counts with dread the broken cries, and she has passed from the Irish valleys, so that men and women are safe for another year from the wildness of wild love, whither is she gone? Like a dream her voice fades from Broceliande, is heard no more by Fontarabia, has no echo in the wood of Vallombrosa. In the last reaches of the Danube she no longer mocks love; above the Siberian steppe the exile no more hears her ironic _Go! Go!_: from the dim Campagna she is lifted into silence, _sospir’ d’ amore_: she is not heard across the waters of Corinth from that fallen temple where Zeus took her form upon him, nor is the shadow of her wings in that wild mountain-valley of Mykenai, where Agamemnon and Clytaimnestra sleep, where once the marble statue of divine Hera stood bearing on a sceptre her perilous image. Where, then, is she gone, she who from the dim Asian valleys to the Aztec wilderness, from one world to another, is the mysterious voice of wandering love; she who is, in one place, to be hailed with hymns of gladness, in another to be hearkened to with bowed head or averted eyes? For thus it is, even to-day, among the ancient remnant in Mexico and the Californian wilds, who hear with terror that foreboding flute-like voice calling out of the unseen world: thus it was in the Himalayan solitudes of old when the Sanskrit villagers hailed the cuckoo as a divine messenger, _Kakila_, the bird who knows all things, not only what has happened, but what shall happen.