l6 NIGHTINGALE. 



The sober-suited songstress. 



Thomson. 



Soon as the sun forsakes the evening skies, 

 And, hid in shade, the ^doomy forest lies, 

 The Nightingales their tuneful vigil keep, 

 And lull her with their gentle strains asleep. 



Fhilip^— Pastorals. 



So sweet, so shrill, so variously she sang 

 That the grove echoed, and the valleys rang. 



Dryden. 



Loud trills sweet Philomel his tender strain 

 Charms his fond bride, and wakes his infant train. 



* Darwin. 



The Poets, with the one great exception of Coleridge, who 

 protests against the notion, attribute a melancholy strain to the song 

 of the Nightingale. But this is probably due more to the old story 

 of Philomela and Tereus, than to any close observation of the 

 bird's song. 



There is a fashion in such things ; and it may be suspected, 

 that some poets have known more of what others had said about 

 the Nightingale, than of the bird itself. One sign of this is, that it 

 is almost always assumed that the bird sings by night only ; 

 whereas, in favourable weather, it sings all day as well. Perhaps 

 it is then less noticed, amongst the general chorus of the minstrelsy 

 of the woods, than when it is heard alone, when other sounds are 

 hushed. Then it is hailed as the 



Sweet bird that shuns the noise of folly 

 Most musical, most melancholy. 



Milton. 



Milton is pre-eminently the poet of the Nightingale, which 

 doubtless he had often heard among the orchards and hedgerows 

 of Horton, where those lines were written. 



He introduces it again in that exquisite passage in Paradise 

 Lost. 



Now is the pleasant time 

 The cool, the silent, save where silence yields 

 To the night-warbling bird, that now awake 

 Tunes sweetest his love laboured song. 



*Darwin was more careful of his Natural History, than of his poetry. It sounds odd to hear 

 Philomela, the metamorphosed Princess of Athens, turned into a /le. 



