NATURE NOTES 
114 
of the children was Mr. Holt White, of Bexley, son of the late 
Mr. Algernon Holt White, the grandnephew of Gilbert White, 
of Selborne ! This gentleman was naturally much pleased with 
the account of the Arbor Day celebration, and told how his 
father as a boy in 1820 had planted an acorn, at Clement’s Hall 
in Essex, from which had sprung an oak, in which rooks had 
built nests some thirty years ago. Mr. Holt White is one of 
the Vice-Presidents of the Selborne Society, and it is owing to a 
suggestion made by him that I have written the foregoing pages. 
C. W. Radcliffe Cooke, M.P. 
THE NIGHTINGALE. 
Hark to those notes making night melodious ! 
’Tis the amorous nightingale piping to his mate. 
What trills ! What tremors ! What sweet-toned flutings 
Steal softly on the list'ning ear ! 
’Tis love’s long lullaby. 
Now with full-throated quickening raptures 
He tells his tale of glowing love, 
Now with plaintive melancholy murmurs 
’Twixt joy and sadness, 
In eddying cadences 
He pours forth through the deep’ning night 
His untiring song. 
Fays and fairies gather 
To hear the music : 
Entranced 
They feel the spell. 
’Tis not to man thou singest, 
Nor for him thy way thou wingest 
From sunny lands afar, 
Sweet warbler ! 
Thy nightly reveries thou holdest 
In closest covert hidden, 
And darksome dell. 
What art thou ? Whence carn’st thou ? 
Who can tell ? 
Spring’s harbinger ! 
May’s chorister ! 
Love’s sentinel ! 
Spirit of song ! 
Our Philomel. 
T. F. Wakefield. 
Richmond , May -Day, 1894. 
