CANTO ii. REPRODUCTION OF LIFE. 71 



Loud trills sweet Philomel his tender strain, 

 Charms his fond bride, and wakes his infant train ; 

 Perch'd on the circling moss, the listening throng 

 Wave their young wings, and whisper to the song. 



" The Lion-King forgets his savage pride, 

 And courts with playful paws his tawny bride; 

 The listening Tiger hears with kindling flame 

 The love-lorn night-call of his brinded dame. 360 



Despotic LOVE dissolves the bestial war, 

 Bends their proud necks, and joins them to his car; 



and as one half of the external shell is thus moist, and the other half 

 dry, as soon as the mother hearing the chick chirp, or the chick 

 itself wanting respirable air, strikes the egg, about its equatorial 

 line, it breaks into two hemispheres, and liberates the prisoner. 



And whisper to the song. I. 356. A curious circumstance is men- 

 tioned by Kircherus cle Musurgia, in his Chapter de Lusciniis. 

 " That the young nightingales, that are hatched under other birds, 

 never sing till they are instructed by the company of other nightin- 

 gales." And Johnston affirms, that the nightingales that visit Scot- 

 land, have not the same harmony as those of Italy, (Pennant's Zoo- 

 logy, octavo, p. 235), which would lead us to suspect, that the sing- 

 ing of birds, like human music, is an artificial language rather than a 

 natural expression of passion. 



