BEDBBEAST. 33 



robbed home: if ever you have plundered a Robin's nest, or 

 that of any other bird, let me hope that you will 'steal no 

 more:' 



'To the ground the vain provision falls! 



Her pinions ruffle, and, low drooping, scarce 



Can bear the mourner to the poplar shade; 



Where, all abandoned to despair, she sings 



Her sorrows through the night; and on the bough 



Sole sitting, still at every dying fall 



Takes up again her lamentable strain 



Of winding woe ; till wide around, the woods 



Sigh to her song, and with her wail resound.' 



Here is no 'poetic license,' but if you think there is, the 

 following well written 'plain prose' of the amiable Mr. Jesse 

 will satisfy the possible doubt: 'I had an opportunity,' he 

 writes in his 'Gleanings in Natural History,' 'this summer of 

 witnessing the distress of a Robin, when, on returning to her 

 nest with food for her young, she discovered that they had 

 disappeared. Her low and plaintive wailings were incessant. 

 She appeared to seek for them among the neighbouring 

 bushes, now and then changing her mournful cry into one 

 which seemed like a call to her brood to come to her. She 

 kept the food in her mouth for a short time, but when she 

 found that her cries were unanswered, let it fall to the 

 ground.' 



So also Virgil, though speaking of a different species, in 

 his 'Fourth G-eorgic,' for nature was the same eighteen 

 hundred years ago as she is now, 



'Qualis popule^ moerens philomela sub umbrS, 

 Amissos queritur foetus, quos durus arator 

 Observans nido inplumes detraxit: at ilia 

 *' Flet noctem, rampque sedens, miserabile carmen 

 Integrat, et mzestis late loca qusestibus implet.' 



Thus well rendered by Dryden 



So, close in poplar shades, her children gone, 



The mother Nightingale laments alone, 



Whose nest some prying churl had found, and thence 



By stealth convey'd the unfeather'd innocence. 



But she supplies the night with mournful strains, 



And melancholy music fills the plains.' 



The eggs, generally five or six in number, are of a 

 delicate pale reddish white, faintly freckled with rather darker 

 red, most so at the larger end, where a zone or belt is 

 VOL. iv. D 



