Birds. 



8031 



" The finest music of the grove we owe 

 To mourning Philomel's harmonious woe ; 

 And, while her griefs in charming notes express'd, 

 A thorny bramble pricks her tender breast. 

 In warbling melody she spends the night, 

 And moves at once compassion and delight." 



And Hood, in the same strain, 



" Come let us set our careful breasts 

 Like Philomel, against a thorn, 

 To aggravate the inward grief 



That makes her accents so forlorn.'' 



Thus it was evidently believed by the poets, whether such an idea 

 was founded on fact or not, that the nightingale leaned her breast on a 

 thorn when she poured forth her mournful song. Now, I ask, what 

 was the origin of such a supposition ? Surely not a mere poetic fancy 

 without foundation, such as the romance of the melodious accents of 

 the dying swan. But I conceive that the finding a thorn projecting 

 from the nest after the manner described above, if it be occasionally 

 found in the nest of the nightingale, as in the two instances I have 

 given, would furnish ample ground for such poetic embellishment. 



But if this be so, still the original difficulty remains unexplained, 

 namely, Cui bono ? the why and wherefore of the thorn ; and the enigma, 

 scarcely more easy of solution, how does the sitting bird contrive to 

 cover her eggs or callow young, with a stout and pointed thorn occu- 

 pying the very centre of the nursery, an insuperable bar, as one would 

 have conjectured, to all domestic convenience and comfort ? These 

 are questions which I should much like to see answered, and on which 

 I earnestly entreat the opinion of those versed in nightingales and 

 nightingales' nests. 



Other details respecting these birds, communicated from the same 

 source, and those, too, very reliable, as resulting from close personal 

 observation, are, that in Wiltshire at any rate they are considerably on 

 the increase, and that notwithstanding the raid made on them by my 

 informant and two friends, who in one day a few years back, and on 

 one estate, took no less than fourteen birds, the greater part of which 

 were tamed and kept in cages through the winter. The same observer 

 has also satisfied himself that there are two distinct species of night- 

 ingales, which he describes as the darker and the redder sort, and which 

 he states vary from one another, not only in colour, in size and in note, 

 but also in locality, the one almost invariably frequenting hedgerows, 



