A PARTICULAR REVIEW 19 



Its music, the sweetest of all sweet natural, non- 

 human sounds whatever, makes the bird much sought 

 after by fanciers, but it is the last of our songsters of 

 the wild that Thomson would have wished to see in a 

 cage. To him it was infinitely preferable in the bush. 

 William Blake imagined that 



A robin-redbreast in a cage 

 Put all Heaven in a rage: 



a nightingale in confinement filled the heart of Thom- 

 son with sorrow. He has a picture of the empty nest 

 (from which the fledgelings have been stolen) and of 

 the anguish of the mother bird at the discovery of her 



Returning with her loaded bill, 

 70 The astonished mother finds a vacant nest, 

 By the hard hand of unrelenting clowns 

 Robbed ! To the ground the vain provision falls; 

 Her pinions ruffle, and, low-drooping, scarce 

 Can bear the mourner to the poplar shade, 

 Where, all abandoned to despair, she sings 

 Her sorrows through the night, and, on the bough 

 Sole-sitting, still at every dying fall 

 Takes up again her lamentable strain 

 Of winding woe. 



so It is her gift of song that recommends the night- 

 ingale to his sympathy. Song is more than form or 

 feathers. The gay plumage of tropical birds was less 

 attractive than the sober-suited songstress trilling her 

 sorrow to the listening night. With a poet's courtesy 

 to the sex, Thomson (like Milton, among others) gives 

 the superiority in song to the female, but, as a matter 

 of scientific fact, it is the male nightingale that is the 

 better singer. 



B2 



