22 The Minstrels of the Summer. 



whether the song of the nightingale be merry or sad. As 

 Hartley Coleridge puts it, it is a poet's question : — 



" Oh, nightingale, what doth she ail, 

 And is she sad or jolly ?" 



But the naturalist must have an opinion, and his decision will 

 be that it depends very much on the mood of the person hear- 

 ing it. Such exquisitely tender, plaintive, and refined modu- 

 lations as the nightingale pours forth for hours together, and 

 generally at a time when other birds are sparing of their songs, 

 will, of necessity, induce a feeling of agreeable sadness. No 

 intensely wrought performance in any department of art causes 

 mirth; the absorption of enjoyment is fatal to jollity, which 

 catches at things as they flit over the surface of life, and cannot 

 go deep without the certainty of being lost. Homer and Horace 

 give us no opinions on the subject. The passsge in the Selena 

 of Euripides, beginning at line 1191 of Potter's version, is de- 

 cisive as to the opinion of this careful observer of nature : — 



" Thee, sweetest bird, most musical 



Of all that warble their melodious song 

 The charmed woods among, 



Thee, tearful Nightingale, I call. 



Oh come, and from thy dark plumed throat 

 Swell sadly sweet thy melancholy note 



Attempered to my voice of woe." 



The beautiful thought of Isaac Walton is familiar to every 

 reader; not so, perhaps, that in Sylvester's Bu Bartas, be- 

 ginning — 



" All this is nothing to the nightingale ! 

 Breathing so sweetly from a breast so small 

 So many tunes." 



Sophocles invariably represents the nightingale as sad, 

 and, in common with the poets, addresses the bird in the 

 feminine gender. How awfully touching is that passage in 

 the Agamemnon of iEschylus, where the chorus describes the 

 " frenzy of a mind possessed with wildest ravings," as 



" Like the sweet bird 



That darkling pours her never-ceasing plaint." 



And what reader of Sophocles will forget the wandering 

 CEdipus, in his blindness and exile, led by his daughter to a 

 land the name of which they knew not, where 



" In the midst 



Thick fluttering nightingales their sweet notes tune." 



Whose line is that — " Dulces variat Philomela querelas ?" -It 

 would be worth knowing, for it gives a new form to the dis- 

 cussion. Virgil comes near its spirit in the Georgics (IV. i. 511), 



