OF SELBORNE. 93 
While, high in air, and poised upon his wings, 
Unseen, the soft, enamour’d woodlark* sings : 
These, Nature’s works, the curious mind employ, 
Inspire a soothing, melancholy joy : 
As fancy warms, a pleasing kind of pain 
Steals o’er the cheek, and thrills the creeping vein ! 
Each rural sight, each sound, each smell com- 
bine ; 
The tinkling sheepbell, or the breath of kine ; 
The new-mown hay, that scents the swelling breeze, 
Or cottage chimney smoking through the trees. 
LETTER XXV. 
Selborne, Aug. 30, 1769. 
Dear Sir,—It gives me satisfaction to find that 
my account of the ousel migration pleases you. 
You put a very shrewd question when you ask me 
how i know that their autumnal migration is south. 
ward. Were not candour and openness the very 
life of natural history, I should pass over this query 
just as a sly commentator does over a crabbed 
passage in a classic ; but common ingenuousness 
obliges me to confess, not without some degree of 
shame, that I only reasoned in that case from anal. 
ogy. For, as all other autumnal birds migrate 
from the northward to us to partake of our milder 
winters, and return to the northward again when 
the rigorous cold abates, so I concluded that the 
ringousels did the same, as well as their congeners 
* In hot summer nights, woodlarks soar to a prodigious height, 
and hang singing in the air. 
