MUTE SWAN. 87 



nest, the ordinary call or croak, and the more har- 

 monious double note with which it responds to the 

 low soft whistlings of its young in summer. The first 

 of these, though frequently heard by day, is particularly 

 striking on a dark or foggy night, when the presence 

 of a family group, disturbed by some passing boat, is 

 thus indicated. If not mute, however, when living, we 

 have Waterton's experience to refute for ever the well 

 known fable of its powers of song when dying. Alas ! 

 for that pretty fiction of mythology, and Tennyson's 

 elaborately descriptive poem on the dying swan, wherein 

 we learn that — 



" At first to the ear, 



The warble was loud and full and clear ; 



And floating about the under sky. 

 # # # # 



But anon her awful jubilant voice, 

 With a music strange and manifold, 

 Flow'd forth on a carol full and bold. 

 As when a mighty people rejoice." 



tP tP •?(• "JP 



till at leng-th the willows, mosses, and soughing reeds, 



" And the silvery marish flowers that throng, 

 The desolate cricks and pools among, 

 Were flooded over with eddying song." 



Alas ! I repeat, for the poet's too vivid imagination, the 

 swan attended in its last moments by a matter of fact 

 naturalist, "never even uttered" (to quote his own 

 words) "its wonted cry, nor so much as a sound, to 

 indicate what he felt within." 



This is, moreover, one of the " vulgar errors " dis- 

 cussed by Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia 

 epidemica, published in 1646, and to which he sums up 

 his objections in the following terms : — " When, there- 

 fore, we consider the dissention of authors, the falsity 

 of relations, the indisposition of the organs [the con- 

 formation of the windpipe] and the unmusical note of 



