Or—

‘She sat down below a thorn,

Fine flowers in the valley,

And there has she her sweet babe born,

And the green leaves they grow rarely.’

Or even those ‘fal-la-las,’ and other nonsense refrains, which, if they

were not meant to imitate bird-notes, for what were they meant?

In the old ballads, too, one may hear the bird keynote. He who wrote

(and a great rhymer he was)

‘As I was walking all alane,

I heard twa corbies making a mane,’

had surely the ‘mane’ of the ‘corbies’ in his ears before it shaped

itself into words in his mind: and he had listened to many a ‘woodwele’

who first thrummed on harp, or fiddled on crowd, how—

‘In summer, when the shawes be shene,

And leaves be large and long,

It is full merry in fair forest

To hear the fowlés’ song.

‘The wood-wele sang, and wolde not cease,

Sitting upon the spray;

So loud, it wakened Robin Hood

In the greenwood where he lay.’

And Shakespeare—are not his scraps of song saturated with these same

bird-notes? ‘Where the bee sucks,’ ‘When daisies pied,’ ‘Under the

greenwood tree,’ ‘It was a lover and his lass,’ ‘When daffodils begin to

peer,’ ‘Ye spotted snakes,’ have all a ring in them which was caught not

in the roar of London, or the babble of the Globe theatre, but in the

woods of Charlecote, and along the banks of Avon, from

‘The ouzel-cock so black of hue,

With orange-tawny bill;

The throstle with his note so true:

The wren with little quill;

The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,

The plain-song cuckoo gray’—

and all the rest of the birds of the air.

Why is it, again, that so few of our modern songs are truly songful, and

fit to be set to music? Is it not that the writers of them—persons often

of much taste and poetic imagination—have gone for their inspiration to

the intellect, rather than to the ear? That (as Shelley does by the

skylark, and Wordsworth by the cuckoo), instead of trying to sing like

the birds, they only think and talk about the birds, and therefore,

however beautiful and true the thoughts and words may be, they are not

song? Surely they have not, like the mediæval songsters, studied the

speech of the birds, the primæval teachers of melody; nor even melodies

already extant, round which, as round a framework of pure music, their

thoughts and images might crystallize themselves, certain thereby of

becoming musical likewise. The best modern song writers, Burns and

Moore, were inspired by their old national airs; and followed them, Moore

at least, with a reverent fidelity, which has had its full reward. They

wrote words to music and not, as modern poets are wont, wrote the words

first, and left others to set music to the words. They were right; and

we are wrong. As long as song is to be the expression of pure emotion,

so long it must take its key from music,—which is already pure emotion,

untranslated into the grosser medium of thought and speech—often (as in

the case of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words) not to be translated into

it at all.

And so it may be, that in some simpler age, poets may go back, like the

old Minnesingers, to the birds of the forest, and learn of them to sing.

And little do most of them know how much there is to learn; what variety

of character, as well as variety of emotion, may be distinguished by the

practised ear, in a ‘charm of birds’ (to use the old southern phrase),

from the wild cry of the missel-thrush, ringing from afar in the first

bright days of March, a passage of one or two bars repeated three or four

times, and then another and another, clear and sweet, and yet defiant—for

the great ‘stormcock’ loves to sing when rain and wind is coming on, and

faces the elements as boldly as he faces hawk and crow—down to the

delicate warble of the wren, who slips out of his hole in the brown bank,

where he has huddled through the frost with wife and children, all folded

in each other’s arms like human beings, for the sake of warmth,—which,

alas! does not always suffice; for many a lump of wrens may be found,

frozen and shrivelled, after a severe winter. Yet even he, sitting at

his house-door in the low sunlight, says grace for all mercies (as a

little child once worded it) in a song so rapid, so shrill, so loud, and

yet so delicately modulated, that you wonder at the amount of soul within

that tiny body; and then stops suddenly, as a child who has said its

lesson, or got to the end of the sermon, gives a self-satisfied flirt of

his tail, and goes in again to sleep.

Character? I know not how much variety of character there may be between

birds of the same species but between species and species the variety is

endless, and is shown—as I fondly believe—in the difference of their

notes. Each has its own speech, inarticulate, expressing not thought but

hereditary feeling; save a few birds who, like those little dumb

darlings, the spotted flycatchers, seem to have absolutely nothing to

say, and accordingly have the wit to hold their tongues; and devote the

whole of their small intellect to sitting on the iron rails, flitting off

them a yard or two to catch a butterfly in air, and flitting back with it

to their nest.

But listen to the charm of birds in any sequestered woodland, on a bright

forenoon in June. As you try to disentangle the medley of sounds, the

first, perhaps, which will strike your ear will be the loud, harsh,

monotonous, flippant song of the chaffinch; and the metallic clinking of

two or three sorts of titmice. But above the tree-tops, rising,

hovering, sinking, the woodlark is fluting, tender and low. Above the

pastures outside the skylark sings—as he alone can sing; and close by,

from the hollies rings out the blackbird’s tenor—rollicking, audacious,

humorous, all but articulate. From the tree above him rises the treble

of the thrush, pure as the song of angels: more pure, perhaps, in tone,

though neither so varied nor so rich, as the song of the nightingale.

And there, in the next holly, is the nightingale himself: now croaking

like a frog; now talking aside to his wife on the nest below; and now

bursting out into that song, or cycle of songs, in which if any man finds

sorrow, he himself surely finds none. All the morning he will sing; and

again at evening, till the small hours, and the chill before the dawn:

but if his voice sounds melancholy at night, heard all alone, or only

mocked by the ambitious black-cap, it sounds in the bright morning that

which it is, the fulness of joy and love. Milton’s

‘Sweet bird, that shun’st the noise of folly,

Most musical, most melancholy,’

is untrue to fact. So far from shunning the noise of folly, the

nightingale sings as boldly as anywhere close to a stage-coach road, or a

public path, as anyone will testify who recollects the ‘Wrangler’s Walk’

from Cambridge to Trumpington forty years ago, when the covert, which has

now become hollow and shelterless, held, at every twenty yards, an

unabashed and jubilant nightingale.