BIRD-HAUNTED LONDON 119 



sound by March. Somehow the very innocence of the 

 throstle's song, his brilliant, varied, luxuriant declara- 

 tion of care-free gladness, lack meditation and tender- 

 ness. We are now so burdened with memory, so 

 appalled by the misery of our own world, that this 

 hey-nonny of a " too happy " bird is as remote from 

 us as the equivalent Elizabethan madrigal. A sorrow 

 to match and express our own we shall not find in 

 nature, but the throstle's very exuberance of joy 

 seems to mock and reproach us. 



It is otherwise with the blackbird, whom I first 

 heard on February 22nd (1919) at seven o'clock in the 

 morning, and in 1921, actually on January 26th. I 

 remember reading somewhere an observation that the 

 blackbird's flute is less a song than "a refined and 

 spiritualized soliloquy." The writer never said a truer 

 thing, for those calm and leisurely intonations are not 

 those of song, but of talk, and the very imperfections 

 and breakings down seem like the prosiest portions 

 of the narrative, the plea, the description, the dramatic 

 monologue, whichever it be. The speaker, for all his 

 eloquence, is not a trained rhetorician. It is as if his 

 tidings were of things of too fair a report for the 

 vehicle of sound to convey ; his technique is not ade- 

 quate to them, and his appreciation of these marvels 

 make him fragmentary, incoherent in his effort to express 

 them. 



I think the reason why this music moves us even 

 more than its beauty warrants is twofold. In the 

 first place, the break with winter is not too abrupt. 

 Unlike those of July and August, avian voices are 

 never silent in winter. The pied wagtail along the 

 river utters his bright, sibilant double note as he 

 hurls himself through the air ; the meadow pipits 

 ring their fugitive elfin bells ; the robin's thin silver 

 spears of melody pierce the mirk ; the tits clatter 

 among the tree-tops, and seem, like Dr. Johnson, to 

 be always drinking tea, so like are their vivacious 

 notes to the rattling of cups and spoons ; the tawny 

 owls cry like the night wind in the rigging and down 

 the chimney ; gulls and lapwings are the bagpipes 



