SONGS AND MUSIC 



183 



have such a quality. The most musical are not always the 

 most pleasing. Few can give more pleasure than the high 

 crescendo ripple of the tree-pipit as he makes a sharp gable 

 of flight above an oak, or — to give a personal preference— the 

 first bell of the wood-wren, to be heard year after year, much 

 about the same date, from a neighbouring group of beeches. 

 It has no music and little variety ; but yet it could ' beget the 

 golden time again,' as did the cuckoo's song, for Wordsworth 

 ringing gently like this : 



i ^P 



m 



a moving mystery of sound now from one place, now from 

 another, penetrating the leafage of the wood where he lay on 

 just one particular sunny day. 



The secret of the charm of the more real singers is much 

 the same as of the cuckoo. In the 

 lark's song is contained all the sense 

 of surrounding things, as catalogued — 

 if one may say so — in Meredith's ' Lark 

 Ascending,' one of the great poems of 



the century. Much of the nightingale's supremacy is due to 

 the night and quietness, and if the poets had been early 

 risers we should have heard as much of the blackbird. 



The blackbird apart the best songs are least expressible 

 in music. It is quite impossible to give in musical notation 

 the song of the lark, which, with a very few exceptions, may 

 be called the one continuous singer among birds. Scots- 

 men have compared the song with the music of the pipes, 

 and the resemblance is quite perceptible. Whether this is an 

 argument for or against the musical nature of the song is a 

 question that may be left undecided. But the majority of 



