REDBREAST. 33: 
robbed home: if ever you have plundered a Robin’s nest, or 
that of any other bird, let me hope that you will ‘steal no 
more:’— 
‘To the ground the vain provision falls! 
Her pinions ruffle, and, low drooping, scarce 
Can bear the mourner to the poplar shade; 
Where, all abandoned to despair, she sings 
Her sorrows through the night; and on the bough 
Sole sitting, still at every dying fall 
Takes up again her lamentable strain 
Of winding woe; till wide around, the woods 
Sigh to her song, and with her wail resound.’ 
Here is no ‘poetic license, but if you think there is, the 
following well written ‘plain prose’ of the amiable Mr. Jesse 
will satisfy the possible doubt:—‘I had an opportunity,’ he 
writes in his ‘Gleanings in Natural History,’ ‘this summer of 
witnessing the distress of a Robin, when, on returning to her 
nest with food for her young, she discovered that they had 
disappeared. Her low and plaintive wailings were incessant. 
She appeared to seek for them among the neighbouring 
bushes, now and then changing her mournful cry into one 
which seemed like a call to her brood to come to her. She 
kept the food in her mouth for a short time, but when she 
found that her cries were unanswered, let it fall to the 
ground.’ 
So also Virgil, though speaking of a different species, in 
his ‘Fourth Georgic, for nature was the same eighteen 
hundred years ago as she is now,— 
‘Qualis populeé mcerens philomela sub umbra 
Amissos queritur foetus, quos durus arator 
Observans nido inplumes detraxit: at illa 
Flet noctem, ramoque sedens, miserabile carmen 
Integrat, et mestis late loca quzstibus implet.’ 
Thus well rendered by Dryden— 
‘So, close in poplar shades, her children gone, 
The mother Nightingale laments alone, 
Whose nest some prying churl had found, and thence 
By stealth convey’d the unfeather’d innocence. 
But she supplies the night with mournful strains, 
And melancholy music fills the plains.’ 
The eggs, generally five or six in number, are of a 
delicate pale reddish white, faintly freckled with rather darker 
red, most so at the larger end, where a zone or belt is 
VOL. IV. 5 D 
