104 THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 



delicious phrases as new and fresh as dew, 

 and yet as old as the sea. I could not get rid 

 of them, even when I shut myself in my 

 study. If I turned to the poets, there were 

 the nightingale and the dove, the mavis, the 

 eky-lark and the oriole singing away for dear 

 life; from the preludes to Greek folk-songs 

 and from the ballads of the love-sick Proven- 

 gal tramp, or from the roundel of the steel-clad 

 knight as he rode along the dusty highway 

 with the Rhone on one hand and the vine- 

 yards on the other, I heard the bird-notes 

 bubble out to mingle with the tinkle of cith- 

 ern and the quaver of hautbois. The orators, 

 the essayists, the preachers, and all the tribes 

 of romancers brought me echoes of sylvan 

 fluting. Then if I turned to the pages of 

 science and rushed to the extreme of "solid 

 reading," I fared no better; for even the rec- 

 ords ef geology eulogized the birds, and I 

 heard strange twitterings of avian voices 

 trickling like spring-streams out of the an- 

 cient rocks. Not less in the books than in 

 the woods and fields was bird-song tantaliz- 

 ing, for at every point some subtle and elusive 

 suggestion arose, only to escape final analysis. 

 Keats, in his Ode to a Nightingale blows 

 through his words something inexpressible 

 which haunts and taunts the understanding 

 like a half -forgotten strain of dream music, 

 and the same mysterious challenge to one's 

 soul exhales from the strange inscriptions 

 sketched in the deep-buried stones of aeons 

 ago, where the fragments of vanished bird- 

 forms hint of unknowable life-forces dried up 

 long before man felt the breath of God. One 

 must say this reverently and with no ques- 

 tion of a clash between Nature and the in- 

 spired record arising in one's mind, for the 

 Bible is not a natural-history book, nor is 

 geology a scheme of salvation. There is no 



