The Nightingale. 163 



expands its wings, and is off in another moment. 

 If it alights on the ground, it rears up head and 

 neck like a thrush, hops a few paces, listens, darts 

 upon some morsel of food, and does not dally 

 with it. As it sings, its whole body vibrates, and 

 the soft neck feathers ripple to the quivering of 

 the throat. 



I need not attempt to describe that wonderful 

 song, if song it is, and not rather an impassioned 

 recitative. The poets are often sadly to seek about 

 it ; Wordsworth at least seems to have caught its 



spirit : 



" O Nightingale, thou surely art 

 A creature of a fiery heart." 



And Wordsworth, as he tells us in the next stanza, 

 found the cooing of the stock-dove more agreeable 

 to his pensive mind. I never yet heard a Night- 

 ingale singing dolefully, as the poets will have it 

 sing; 1 its varied phrases are all given out con brio, 

 and even that marvellous crescendo on a single 



1 As in Milton's " most musical, most melancholy/' But as 

 Coleridge remarks in a note to his own poem of the Night- 

 ingale, in Sibylline Leaves, these words of Milton are spoken 

 in the character of the melancholy man, and have therefore 

 a dramatic rather than a descriptive propriety. Coleridge's own 

 conception of the song is the true one and most happily expressed. 



M 2 



