20 The Minstrels of the Summer. 



hour, but none of these, so far as I know, visit the gardens near 

 London. 



The niusic of birds has a different effect to music of every 

 other kind, and it may be that the associations of vegetable 

 luxuriance and the enjoyment of a refreshing out-door tempe- 

 rature assist the charm and are properly parts of it. Gassendi 

 gives a curious reason for preferring the music of birds to that 

 of instruments, and describes the effect of the latter on the 

 mind — " Prsehabebat porro vocibus hunianis, instrumentisque 

 harmonicis, musicam illam avium." Certainly with a western 

 prospect, consisting of broken campaign sward terminating in a 

 background of copse and tall elms, when the sun darts his first 

 horizontal beams across it, and with a scarlet thorn to perfume 

 the air and a thrush or nightingale in song overhead, the plea- 

 sure is as great as can be borne, and is enough to make one 

 ■satisfied that our summer grows by successive increments, for 

 if it were to burst upon us all at once it would be too much for 

 ordinary powers of endurance. 



It has been frequently remarked that song birds generally 

 haunt the dwellings of man. This is particularly the case in 

 Britain, though it is a mistake to allege that the birds of the 

 tropical wilderness are deficient of musical powers, and in the 

 tropics, especially of America, the richest bird-music is heard 

 in districts where man is at most a sojourner, and has never 

 chosen a site for a village or encampment. It may be that 

 song birds like human society, as it is certain the robin, black- 

 bird, and thrush do ; and it may also happen that food and 

 conveniences for building are more plentiful on the skirts of 

 towns and villages than in deep forests and great open wastes. 

 But this association has not been without its effect on litera- 

 ture ; and when I have heard some of those wild Scottish and 

 Irish airs that remain to us of the music of the past, I have often 

 thought they were borrowed from the songs of birds ; and I 

 should suppose the modulations of the robin, the nightingale, 

 and the song thrush, would furnish ready-made compositions, 

 needing only to be copied, for the use of the mellowest human 

 voices, and for any class of soft-toned wind instruments. 

 Gardener ; s Music of Nature I have never seen, but have always 

 understood that it is a reduction to musical scale of the songs 

 of our best birds. Kircher, in his Universal Harmony (vol. i. 

 chap. 14), attempted a reduction of the nightingale's song, and 

 with much better* success than Bechstein's reduction to words 

 consisting of zi and zo endlessly repeated. The very thought 

 of wedding such music to words, as I believe was done by the 

 old Scottish and Irish minstrels, suggests the question, What 

 do the birds themselves mean ? for these exquisite utterances 

 have a meaning, we may be sure, and are not far away from 



