The New Forest is a wild, uninhabited stretch of heath and woodland, many of the trees gnarled and aged, and its very wildness, the lack of cultivation, the ruggedness, made it strongly attractive in my eyes, and suggested my own country.  The birds of course were much less plentiful than beside the Itchen.

The bird that most impressed me on my walk was the blackbird.  I had already heard nightingales in abundance near Lake Como, and had also listened to larks, but I had never heard either the blackbird, the song thrush, or the blackcap warbler; and while I knew that all three were good singers, I did not know what really beautiful singers they were.  Blackbirds were very abundant, and they played a prominent part in the chorus which we heard throughout the day on every hand, though perhaps loudest the following morning at dawn.  In its habits and manners the blackbird strikingly resembles our American robin, and indeed looks exactly like a robin, with a yellow bill and coal-black plumage.  It hops everywhere over the lawns, just as our robin does, and it lives and nests in the gardens in the same fashion.  Its song has a general resemblance to that of our robin, but many of the notes are far more musical, more like those of our wood thrush.  Indeed, there were individuals among those we heard certain of whose notes seemed to me almost to equal in point of melody the chimes of the wood thrush; and the highest possible praise for any song-bird is to liken its song to that of the wood thrush or hermit thrush.  I certainly do not think that the blackbird has received full justice in the books.  I knew that he was a singer, but I really had no idea how fine a singer he was.  I suppose one of his troubles has been his name, just as with our own catbird.  When he appears in the ballads as the merle, bracketed with his cousin the mavis, the song thrush, it is far easier to recognize him as the master singer that he is.  It is a fine thing for England to have such an asset of the countryside, a bird so common, so much in evidence, so fearless, and such a really beautiful singer.

The thrush is a fine singer too, a better singer than our American robin, but to my mind not at the best quite as good as the blackbird at his best; although often I found difficulty in telling the song of one from the song of the other, especially if I only heard two or three notes.

The larks were, of course, exceedingly attractive.  It was fascinating to see them spring from the grass, circle upwards, steadily singing and soaring for several minutes, and then return to the point whence they had started.  As my companion pointed out, they exactly fulfilled Wordsworth’s description; they soared but did not roam.  It is quite impossible wholly to differentiate a bird’s voice from its habits and surroundings.  Although in the lark’s song there are occasional musical notes, the song as a whole is not very musical; but it is so joyous, buoyant and unbroken, and uttered under such conditions as fully to entitle the bird to the place he occupies with both poet and prose writer.