168 
WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIEDS. 
to wear. In the Bird, with its plain, brown plumes hid in 
the lowly hawthorn, singing to the night, who does not see 
a resemblance to the Eepublican Poet, in his coarse, simple 
garb, retired beyond the reach of persecution to his humble 
home, while, out of his darkness^ over all the world, 
" Prophetic echoes flung dim melody." 
With so many and such singular points of coincidence be- 
tween them, who can doubt but that the Poet felt them, and 
that his mild spirit yearned, and was moved by the tender 
drawing of affinities towards his tuneful Brother. He, 
rather than poor Keats, might have passionately pleaded : 
" So let me be thy choir, and make a moan 
Upon the midnight hours. 
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet, 
From swinged censers teeming ; 
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat. 
Of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming." 
As is Milton, so is the Nightingale peculiarly the favorite 
of the poets. They are regarded alike with a gentle and 
deep affection. Kind old Spenser has expressed this for us 
all, and for all time, concerning the Bird ; and the Poet and 
the Bird are one. 
" Hence with the nightingale will I take parte, 
That blessed byrd that spends her time of sleepe 
Tn songs and plaintive pleas ." 
Other coincidences — if possible, even yet more apparent — 
suggest themselves. 
" Nor that is not the lark, whose notes do beat 
The vaulty heaven so high above our head." 
The thought of Shelley at once occurs in the high place 
of that aerial melodist. Who has not, long ago, linked in- 
