72 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



These, NATURE'S works, the curious mind employ, 



Inspire a soothing melancholy joy: 



As fancy warms, a pleasing kind of pain 



Steals o'er the cheek, and thrills the creeping vein ! 



Each rural sight, each sound, each smell, combine j 

 The tinkling sheep-bell, or the breath of kine ; 

 The new-mown hay that scents the swelling breeze, 

 Or cottage-chimney smoking through the trees. 



The chilling nigh-dews fall : away, retire ! 

 For see, the glow-worm lights her amorous firei * 

 Thus, ere night's veil had half obscured the sky, 

 Th' impatient damsel hung her lamp on high : 

 True to the signal, by love's meteor led, 

 Leander hasten'd to his Hero's bed. f 



I am, &c> 



LETTER XXV. 



TO THE SAME. 



SELBORNE, Aug. y>th, 1769. 



DEAR SIR, It gives me satisfaction to find that my account of 

 the ousel migration pleases you. You put a very shrewd question 

 when you ask me how I know that their autumnal migration is 

 southward ? Was not candour and openness the very life of natural 

 history, I should pass over this query just as a fly commentator 

 does over a crabbed passage in a classic ; but common ingenuous- 

 ness obliges me to confess, not without some degree of shame, that 

 I only reasoned in that case from analogy. For as all other 

 autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to partake of our 

 milder winters, and return to the northward again when the rigor- 

 ous cold abates, so I concluded that the ring-ousels did the same, 

 as well as their congeners the fieldfares ; and especially as ring- 

 ousels are known to haunt cold mountainous countries : but I have 

 good reason to suspect since that they may come to us from the 



* The light of the female glow-worm (as she often crawls up the stalk of a grass to 

 make herself more conspicuous) is a signal to the male, which is a slender dusky 

 rrarabceus. 



\ See the story of Hero and Leander. 



