THE SEASON OF BUTTERCUPS. 25 



all the while warbling to his bride as she sits brooding and listening 

 under the shelter of the bents. 



How fares it with a hundred others ? Mute all the year till now, 

 Love seizes them, and they become spirits of gay song, so full, free, 

 and concordant, that the forest is no longer a mere fleet of brown 

 stems, but " an orchestra of mighty sound." 



In the very dawn of spring comes the wryneck, with its cry of 

 " pee," softer and fuller now, because uttered from the heart, telling 

 of the hours, when — 



The balm, the beauty, and the bloom 

 Recall the good Creator to his creature. 



Then, simultaneously, the chaffinch, who had begun to sing long 

 before, attains the fulness and fluency of his cheerful song ; the 

 thrush, who whistled when the snow lay thick, is hurried with the 

 rest, and has so much to express that he is constrained to sing by 

 night as well as by day ; the blackcap, with uncontrollable delight, 

 mocks all the songs it hears, as if employing all the languages of the 

 bird-world to express what language never can express at all ; and 

 from the midst of this "full-throated chorus," rise the soft modu- 

 lations of the nightingale, first, *' jug jug," then in a liquid strain of 

 flute-like music which melts us into tears, as if it were the voice of a 

 happy spirit, singing songs of gladness in the gardens of Paradise. 

 It " breathes," says old Izaak Walton, " such sweet, loud music out 

 of its little instrumental throat, that it might make mankind think 

 that miracles had not ceased. He that at midnight, when the very 

 labourer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have often, the clear airs, 

 the sweet descant, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and 

 redoubling of that sweet voice, might well be lifted above the earth, 

 and say, * Lord, what music hast thou provided for the saints in 

 heaven, when thou affordest bad men such music upon earth?'" 

 No wonder the old poets wove it into their wild fables, and made it 

 the emblem of tenderness, affection, and slighted worth. No wonder 

 that Hesiod sang of the " dappled Philomel," Homer of the "tawny 

 Nightingale," ^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides — himself the 

 nightingale of Grecian poetry, drawing his inspirations from the 

 beautiful in Nature — Theocritus, dreamy and musical as a summer 

 sleep — Longus, spiritual and tender, like the flowers in the gardens 

 of Philetas ; — all that have known how to love and sing, from the 



