58 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



'Till blended objects fail the swimming sight, 



And all the fading landscape sinks in night ; 



To hear the drowsy dor come brushing by 



With buzzing wing, or the shrill * cricket cry ; 



To see the feeding bat glance through the wood ; 



To catch the distant falling of the flood ; 



"While o'er the cliff th' awaken'd churn-owl hung 



Through the still gloom protracts his chattering song 



While high in air, and poised upon his wings, 



Unseen, the soft enamour'd f woodlark sings : 



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 ; 

 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 night-dews fall : away, retire ! 

 For see, the glow-worm lights her amorous fire ! J 

 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. 



I am, &c. 



LETTER XXV. 



TO THE SAME. 



SELBORNE, Aug. 30th, 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 1 

 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 ingenuousness 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 rigorous 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 : 



* Gryllus campestris. 



t In hot summer nights woodlarks soar to a prodigious height, and hang singing 

 in the air. 



t 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 

 scarabceus. 



See the story of Hero and Leander. 



