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PICTURES OF BIRD LIFE. 
We hear, too, of “the Nightingale’s complaining woes,” and of “twenty caged 
Nightingales,” showing that the cruelties practised on this bird by the snarers are 
not of recent infliction. But Shakespeare can upon occasion hear the merry, gleeful 
mood in this bird’s character, as in— 
“ Philomel with melody 
Sing in our sweet lullaby ; ” 
and in 
“ She sings as sweetly as any Nightingale.” 
The bird’s name and its suggestiveness probably caused him to put into Edgar’s 
mouth in “King Lear” that “the foul fiend haunts poor Tom in the shape of a 
Nightingale.” Almost every one, when disputing whether the bird’s song is glad or 
mournful, has been confronted with the objection that much of the sweetness and 
effectiveness of the strain is due to its association with the peaceful images of night. 
Shakespeare long ago put this view in the mouth of Portia— 
“And I think 
The Nightingale, if she should sing by day, 
When every goose is cackling, would be thought 
No better a musician than the wren.” 
There is a legend in Essex that Nightingales never sing at St. Oswyth, because 
they interrupted Becket’s evening prayers by their song, and were cursed by the 
saint for their ill-timed merriment. 
The love of the Nightingale for the rose forms the theme of much Persian 
poetry. Sir William Jones thus translates a Persian quatrain— 
“ Come, charming maid, and hear thy poet sing, 
Thyself the rose, and he the bird of spring; 
Love bids him sing, and Love will be obeyed. 
Be gay ! Too soon the flowers of spring will fade 
and Byron, in a beautiful description of the rose as known only in all its fragrance 
in the East, has not forgotten the myth— 
“For there the rose o’er crag or vale, 
Sultana of the Nightingale, 
The maid for whom his melody, 
His thousand songs, are heard on high, 
Blooms blushing to her lover’s tale. 
His queen, the garden queen, his rose, 
Unbent by winds, unchilled by snows, 
