spherical development of tail, but everybody dislikes my style of articulation, and as good as intimates that I really have no voice at all, or worse than none, an out-and-out bad one. And all this while, that shabby little wretch the nightingale is own sister to Piccolomini and Jenny Lind -absolutely trills divinely in a dingy quaker sort of dress!

Au lieu qu'un rossignol, chétive créature,
Forme des sons aussi doux qu'éclatants,
Est lui seul l'honneur du printemps.*

In another fable the poet gives us a dialogue between the transformed sisters, Philomela and Progne, after a thousand years' separation, during which the former has not revisited Thrace, the scene of her miseries and her metamorphosis,-whither, however, her swallow-tailed sister would fain allure her back, that she may cease to waste her sweetness on the desert air:

-Eh quoi! cette musique,

Pour ne chanter qu'aux animaux,
Tout au plus à quelque rustique!

Le désert est-il fait pour des talents si beaux?
Venez faire aux cités éclater leurs merveilles.t

But Philomèle has had enough, thank you, sister, of city life, and prefers living in the country for good. Progne may forget, but she has a longer memory, and quickens its pangs afresh as often as ever she leans her breast against a thorn. There is another fable of La Fontaine's, in which she is made the prey of a kite, and offers in vain to ransom her life by a song. She will narrate the Thracian tragedy of her life, in melting recitative, if the kite will not make a meal of her. But the kite bethinks him, No song no supper-perverting into a coarse alternative that conditional negative. He likes supper better than anybody's singing, that's flat. To have no supper, and yet a rossignol within reach, were preposterous; but it costs him nothing to have no song. Supper is therefore served, and the pièce de résistance is Philomèle herself.

Thomson pictures a "sorry sight" of this bird's bewilderment and despair at coming home to a rifled nest:

But let not chief the nightingale lament
Her ruined care, too delicately framed
To brook the harsh confinement of the cage.
Oft when, returning with her loaded bill,
The astonished mother finds a vacant nest,
By the hard hands of unrelenting clowns
Robbed, to the ground the vain provision falls;
Her pinions ruffle, and, low-dropping, scarce
Can bear the mourner to the poplar shade,
Where all abandoned to despair she sings

Her sorrows through the night; and, on the bough
Sole-sitting, still at every dying fall

Takes up again her lamentable strain
Of winding woe, till wide around the woods
Sigh to her song, and with her wail resound.

*La Fontaine, Fables, 1. ii. 17.

+ Livre ix. 18.

† Ibid. 1. iii. 15.

The Seasons: Spring.

This picture is a copy, however, from one by Virgil in the Georgics, where mærens philomela is heard lamenting, populea sub umbrâ, the loss of her young, quos durus arator has carried off from her nest, in their unfledged innocence,—and whose loss she flet noctem, bewails the livelong night,-et mæstis late loca questibus implet, and makes the neighbourhood ring, far and wide, with her accents of woe. There is a parallel passage too in the Antigone of Sophocles.

Awhile before, Thomson had verified the observation of ornithologists, that "the nightingale sings only when the female is sitting, leaving off directly the young are hatched; and during this period his song is constant both day and night."*

As thus the patient dam assiduous sits . . .
Her sympathising lover takes his stand

High on the opponent bank, and ceaseless sings
The tedious time away-

which presents paterfamilias (actual or almost) in an exemplary attitude,
appreciated no doubt with uttermost delight by his lady-bird wife. In a
later section, Thomson upholds the nightingale in his sober suit in pre-
ference to the gayer-apparelled but less melodious birds of the torrid zone.
It is the doctrine of compensation-the same doctrine enforced by Juno
when she snubs the Peacock, in La Fontaine's fable. For, argues the
poet of the Seasons, in reference to the "plumy nations" of South Ame-
rica, if Nature bids them shine,

Arrayed in all the beauteous beams of day,
Yet, frugal still, she humbles them in song.
Nor envy we the gaudy robes they lent
Proud Montezuma's realm, whose legions cast
A boundless radiance waving on the sun,
While Philomel is ours; while in our shades,
Through the soft silence of the listening night,
The sober-suited songstress trills her lay.t

Nor in his Hymn of Praise does Thomson omit appeal by name to this
sweetest of quiristers. "Ye woodlands all, awake: a bourdless song
Burst from the groves; and when the restless day,

Expiring, lays the warbling world asleep,

Sweetest of birds! sweet Philomela, charm

The listening shades, and teach the night His praise.'

"Ten thousand warblers cheer the day," sings Cowper, "and one the
livelong night"-not unmindful of Milton's telling how "the smaller
birds with songs solaced the woods" till
66
even; nor then the solemn
nightingale ceased warbling, but all night tuned her soft lays."§ Among
Cowper's miscellaneous poems is one he addressed to this bird, "which
the Author heard sing on New Year's-day." It was in 1792.
talk of primroses that you pulled on Candlemas-day," he writes to a
friend; but what think you of me that heard a nightingale on New
Year's-day? Perhaps I am the only man in England who can boast of
such good fortune; good, indeed, for if it were at all an omen it could not

"You

*Note by the poet's namesake and commentator, Dr. Anthony Todd Thomson. †The Seasons: Summer.

The Sofa.

be an unfavourable one."* Horace Walpole, for one, must have envied Cowper-for Horace, with all his worldliness, had a genuine delight in two at least of Nature's beauties-lilac-trees and nightingales. "I am very willing to leave London," he writes, the first week in May, "and pass half the week at Strawberry, where my two passions, lilacs and nightingales, are in full bloom. I spent Sunday as if it were Apollo's birthday; Gray and Mason were with me, and we listened to the nightingales till one o'clock in the morning."+-But the most familiar of Cowper's allusions to the bird is that stanza in his charming lines to Lady Throckmorton (Catharina), then Miss Stapleton, and quite as able (his verses would imply) to break the hearts of competing nightingales as ever was Angélique Paulet herself:

Only a year or two before his death, and amid his renewed activities in political strife, Charles Fox, it is pleasant to see, took a keener interest than ever in nightingale notes. St. Anne's-hill was a favoured resort of theirs, but it quite disturbed the statesman's peace of mind if they were later in coming than usual. A letter to his travelling nephew in 1804 has this P.S.-"Nightingales not come yet [April 9], and it will be well if I do not quite miss hearing them this spring.... I have quite turned my mind to politics again, and am as eager as in former days. Pray remember to inquire at what time Nightingales usually appear and sing where you are. Here, you know, it is about the 12th of this month; and do the Spanish poets count them lively or melancholy?"§ In April they come, but for a too brief sojourn-witness the authority of Wordsworth's son-in-law, himself a poet, and studious of nightingale notes:

For after May

These vernal melodies are almost dumb;
And seldom shall we hear in June

These shy, inconstant, poets of the moon.||

Many and many a time used Chateaubriand to linger in the more secluded parts of Kensington Gardens, with his secretary, M. de Marcellus, to listen to the nightingale (not much addicted to Kensington Gardens now). He had never heard it, he said, in the American forests. "Dieu donna le rossignol à l'Europe pour charmer des oreilles civilisées."¶ By the way, does the nightingale sing in Scotland? If Ariosto is any authority, with his tale of "Ginevra," that does she, in notes with many a winding bout of linked sweetness long drawn out. "Nor should the nightingale be left out in Ginevra's bower," writes Mr. Leigh Hunt, in his ideal book-map of Scotland, "for Ariosto has put it there, and there,

* Cowper to Mr. Johnson, March 11, 1792.

t Walpole to George Montague, May 5, 1761.

§ Mem. and Correspondence of C. J. Fox, vol. iii. p. 247.

Quillinan's Poems, p. 101.

Chateaubriand et son Temps, 84-5.

‡ Catharina.

accordingly, it is and has been heard, let ornithology say what it will; for what ornithologist knows so much of the nightingale as a poet? We would have an inscription put on the spot-' Here the nightingale sings, contrary to what has been affirmed by White and others." "*

From Ariosto's countrymen might be culled a profuse anthology of nightingale extracts, glistening with the essential oil of Italian compliment. The Gongora and Marini school cram the poor bird with concetti. We confine ourselves to one specimen from the former, thus Englished by Robert Southey:

With such a grace that nightingale bewails,
That I suspect, so exquisite his note,
An hundred thousand other nightingales

Within him, warble sorrow through his throat.

(Marini's expression of the same conceit is not quite so extravagantch'aver parea E mille voci e mille angelli in petto.) Goethe inserts a passage to this effect in Ottilie's Diary: that everything which is perfect in its kind, must pass out beyond and transcend its kind. It must be an inimitable something of another and higher nature. "In many of its tones the nightingale is only a bird; then it rises up above its class, and seems as if it would teach every feathered creature what singing really is."+

Southey has not much to say about the nightingale: one rememberable allusion, however, occurs in the wanderings of Thalaba, who, amid other sounds of "distance-mellowed song from bowers of merriment," and waterfall remote, and murmuring of the leafy groves, hears a bird-strain dearer than the rest

The single nightingale,

Perch'd in the rosier by, so richly toned,
That never from that most melodious bird,
Singing a love-song to his brooding mate,
Did Thracian shepherd by the grave

Of Orpheus hear a sweeter melody‡—

the Thracians alleging, according to Pausanias, that the nightingales which build their nests about the sepulchre of Orpheus, sing sweeter and louder than other nightingales.

Wordsworth is rich and copious and in earnest in Philomelic literature:

O Nightingale! thou surely art

A creature of a “fiery heart :”—

These notes of thine-they pierce and pierce;
Tumultuous harmony and fierce!
Thou sing'st as if the God of wine
Had helped thee to a Valentine;
A song in mockery and despite
Of shades, and dews, and silent night;
And steady bliss, and all the loves

Now sleeping in these peaceful groves.§

Wordsworth wrote this somewhat novel, at any rate un-common-place,

The World of Books.

Thalaba, book vi. 21.

† Goethe, Wahlverwandtschaften, IX. § Wordsworth, Poems of the Imagination, IX.

interpretation of her strain, he says, at Town-end, Grasmere; but his widow, in a note of correction, says, at Coleorton, Sir George Beaumont's place. In quite another mood is conceived his allusion to

-that shy songstress, whose love-tale

Might tempt an angel to descend,

While hovering o'er the moonlight vale.*

A sonnet of his vindicates the nightingales of Richmond-hill against the alleged superiority of their relatives in Wallachia:

Fame tells of groves-from England far away-
Groves that inspire the Nightingale to trill
And modulate, with subtle reach of skill
Elsewhere unmatched, her ever-varying lay;
Such bold report I venture to gainsay;
For I have heard the quire of Richmond-hill
Chanting, with indefatigable bill,

Strains that recalled to mind a distant day;
When, haply under shade of that same wood,
And scarcely conscious of the dashing oars
Plied steadily between those willowy shores,
The sweet-souled Poet of the Seasons stood-
Listening, and listening long, in rapturous mood,
Ye heavenly Birds! to your Progenitors!†

Philomel figures by name, too, in the same poet's "Morning Exercise," and is introduced in "The Solitary Reaper," than whose thrilling undersong, all alone to herself, he says, no nightingale did ever chant More welcome notes to weary bands Of travellers in some shady haunt, among Arabian sands." And again in one of his Evening Voluntaries, by the side of Rydal Mere, he wistfully invokes her presence in that green vale, to him fairer than Tempe.

Samuel Rogers, in one of his scenes in Italy, tells how

the nightingale her song poured forth

In such a torrent of heartfelt delight,
So fast it flowed, her tongue so voluble,
As if she thought her hearers would be gone
Ere half was told.‡

Campbell tells how

-the holy nightingale

Winds up his long, long shakes of ecstasy,
With notes that seem but the protracted sounds
Of glassy runnels bubbling over rocks.§

Less graphically he elsewhere celebrates "the nightingale's long trills and gushing ecstasies of song." Leigh Hunt designates her "the bird that speaks delight Into the close ear of night." The Ode to her by John Keats is one of the glories of modern song-enthusiastic in its homage to that light-winged Dryad of the trees," singing of summer in fullthroated ease."