236 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



this very clump where the sap is beginning to move in 

 the grey naked oaks and brambles and thorns — some- 

 thing stirs in him too: not memory nor passion perhaps, 

 yet there may be something of both in it — an inherited 

 memory and the unrest and passion of migration, the 

 imperishable and overmastering ache and desire which 

 will in due time bring him safely back through in- 

 numerable dangers over that immense distance of barren 

 deserts and of forests, of mountain and seas, and savage 

 and civilised lands. 



It is not strange to find that down to the age of 

 science, when the human mind had grown accustomed 

 to look for the explanation of all phenomena in matter 

 itself, an exception was made of the annual migration 

 of birds, and the belief remained (even in Sir Isaac 

 Newton's mind) that the impelling and guiding force 

 was a supernatural one. The ancients did not know 

 what became of their nightingale when he left them, 

 for in Greece, too, he is a strict migrant, but his re- 

 appearance year after year, at the identical spot, was 

 itself a marvel and mystery, as it still is, and they came 

 inevitably to think it was the same bird which they 

 listened to. We have it in the epitaph of Callimachus, 

 in Cory's translation: 



They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead ; 

 They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed ; 

 I wept when I remembered how often you and I 

 Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky. 

 And now that you are lying, my dear old Carian guest, 

 A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest, 

 Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake. 

 For death he taketh all away, but these he cannot take 



