72 NATURAL HISTORY 



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, 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. k 



I am, &c. 



LETTER XXV, 



TO THE SAME. 



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 partake of our milder winters, and return 

 to the northward again when the rigorous cold abates, so I 



1 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 scaralceus. 



k See the story of Hero and Leander. 



