BIRDS AND POETS. 
165 
Falstaff, Bardolph, Shallow, Nym, et ii omnes — with Puck, 
Ariel, Titania and Oberon thrown in — stand like chiselled 
laughter upon the monumental front of Time. Our feath- 
ered Shakspeare can, in its sphere, contend for nothing so 
sublimely fixed — but that it is a practical, habitual humorist 
of the rarest water, as we have already shown. 
We will here dismiss this particular contrast. We are 
fully prepared to expect, that in this instance as well as in 
those which are to follow our "Similitudes" — our whole 
Philosophy indeed — will appear to many surface-glancing 
minds, 
" Like the man's thought dark in the infant's brain — 
Like aught that is which wraps what is to 
We are smilingly content to rest all upon this interpreta- 
tion, so that — in the Poetical sense, it include the pregnant 
meaning of 
" The infantine familiar clasp of things divine." 
And then, again, who but Milton, blind Thamyris " among 
the " Prophets old " should be a type of the Nightingale? 
Who does not remember that delicate and touching compar- 
ison instituted by himself in allusion to his blindness ? — 
Who, other than he, could under such circumstances of blank, 
rayless desolation— poised on his own supreme spiritualit}^ — 
have loftily fed 
" On thoughts that voluntary move 
Harmonious numbers as the wakeful bird 
Sings darkling, and in shadiest covers hid, 
Tunes her nocturnal note." 
All minds must be impressed by the strange excelling appo- 
siteness of the similitude in this case. Ah, Soul of the beau- 
tiful! thy 
