Free Reading Fluency Analyzer

Read the selection and choose the best answer to each question.

Excerpt from Specimen Days by Walt Whitman

110. Summer Sights and Indolences

1 June 10th.-AS I write, 5 1/2 P. M., here by the creek, nothing can exceed the quiet splendor and freshness around me. We had a heavy shower, with brief thunder and lightning, in the middle of the day; and since, overhead, one of those not uncommon yet indescribable skies (in quality, not details or forms) of limpid blue, with rolling silver-fringed clouds, and a pure-dazzling sun. For underlay, trees in fullness of tender foliage-liquid, ready, long-drawn notes of birds-based by the fretful mewing of a querulous cat-bird, and the pleasant chippering-shriek of two kingfishers. I have been watching the latter the last half hour, on their regular evening frolic over and in the stream; evidently a spree of the liveliest kind. They pursue each other, whirling and wheeling around, with many a jocund downward dip, splashing the spray in jets of diamonds-and then off they swoop, with slanting wings and graceful flight, sometimes so near me I can plainly see their dark-gray feather-bodies and milk-white necks.

111. Sundown Perfume - Quail-Notes - The Hermit Thrush

2 June 19th, 4 to 6 1/2, P. M.-SITTING alone by the creek-solitude here, but the scene bright and vivid enough-the sun shining, and quite a fresh wind blowing (some heavy showers last night,) the grass and trees looking their best-the clareobscure of different greens, shadows, half-shadows, and the dappling glimpses of the water, through recesses-the wild flageolet-note of a quail near by-the justheard fretting of some hylas down there in the pond-crows cawing in the distance-a drove of young hogs rooting in soft ground near the oak under which I sit-some come sniffing near me, and then scamper away, with grunts. And still the clear notes of the quail-the quiver of leaf-shadows over the paper as I write- the sky aloft, with white clouds, and the sun well declining to the west-the swift darting of many sand-swallows coming and going, their holes in a neighboring marl-bank-the odor of the cedar oak, so palpable, as evening approaches- perfume, color, the bronze-and-gold of nearly ripen'd wheat-clover-fields, with honey-scent-the well-up maize, with long and rustling leaves-the great patches of thriving potatoes, dusky green, fleck'd all over with white blossoms-the old, warty, venerable oak above me-and ever, mix'd with the dual notes of the quail, the soughing of the wind through some near-by pines.

3 As I rise for return, I linger long to a delicious song-epilogue (is it the hermitthrush?) from some bushy recess off there in the swamp, repeated leisurely and pensively over and over again. This, to the circle-gambols of the swallows flying by dozens in concentric rings in the last rays of sunset, like flashes of some airy wheel.