The silence of the vales is, however, broken by one visitor’s cry, who is par excellence the bird of April. I know not why, unless it be that the cuckoo loves an echo and delights to hear his own voice, but I have noted how persistently he chooses the tops of the dales, their inmost recesses, for his habitat. One cannot towards the end of April pass up from the high end of a valley to the fells without hearing the cuckoo. Long before he will be welcomed by the children in the plain, there, in the resonant valley-end, will shepherds hear him. So persistently does he haunt the far end of Borrodale and shout himself hoarse at Seathwaite that the word ‘Borrodalgouk’ has become a proverb, and stories are told of a determination on the part of the dalesmen to build up a wall to keep the cuckoo a possession of the vale. (pp. 43-44)
Wordsworth was fortunate to dwell where the cuckoo found an echo, and many a time has one noted how, between Loughrigg fell and Nab Scar, the cuckoo loves still, as of old, to stammer out his call. (p. 44)
At the end of April, in the far recesses of the hill in some deep ghyll where as yet no leaf has come to ash or rowan, another voice may break the silence and cheer the solitude, this is the mountain ouzel; a shy singer but a sweet one is he, and one may feel rewarded for a long April wandering by sound of his clear flute. (p. 44)
A long April wandering! The April twilight is the loveliest gift the month brings to our lakeland hills. Not truly to be compared to the never-darkened skies of May, but very wondrous are these golden evenings of an April day. All through the day alternate sun and shower has possessed the vale. Curtains of hail or heavy rain have hidden or revealed the purple blues and golden greens of the mountain distance. Then all the storms of the day drift from sight. Like black dragons, dark clouds that had coiled up in the west writhe out of ken, and golden galleons float over the hills into serene spaces of silver sky. The hills are deathly grey, and the woods dead brown, save for the islands of larch green and budding birch, but the song of the birds is ceaseless. You feel as you listen that they are in a world—the world of love and praise—where no night comes. Suddenly Helvellyn kindles into rosy pink, and Skiddaw goes a golden bronze, and when the light fails, such golden sky burns between Wythop and the Dodd, or gleams in the west beyond the Wrynose pass, that the men in Westmoreland and Cumberland feel as a shepherd once put it to me, “that dayleet’s ower lang for a hard darrock,” and we feel the April skies are almost merciless to the weary horse and husbandman. But it is this same lengthened evening that invites the wanderer to our dales, and they who love colour-changes and would feel the gladness of bird-song and the first quickening of the valley meadows and hedgerows should come—though nights are chill and at times a snow-fall whitens all the tops—to the English Lakes in daffodil days, before the woodlands have shut the sunshine from their mellow carpets, or the sycamore has shaken his rosy glumes upon the rooftree of the fellside farm. (pp. 44-45)
(Months at the Lakes, pp. 37-47)
