24 
THE NIGHTINGALE. 
miracles are not ceased. He that at midnight, when the 
very labourer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have very 
often, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising 
and falling, the doubling and redoubling, of her voice, 
might well be lifted above earth and say, Lord, what 
music hast thou provided for the saints in heaven, when 
thou affordest bad men such music on earth?” To “sing 
like a nightingale ” has passed into a proverb. 
“ She sings as sweetly as any nightingale.” 
Taming of the Shrew , Act ii. Sc. i. 
In Gardiner’s “ Music of Nature,” the following passage 
is given from the song of the Nightingale :— 
tr 
Although the male bird only is the songster, yet we 
talk of her singing — 
“It was the nightingale, and not the lark, 
That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear ; 
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree ;* 
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale. 
Romeo and Juliet , Act iii. Sc. 5. 
The origin of this change of sex is to be found, no 
# According to Steevens, this is not merely a poetical supposition. “It is ob¬ 
served,” he says, “of the nightingale that, if undisturbed, she sits and sings upon 
the same tree for many weeks together; ” and Russell, in his “Account of Aleppo,” 
tells us “ the nightingale sings from the pomegranate groves in the day-time.” 
