182 SUMMER 



one part of the song after the other falls away till you can 

 only hear that one lone and thrilling cry. The notes of the 

 blackbird, very often in a sequence of seven, are describable 

 in music. They differ a good deal, but the consecutiveness 

 of the notes and the liquidness of the tone form the most 

 unmistakable and cheeriest of all songs. Of the strains given 

 in Witchell's wonderful book the following, though more 

 monotonous, is, so to speak, the foundation of the song, 



mi 



e 



m 



m 



f= st= f t 



■r 



with the exception of the final note, which is the same as the 

 penultimate. Witchell, however, gives this as the alarm 

 note. But we must not judge birds' song by any of our 

 musical standards. Sounds in nature, whether made by 

 animate or inanimate things, please us because they are 



consonant with the mood 

 and form of the world at 

 the moment : 'The moan 

 of doves in immemorial 

 elms and murmur of in- 

 numerable bees ' are har- 

 monious for more esoteric 

 reasons than — may one 

 say ? — the music of those 

 two famous lines of the 

 young Tennyson. The 

 tinkle of thin ice, the 

 chromatic moan of the wind, the sucking whisper of the reced- 

 ing surf, are not musical sounds, but each has the power to stir 

 Celtic sense of ' old, forgotten, far-off things ' as powerfully as 

 the triumphant harmonies of Teutonic masters. Birds' songs 



^.- 



WOOD-WREN 



