BIRDS AND POETS v4 
In a like vein Coleridge sang: — 
“Tis the merry nightingale 
That crowds and hurries and precipitates 
With fast, thick warble his delicious notes.’? 
Keats’s poem on the nightingale is doubtless 
more in the spirit of the bird’s strain than any 
other. It is less a description of the song and more 
the song itself. Hood called the nightingale 
“The sweet and plaintive Sappho of the dell.” 
I mention the nightingale only to point my re- 
marks upon its American rival, the famous mocking- 
bird of the Southern States, which is also a nightin- 
gale, —a night-singer, — and which no doubt excels 
the Old World bird in the variety and compass of 
its powers. The two birds belong to totally dis- 
tinct families, there being no American species 
which answers to the European nightingale, as there 
are that answer to the robin, the cuckoo, the black- 
bird, and numerous others. Philomel has the color, 
manners, and habits of a thrush, — our hermit thrush, 
— but it is not a thrush at all, but a warbler. I 
gather from the books that its song is protracted 
and full rather than melodious, —a capricious, long- 
continued warble, doubling and redoubling, rising 
and falling, issuing from the groves and the great 
gardens, and associated in the minds of the poets 
with love and moonlight and the privacy of seques- 
tered walks. All our sympathies and attractions are 
with the bird, and we do not forget that Arabia and 
Persia are there back of its song. 
