62 THE NATURAL HISTORY 



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, combine ; 

 The tinkling sheep-bell, or the breath of kine ; 

 The new-mown hay that scents the swelling breeze, 

 Or cottage-chimney smoking through the trees. 



The chilling night-dews fall : away, retire ; 

 For see, the glow-worm lights her amorous fire ! ^ 

 Thus, ere night's veil had half obscured the sky, 

 Th' impatient damsel hung her lamp on high ; 

 True to the signal, by love's meteor led, 

 Leander hasten'd to his Hero's bed.^ 



I am, etc. 



LETTER XXV 



TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESOUIRE 



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 southward .'' Was 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 analogy. For as all other 

 autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to par- 

 take of our milder winters, and return to the northward 

 again when the rigorous cold abates, so I concluded that 



^ The light of the female glow-worm (as she often crawls up the stalk 

 of a grass to make herself more conspicuous) is a signal to the male, which 

 is a slender dusky scarabaeus. 



2 See the story of Hero and Leander. 



