4 8 
PICTURES OF BIRD LIFE. 
how beautifully this little creature modulates his music! We hear a soft plaintive 
note, sounding as though its author were a hundred yards away. Gradually it rises 
in its tone; we think the bird is coming nearer. Louder and louder become the 
notes, till they sound as if a blackbird, song-thrush, wren, robin, and warbler were 
all singing together. We happen to cast our eyes in the branches above us, and 
there we see this little black-capped songster; and after watching him we find that 
all these lovely notes, low and soft, loud and full, come from his little throat alone, 
and when at the same distance from us.” 
Thus much, then, for the life and characteristics of the Blackcap. It has not 
been so much celebrated in poetry as it deserves. It may have been the songster in 
the Laureate’s mind in his welcome to the Princess of Wales— 
“ Break, happy land, into earlier flowers; 
Make music, O bird, in the new-budded bowers ; ” 
and Thomson, when celebrating the songs of spring, and assigning as their cause 
“ ’Tis love creates their melody, and all 
This waste of music is the voice of love,” 
does not specify one of the most delightful minstrels. He relates, indeed, how 
“ The thrush 
And woodlark, o’er the kind-contending throng 
Superior heard, run through the sweetest length 
Of notes,” 
but the Blackcap must be mentally included in the next group— 
“Joined to these, 
Innumerable songsters in the fresh’ning shade 
Of new-sprung leaves their modulations mix 
Mellifluous.” 
Jean Ingelow, however, gives us a pretty picture of spring— 
“ The Blackcaps in an orchard met 
Praising the berries while they ate ; 
The finch that flew her beak to whet 
Before she joined them on the tree; 
The water-mouse among the reeds, 
His bright eyes glancing, black as beads, 
So happy with a bunch of seeds— 
I felt their gladness heartily.” 
Probably from its shy nature, being more like “ a wandering voice” than a bird 
which can be seen by every one, the Blackcap is not famous in folk-lore. The old 
