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:

The last evening ramble we made,
Catharina, Maria, and I,

Our progress was often delayed
By the nightingale warbling nigh.
We paused under many a tree,

And much she was charmed with a tone,

Less sweet to Maria and me

Who so lately had witnessed her own.‡

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."T 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.

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!†

66

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.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.*

Shelley is another poet-laureate of this queen of song. He speaks of her "heaven-taught tale," her "heaven-resounding minstrelsy," the "wine of her bright and liquid song." He tells how she "satiates the hungry dark with melody," "whose music was a storm of song." He tells how, when evening was come, and the earth was all rest, "and the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned In an ocean of dreams without a sound,"

Only overheard the sweet nightingale

Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail,

And snatches of its Elysian chant

Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant.§

Barry Cornwall iterates the compensation argument we have already illustrated from Thomson and La Fontaine: "What's perfect on poor earth? Is not the bird At whose sweet song the forests ache with love, Shorn of all beauty?"|| With Hood we hear "in leafy shroud, The sweet and plaintive Sappho of the dell," and "love to listen in the dark That tuneful elegy of Tereus' wrong."** Tennyson introduces the bulbul's, song, mingled of "delight, life, anguish, death, immortal love,"+t in the lemon-groves of good Haroun Alraschid. And in a strain more solemn, apostrophises her thus:

Sweet bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
Rings Eden through the budded quicks,
O tell me where the senses mix,
O tell me where the passions meet,

Whence radiate: fierce extremes employ
Thy spirits in the dusking leaf,
And in the midmost heart of grief

Thy passion clasps a secret joy.‡‡

So, Mrs. Browning describes the nightingale "who singeth-Oh! she leans on thorny tree, And her poet-soul she flingeth Over pain to victory."§§ But there is a fable of this lady's poetising,—akin in character to the Strada, Ford, and Crashaw legend-and which is too short and sweet not to be quoted entire :

Said a people to a poet-"Go out from among us straightway!
While we are thinking earthly things, thou singest of divine;
There's a little fair brown nightingale, who, sitting in the gateway,
Makes fitter music to our ears, than any song of thine !"
The poet went out weeping-the nightingale ceased chanting;
'Now, wherefore, O thou nightingale, is all thy sweetness done ?"
"I cannot sing my earthly things, the heavenly poet wanting,
Whose highest harmony includes the lowest under sun.”

* Keats, Ode to a Nightingale.
The Woodman and the Nightingale.
Dramatic Fragments, 81.

** Ibid. 33.

‡‡ In Memoriam, 87.

† Rosalind and Helen. The Sensitive Plant, part i.

¶ Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, 32. tt Recollections of the Arabian Nights. §§ The Lost Bower.

The poet went out weeping,-and died abroad, bereft there-
The bird flew to his grave and died amid a thousand wails ;-
And when I last came by the place, I swear the music left there

Was only of the poet's song, and not the nightingale's.*

In her latest poem, again, Mrs. Browning speaks of "the nightingales, Which pluck our heart across a garden-wall (When walking in the town), and carry it So high into the bowery almond-trees," &c.† Ŏwen Meredith describes the method of the song-now a rising note-now sinking back in little broken rings

Of warm song that spread and eddy-
Now he picks up heart-and draws
His great music, slow and steady,
To a silver-centred pause.‡

Madame Dudevant characterises this method when she says of the Bohemian peasant, whom Heaven may have made a musician, that he sings after the fashion of the nightingale, "whose improvisation is endless, though the elements of her song be the same."§ So, too, in his way, does Addison, in a letter of invitation to his future stepson, the Earl of Warwick, to come and hear a concert of music he (Joseph) has found out in a neighbouring wood (at Sandy-End)-which begins precisely at six in the evening, and consists of a blackbird, a thrush, a robin-redbreast, and a bullfinch. "The whole is concluded by a nightingale, that has a much better voice than Mrs. Toft, and something of the Italian manner in her divisions."|| In another of pseudonymous Owen Meredith's poems, there is a simile of -a nightingale, mute at the sound of a lute

In the same have it that

That is swelling and breaking its heart with its strain.
Waiting, breathless, to die when the music is ended.¶

minstrel's last (no, penultimate) volume, a lover's letter will

The nightingales sing-ah, too joyously!

Who says those birds are sad?

But that is a question to be more explicitly put aud answered in a second and concluding section, which it shall have all to itself.

*The Poet and the Bird: A Fable.

An Evening in Tuscany.

Addison to the Earl of Warwick, May 27, 1708.
The Earl's Return, XI.

† Aurora Leigh, book vii. § Consuelo, ch. lvi.

**The Wanderer: "A Love-Letter."

May-VOL. CXIX. NO. CCCCLXXIII.

G