86 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



an elaborate or brilliant song, and the languishing notes, 

 though they do not always float down to the last sighing 

 diminuendo, are always repeated in the same order. 

 Yet it is a song to which I could listen longer than to 

 that of any other small bird (except the nightingale) 

 I know, so fragile is it, but so lingering that after some 

 minutes it steals into and interpenetrates the whole 

 being, until one breathes and moves by music, as though 

 personal identity were relaxing and shifting, swinging 

 into the measured beats of nature's pulse, caught up 

 into that great pendulum of song that surges up through 

 drone of gnat's wing to the chiming of the star, and 

 now down, a shaft of light, a loosed wind, a leaf, down 

 into the fainting Amen of this yellowish-green bird-form 

 among the green- winged branches. 



There is, indeed, a double appeal in the willow- 

 warbler's song, the one belonging to the natural festival 

 of renewal, the other to human sentiment — a good 

 morning and a good evening. It is the music of the 

 wind-flower, clear, yet low, and is the very expression 

 of shy, maidenly, early spring, when the April morning 

 is like one of Blake's children and the shy-peering 

 grass, the primroses and bluebells seem rather dimples 

 than shapes, rather melodies than colours, each with 

 its separate note, but blended all into one concert of 

 praise. But while aerial, the song is also human, not 

 in the tone, I think (as Mr. Hudson says), but its ex- 

 pression and the gentle stimulus it gives to associations 

 of the past. It is too subtle for melancholy, and its 

 plaintiveness is free of sorrow — it voices, shall we say, 

 what old Lyly would call " a pleasing pain." Though 

 it is impossible for the human ear to distinguish by any 

 difference of note or quality between a bird's song 

 uttered in anger or anxiety and one of rapture, yet 

 intoxication of spirits, the overmastering gladness which 

 is in all nature, are what commonly impel a bird to 

 sing, and of such is the willow-wren's elegy. But for 

 us an elegy it remains, a reminder and looking back- 

 wards through the screen of leafy memory drawn aside 

 by it. Thus the song I heard was a true dispensation 

 for my journey to Selborne, and I could go ahead, boldly 



