49 



PHILOMEL 



To realise the strange and almost horrible mingling 

 of beauty and squalor, of passion and indifference, 

 of harmony and discord, that composes into life, there 

 is no more helpful experience than to stand between 

 eleven and twelve at night ' list'ning the nightingale ' 

 on the skirts of Epping Forest. In cherry orchards, 

 when the moon shines so brightly that leaf and flower 

 are as easily distinguished as in broad daylight, you 

 think ypu find in him all the rejoicing merriment that 

 Coleridge found ; and to hear him in some other en- 

 vironment is to agree with Milton that he was ' most 

 musical, most melancholy.' But to come upon him in 

 the wood, out of which he was banished for warbling 

 in, the lonely places where St. Edward used to 

 pray, is to recognise that both the sorrow and the joy 

 were in the listening ear. Here your mind rejects 

 the legendary fancy that he is lamenting or rejoicing 

 his fate, here you can not figure him as a human 

 spirit in the likeness of a brown bird. 



Within the radius of a few miles is many a green, 

 unvisited coppice, ringed in with fresh, cool ferns, 

 where the buds are breaking on the sweetbriar, and 

 the foliage is virgin and undefiled ; but in these you 

 might stand for ever without hearing note of his. Yet 

 here, in these woodlands bedraggled and shamed by 



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