846 
A HISTORY OF THE NIGHTINGALE. 
asserted to the contrary, the Nightingale is a frequent diurnal vocalist, insomuch 
that to one that may he heard singing during the night, at least a dozen may be 
remarked in the same locality by day, in places where they are numerous. They 
sing more frequently at midnight than in the evening ; for at about eight or nine 
o’clock not a single Nightingale will perhaps be heard, when, an hour or two 
later, the woods resound with their music. 
The surpassing song of the Nightingale is totally unlike that of every other 
British bird; and its characteristic trait is the brilliancy of its execution, the 
articulate manner in which it repeats the most inimitable passages, often with 
inconceivable rapidity. It is a bird 
“ That crowds and hurries and precipitates 
With fast thick warble his delicious notes, 
As ever fearful that an April night 
Would be too short for him to utter forth 
His love chaunt, and disburthen his full soul 
Of all its music * * * _ 
* * * Far and near 
To wood and thicket over the wide grove 
They answer and provoke each others songs,* 
With skirmish and capricious passagings, 
And murmurs musical, and sweet ‘jug, jug,’ 
And one low piping sound more sweet than all, 
Stirring the air with such an harmony. 
That should you close your eyes you might almost 
Forget it was not day.” 
Coleridge. 
But the Bard of Avon, availing himself of the acknowledged licence of a poet, 
affirms that 
“ The Nightingale, if she should sing by day, 
When every Goose is cackling, would be thought 
No better a musician than the Wren.” 
And the Scottish ornithologist of America, Alexander Wilson, seizes on this 
deprecatory passage in order to extol the Mocking-bird at the Nightingale’s 
expense. It is in the day-time, however, according to my judgment, that the 
Nightingale is heard to the most advantage. He is the loudest songster of the 
wood, and one of which the notes, at once, arrest the attention over every other. 
That singular a low piping sound more sweet than all” takes a stranger to its song 
quite by surprise; he wonders what he hears ,* and the rapidly-delivered passage 
that follows perhaps first apprises him that the sound proceeded from a bird. 
Slow, plaintive, rising in crescendo , dwelt on till the listener pauses in astonish-* 
ment,—again repeated in another key, even a third time,—how very different is this 
* A conspicuous habit, in which this bird further resembles the Robin. 
