BY-WAYS 



AND 



B I R D-N O T E S . 



IN THE HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING- 

 BIRD. 



THE mocking-bird has been called the 

 American nightingale, with a view, no doubt, 

 to inflicting a compliment involving the opera- 

 tion, known to us all, of damning with faint 

 praise. The nightingale presumably is not 

 the sufferer by the comparison, since she holds 

 immemorial title to preeminence amongst sing- 

 ing-birds. The story of Philomela, however, 

 as first told, was not an especially pleasing 

 one, and the poets made no great use of it. 

 Nowhere in Greek or Roman literature, so far 

 as I know, is there any genuine lyric apostro- 

 phe to the nightingale comparable to Sappho's 

 fragment To the Rose; still the bird has a 

 prestige gathered from centuries of poetry and 

 upheld by the master romancers of the world. 



To compare the song of any other bird with 

 that of the nightingale is like instituting a 

 comparison between some poet of to-day and 

 Shakespeare, so far as any sympathy with the 

 would-be rival is concerned. The world has 

 long ago made up its mind, and when the 

 world once does that there is an end, a cul de 



