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What soul can be so sick, which by thy songs
(Attired in sweetness) sweetly is not driven
Quite to forget earth's turmoils, spites, and wrongs,
And lift a reverend eye and thought to heaven.
Sweet artless songster, thou my mind dost raise

To airs of spheres, yes, and to angels' lays." DRUMMOND.

Milton came after Drummond, with his sonnet to the nightingale:—

"O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray
Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still,
Thou with fresh hope the lover's heart dost fill,
While the jolly hours lead on propitious May!"

In the Il Penseroso,' the poet, dramatically speaking, addresses the nightingale:

"Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly,

Most musical, most melancholy!"

The general propriety of the epithet has been controverted in one of the most delightful pieces of blank verse in our language:

"No cloud, no relique of the sunken day
Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip
Of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues.
Come, we will rest on this old mossy bridge.
You see the glimmer of the stream beneath,
But hear no murmuring: it flows silently
O'er its soft bed of verdure. All is still:
A balmy night! and though the stars be dim,
Yet let us think upon the vernal showers
That gladden the green earth, and we shall find
A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.
And hark! the Nightingale begins its song,
'Most musical, most melancholy' bird!
A melancholy bird! Oh, idle thought!
In nature there is nothing melancholy.

But some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced
With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,

Or slow distemper, or neglected love,

(And so, poor wretch! filled all things with himself, And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale

Of his own sorrow)-he, and such as he,
First named these notes a melancholy strain.
And many a poet echoes the conceit;

Poet who hath been building up the rhyme
When he had better far have stretched his limbs
Beside a brook in mossy forest-dell,

By sun or moonlight, to the influxes

Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements
Surrendering his whole spirit, of his song
And of his fame forgetful! so his fame
Should share in Nature's immortality,
A venerable thing! and so his song
Should make all Nature lovelier, and itself
Be loved like Nature! But 'twill not be so;
And youths and maidens most poetical,
Who lose the deepening twilights of the spring
In ball-rooms and hot theatres, they still
Full of meek sympathy must heave their sighs
O'er Philomela's pity-pleading strains.

My Friend, and thou, our Sister! we have learnt
A different lore: we may not thus profane
Nature's sweet voices, always full of love
And joyance! 'Tis the merry Nightingale
That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates
With fast thick warble his delicious notes,
As he were fearful that an April night
Would be too short for him to utter forth
His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul
Of all its music!

And I know a grove Of large extent, hard by a castle huge, Which the great lord inhabits not; and so This grove is wild with tangling underwood, And the trim walks are broken up, and grass, Thin grass, and king-cups, grow within the paths.

But never elsewhere in one place I knew
So many nightingales; and far and near,
In wood and thicket, over the wide grove,
They answer and provoke each other's songs
With skirmish and capricious passagings,
And murmurs musical and swift jug-jug,

And one low piping sound more sweet than all—
Stirring the air with such a harmony,

That should you close your eyes, you might almost
Forget it was not day! On moon-lit bushes,

Whose dewy leaflets are but half disclosed,

You may perchance behold them on the twigs,

Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full,
Glistening, while many a glow-worm in the shade
Lights up her love-torch.

A most gentle Maid,
Who dwelleth in her hospitable home
Hard by the castle, and at latest eve
(Even like a lady vowed and dedicate

To something more than Nature in the grove)

Glides through the pathways; she knows all their notes,
That gentle Maid! and oft a moment's space,
What time the moon was lost behind a cloud,
Hath heard a pause of silence, till the moon,
Emerging, hath awakened earth and sky
With one sensation, and these wakeful birds
Have all burst forth in choral minstrelsy,
As if some sudden gale had swept at once
A hundred airy harps! And she hath watched
Many a nightingale perched giddily

On blossomy twig still swinging from the breeze,
And to that motion tune his wanton song

Like tipsy joy that reels with tossing head."

COLERIDGE.

But the chorus of birds, the full harmony of the grove, is the great charm of a sunny spring-time. Old Drayton has made his rough verse musical with the ever-varied songs of the leafy Arden :

:

"When Phoebus lifts his head out of the winter's wave,
No sooner does the earth her flowery bosom brave,
At such time as the year brings on the pleasant spring,
But hunt's-up' to the morn the feath'red sylvans sing:
And in the lower grove, as on the rising knole,
Upon the highest spray of every mounting pole
Those quiristers are perch'd, with many a speckled breast.
Then from her burnish'd gate the goodly glitt'ring East
Gilds every lofty top, which late the humorous night
Bespangled had with pearl to please the morning's sight:
On which the mirthful quires, with their clear open throats,
Unto the joyful morn so strain their warbling notes,
That hills and valleys ring, and even the echoing air
Seems all composed of sounds, about them every where.
The throstle, with shrill sharps; as purposely he song
T'awake the lustless sun; or chiding that so long
He was in coming forth, that should the thickets thrill;
The woosel near at hand, that hath a golden bill;
As nature him had markt of purpose to let see

That from all other birds his tunes should different be,
For, with their vocal sounds, they sing to pleasant May:
Upon his dulcet pipe the merle doth only play;
When, in the lower brake, the nightingale hard by
In such lamenting strains the joyful hours doth ply,
As though the other birds she to her tunes would draw;
And, but that nature (by her all-constraining law)
Each bird to her own kind this season doth invite,
They else, alone to hear that charmer of the night

(The more to use their ears) their voices sure would spare, That moduleth her tunes so admirably rare,

As man to set in parts at first had learn'd of her.

To Philomel, the next the linnet we prefer ;

And by that warbling bird the wood-lark place we then,
The red-sparrow, the nope, the red-breast, and the wren.
The yellow-pate; which, though she hurt the blooming tree,
Yet scarce hath any bird a finer pipe than she.

And of these chaunting fowls, the goldfinch not behind,
That hath so many sorts descending from her kind.

The tydy from her notes as delicate as they,
The laughing hecco, then the counterfeiting jay;
The softer with the shrill (some hid among the leaves,
Some in the taller trees, some in the lower greaves)
Thus sing away the morn, until the mounting sun
Through thick exhaled fogs his golden head hath run,
And through the twisted tops of our close covert creeps
To kiss the gentle shade, this while that sweetly sleeps."

DRAYTON.

Heywood, no great poet, but as a dramatist full of simple pathos, has given us a pretty love-song, in which the birds are to serenade his mistress :

"Pack clouds away, and welcome day,

With night we banish sorrow;
Sweet air, blow soft, mount, larks, aloft,
To give my love good-morrow!
Wings from the wind to please her mind,
Notes from the lark, I'll borrow;
Bird, prune thy wing, nightingale, sing,
To give my love good-morrow!

To give my love good-morrow,
Notes from them both I'll borrow.

Wake from thy nest, robin red-breast,
Sing, birds, in every furrow;
And from each hill let music shrill

Give my fair love good-morrow!
Blackbird, and thrush, in every bush,
Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow!
You pretty elves, amongst yourselves,
Sing my fair love good-morrow!
To give my love good-morrow,
Sing, birds, in every furrow!"

Coleridge says that the language of birds is love:

HEYWOOD.

Do you ask what the bird says? The sparrow, the dove,
The linnet, and thrush, say, 'I love and I love,'

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