42 
BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 
well be lifted above the earth, and say, * Lord what music 
hast thou provided for the saints in heaven, when thou 
affordest bad men such music upon earthNo wonder 
the old poets wove it into their wild fables, and made it 
the emblem of tenderness, affection, and slighted worth. 
No wonder that Hesiod sang of the “ dappled Philomel/ 
Homer of the “ tawny Nightingale,” iEschylus, Sopho¬ 
cles, and Euripides—himself the nightingale of Grecian 
poetry, drawing his inspirations from the beautiful in 
Nature—Theocritus, dreamy and musical as a summer 
sleep—Longus, spiritual and tender, like the flowers in 
the gardens of Philetas;—all that have known how to 
love and sing, from the mountain bard, charming the 
shepherds with impromptu songs, to Milton singing 
of— 
-- {f the pleasant time, 
The cool, the silent, save where silence yields 
To the night* warbling bird, that now awake, 
Tunes sweetest his love-laboured song/’ 
And not those only that sing deserve honourable mention, 
but many others, whose throats have no ravishing har¬ 
monies, are yet susceptible of the rose-hues and summer 
breath of that blind god who tips his arrow with an 
amra bloom to make its point pierce keener. There is 
the little wagtail—dear to the Season of Buttercups—a 
consequential, striding wiseacre, for ever foraging by the 
unfrozen spring for delicate morsels of insect life; a 
thorough Briton, nevertheless, who sticks to the land 
that gave him birth, and disdains to turn his back on 
our northern climate, because a few fogs and frosts give 
edge to the British winter. There are the rooks, too, a 
