4'26 The Nightingale and the Blackcaps 



stance of his nocturnal song; for surely there is not the 

 smallest resemblance in the melody, though very sweet. 



* The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark, 

 When neither is attended ; and, I think, 

 The nightingale, when he doth sing by day, 

 While every goose is cackling, would be thought 

 No better a musician than the wren. 

 How many things by season season'd are. 

 To their right praise and true perfection ! * 



Nay, I have even known the ignorant and inorganised 

 aver the hurried and huddled notes of the eternally restless 

 sedgebird [Curr^ca salicaria Fleming].^ to be those of the 

 nightingale ! I cannot be mistaken, having so constantly 

 heard the nightingales in Bagley Wood, near Oxford ; and, 

 once heard by a duller ear than mine, they and their notes 

 are not likely to be forgotten. They seem to love low meadows 

 and bushy grounds. I stopped a full half hour last night in 

 the road, during which he scarcely ceased singing; from the 

 low and quickly repeated gurgling note, to his full flow and 

 rich gushes of lofty melody ; with short but lovely pauses, 

 doubling the effect of the resumed and reiterated strains. It 

 was a moonless night, but refreshingly mild, and fragrant with 

 the odours of woodbines and hedge-flowers, while the glow- 

 worm shone sweetly on the bank." 



Much, however, as I lament that the visits of this bird are 

 so few and far between, I would not give up the blackcap for 

 him ; of all our English warblers, to my taste, the most 

 ravishingly sweet, wild, and wonderful. As the Scotch say to 

 the Irish, when the latter pretend a claim to Ossian, " Well, 

 take him if ye can : we have Robert Burns for our own ! " 

 So I say of my beloved blackcap : he is the Burns of birds. 

 And really often. Sir, when musing alone (though I may be 

 laughed at for telling it, and I care not), delightfully startled 

 at his sudden burst of ecstatic song, I exclaim aloud, " God 

 bless thy merry heart ! " and I find I have long ago written 

 opposite him, on the margin of my Ray, " Avium poeta, et 

 omni modulamine amplissimus." * 



The finely tuned ear of our darling White duly felt the 

 music of this bird, when he gives it 'the numerous and just 

 epithets of " a full, sweet, deep, loud, and wild pipe." He 

 has not only, too, a perfectly original style of his own, though, 

 like a poet of all-genius, he sometimes hardly knows what he 

 is about, and has (regardless of Aristotle and the unities) 

 neither beginning, middle, nor end ; but is an eminent and 

 most successful imitator of many other birds, particularly of 



* " Poet of birds, and fullest of all song." 



