The Musical Swan {Cygnus musicus) 



By Julietta A. Owen 



''What moonlit glades, what seas, 



Foam-edged, have I not known ! 



Through ages hath not flown 



Mine ancient song with gathered music sweet — 



By fanes o'erthrown, 



By cities known of old, and classic woods, 



And, strangly sad, in deep-leaved northern solitudes?" 



If those living avian gems aglow amid the trees that form Earth's emerald 

 diadem, are the jewels of Nature's crown, then is the great white swan afloat 

 upon the ripples of her glistening lakes and seas, a shimmering pearl amid the 

 chasing of her silver breastplate. 



Yet it was not the beautiful Mute Swan, most beautiful, most stately, and 

 most silent of all created things, that typified to the men of old the reincarna- 

 tion of the poet's soul ; neither the Trumpter, with its loud clarion, but the more 

 slender Singing Swan of song and story, that ''thro' its deathless music sent a 

 dying moan." It was to this swan alone that the ancients could attribute the 

 power of melody — the singular faculty of tuning its dying dirge from among 

 the reedy marshes of its final retreat, where "in a low, plaintive and stridulous 

 voice, in the moment of death, it murmured forth its last prophetic sigh ;" and 

 it was this swan, too, that inspired the philosopher Pythagoras to teach that the 

 souls of poets passed at death into swans and retained the powers of harmony 

 they had possessed in their human forms. 



M. Antoine thinks that it is not improbable that the popular and poetical 

 notion of the singing of the swan was derived from the doctrine of the trans- 

 migration of souls; yet the traveler Pausanius, who spake as one having au- 

 thority, aflirmed the sw^an to be "the glory of music," at the same time pre- 

 serving the following testimony to the repute of the swan as a bird of prophecy : 

 "In the night before Plato was to become the pupil of Socrates, the latter in a 

 dream saw a swan take refuge in his bosom. Now the swan has a reputation 

 for music, because a man w^ho loved music very much, Kuknos, the king of the 

 Ligyes beyond the Eridanus, is said to have ruled the land of the Kelts. People 

 relate concerning him that, through the will of Apollo, he was changed after his 

 death into a swan." From this evidence Pausanius thus subtracts the weight 

 of his private opinion : "I am willing to believe that a man who loved music 

 may have ruled over the Ligyes, but that a human being was turned into a bird 

 is a thing impossible for me to believe." 



Mr. Rennie cites, also: "In his Phaedro, Plato makes Socrates thus ex- 

 presses himself : 'When swans perceive approaching death, they sing more merrily 

 than before because of the joy they have in going to the God they serve; but men, 

 through fear of death, reproach the swans, saying that they lament their death 



731 



