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, 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, Le désert est-il fait pour des talents si beaux? 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 sorrows through the night; and, on the bough Takes up again her lamentable strain *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 . . . High on the opponent bank, and ceaseless sings which presents paterfamilias (actual or almost) in an exemplary attitude, Arrayed in all the beauteous beams of day, Nor in his Hymn of Praise does Thomson omit appeal by name to this 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 "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; 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, 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, 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; 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- Strains that recalled to mind a distant day; 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, Campbell tells how -the holy nightingale Winds up his long, long shakes of ecstasy, 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." |