[Illustration]
Two sweet little pictures, entitled, “The Lark,” and “The Nightingale,”
have greatly charmed me. In one, there was a blue-flecked sky, a Spring
morning landscape, and a glad-eyed girl, with a lapful of daisies,
lying back and looking up with shaded gaze and listening eyes, into
those blue depths, wherein
“The lark became a sightless song.”
In the other, there was an evening glow: warm, orange-grey sky, cooling
into steel-blue; a bower of rose-leaves; an earnest face, with darker
hair, and pensive brow, flushed into warmth by the setting sun. And you
would know, even had you not been told, that the child, old enough just
to enjoy that young melancholy which is pleasant,--is listening to that
“Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
Rings Eden through the budded quicks.”
For in neither case is the songster seen: with true art the minstrel
is left to the imagination to supply, and this subtler artist can
furnish voice, form, motion; only one of which three could be given by
the painter.
These pictures were in the Winter Exhibition; hence, no doubt, their
suggestion of the absent bird-songs was the more valued. For perhaps
these, like other delights, are the sweetest when they are not
possessed, but only remembered and longed-for.
That remembrance, however, of Winter, will serve, by contrast, to
freshen our enjoyment, as we start, on this warm March day, for Bramley
Wood, to descry and collect the old familiar bird-songs as they come
back to us in the Spring. To collect these and the flowers, I say, in
the heart’s cases and herbarium, for use when Winter comes, and woods
are dead, and bird-songs gone. This is a better way than to crowd the
staircase and hall with stuffed, silent birds, or to encumber your
shelves with dried, brittle, brown specimens; which can never suggest
the fresh, juicy, sweet-breathed blossoms, or the quick, never-still,
bright-glancing inhabitants of the bushes. For the heart keeps these
collections all fresh and full of life, and if a picture or a poem
or a strain of music does but summon them up, why, there they are in
a minute. Though they may have seemed laid by and forgotten, yet, at
the magic call, lo! the heart is a lane of primroses, or a copse of
bluebells; the lark is high in the heaven, and the thrush answering the
blackbird out of great white sheets of the may.
We soon settle down to the bird-songs when once they have really all
come back; and we plod on our preoccupied way, hearing them without
hearing, unless, indeed, one day-note of a nightingale should
electrify our heart. But there is no doubt that, at first returning,
the silver minstrelsy of the woods is welcomed by most. And we never
grow too old to feel a heart-kindling and a brightening of the eye,
on that mild November day, when we start, and listen, and--yes, it
_is_, the first Thrush-song breaking the meditative misty hush of the
landscape. Autumn is stringing the woods with tears, and the first
gripe of Winter has ere now pinched to death the more delicate garden
flowers; but, even before his reign has begun in earnest, here is
a voice which prophesies of his overthrow. Then the frosts come in
defiance, and the last leaves spin down, and the snow-sheet falls, and
the thrush is silent as though dead, and resistance seems overcome,
and Winter’s reign established. An observant eye will, however, still
detect a speckled clean breast, flitting into alternate concealment and
sight behind the bushes in the shrubbery, and rustling the counterpane
of dry leaves, under which those many little dull-green points are
crowding out of the frost-held ground. But his song is kept in reserve
for a time. And it seems that Spring is close at hand, and that the
year is indeed turned, when next you hear him, high on the boughs of
that tulip tree, large against the pale blue sky, singing out loud and
clear from early morning to dusk of a bright February day. And the dry
leaves have huddled away from the searching wind, and left the brown
moist beds, over which trembles a surprise of delicate white cups,
where the blunt dull-green points had been.
But I mean now to muse in a fanciful way about the characteristics of
these returning songs, and the teaching that may be gathered from
them. Canon Evans’ little book, “The Songs of the Birds,” might seem
to have preoccupied this ground, but the treatment will differ, if the
idea be the same.
To what, then, shall we liken the song of the Thrush? Different
temperaments of men and women may well be illustrated by the variety in
the character of the bird-songs. In the thrush’s song, then, I seem to
hear the utterance of the strong and happy Christian. He has never been
troubled with any doubts; the dark dismays and hidden misgivings of
other minds are without meaning to him. Clear and glad, and untroubled,
and strong in faith, the soul of this man sits upon wintry trees, above
few trembling flowers, under a pale still sky, and sings from the early
morning to the dusking eve an unwavering, undoubting, happy song. A
song in which there are not weird mysterious depths of feeling, nor
ecstatic, incomprehensible heights, but in which there is ever an even
tenor, a stedfast sustained gladness, an unchecked unvarying trust.
A song, perhaps, not of the highest intellect, but of the firmest
faith. Here are no dark questionings, that must be content to pause
for an answer hereafter; no evil suggestions, fiery darts which the
shield of faith must ever be upheld to quench. There is almost a hard
ignoring and turning away from minds otherwise fashioned; minds full
of anxieties and searchings, that are troubles indeed, but not doubts;
struggles, but not defeats, because faith upholds where sight fails.
These sing more broken snatches of more passionate music, amid thicker
branches, and in the dusk; while the thrush-spirit, unknowing of these
fierce alternations, sings out, up there upon the naked bough, clear
and distinct against the blue soft sky.
There is a wild stormy note which must detain us awhile from our March
wood. It comes early in January, and on stormy days, under thin driving
clouds, you may hear short bursts, as though the broken song of a
husky blackbird, flung from the ivy-clad top of some tall, ancient
spruce-fir. This is the note of the Missel-thrush, or Storm-cock. He
seems rather to exult in the disturbed sky, and swaying boughs, and
passing gleams and showers. There is a wild beauty, tempered with a
_little_ harshness, in the short sharp snatches of defiant and militant
song. In him I find a type of the religious controversialist and
disputant; the watchman set on his tower amid storms and lowering days.
Such watchers there are, and they are useful to detect and descry the
insidious approach of error. Controversialists-born, as it were, you
shall ever hear their sharp short utterances under a stormy sky; and
while you value the note, you will often detect and deplore some touch
of harshness that grates upon the heart, some falling short of the
mellow flute-like tones of Love.
But on our way to the wood, and as we pass through this meadow, a
Skylark springs up, and flutters higher and higher; fountain-like, as
it rises, scattering about its silver spray of song. Very soon the eye
wanders about, searching after it for some time in vain, pleased at
last to recover the dim black speck in the grey sky.
I suppose that the picture of which I spoke above gives the natural
embodiment of the song of the lark.
“Heigh ho! daisies and buttercups,
Fair yellow daffodils, stately and tall;
A sunshiny world full of laughter and leisure,
And fresh hearts unconscious of sorrow and thrall.”
Up into the sky, bright thoughts and dreams, quivering wings, swelling
throat, hurrying ecstasies and crowding notes of joy, impatient, yet
impossible to be uttered. Careless flowers upon the lap,--withering,
are they? But there is a worldful more to be had for the gathering.
Oh yes, the lark’s song is that of the young heart--young enough to
stop short at the attainment of simple gladness. There is not yet upon
it the sweet hush even of love and sentiment, the upward soaring has
no alternate dip and rise; the quick beat of the wings no pause; the
bright flash of song no dyings-down into shade. Wonder at life goes
hand in hand with joy in it; all is new and all is delicious; all is
hope, and nothing is disappointing; the whole widening prospect is
one of beauty and glad surprise. The year is in its early Spring, and
has never so much as heard of Autumn yet; nor can guess, nor cares
to try to divine, what those old brown leaves can mean, out of which
huddle the thick primrose clumps. Higher and higher, and brighter and
brighter, and gladder and gladder, and more and more impetuous the
thronging notes, and more and more untiring the ecstatic wing. And
God loves to see this, for He gave the feeling; and we may perceive
that He has allotted to most things a young life of fresh colour and
unmixed joyfulness. Kittens and lambs, and Spring leaves, and young
children--they all sober down soon enough--and well they should.
But let us not grudge the short hour of pure lightness of heart,
that was God’s gift; nor hunt for ripe fruit among the sheets of
blossom; nor dull with our heart’s twilight the first flush of the
morning; nor desire, in the song of the lark, the thoughtfulness of
the blackbird--far less the moan of the dove. Let not our work ever be
to _check_, only to guide, and to tend, and to develop, the heart’s
songful gladness, pointing it, indeed, heavenward; or, again, ready to
tend the germ which some gust has stolen from its white petal-wings.
I spoke of the Blackbird. And here, as we near the wood, towards
which for some long time we have been walking, we catch the smooth,
rich, lyric fragments of this deep-hearted poet. Less openly, freely,
fearlessly confident and exulting in an unclouded soul, than the
thrush,--there is something exceedingly fascinating in the intermitted,
but not broken song of the blackbird. The pauses which sever the
stanzas of his song, seem well suited to its lyric character. There are
in these separate and finished verses the polish and completeness, also
the richness and liquid flow, of a set of stanzas of “In Memoriam,”
and, moreover, something of their wild mournfulness and tender, deep,
questioning thought. The blackbird’s song is that of the grave, mature
mind, highly intellectual, somewhat touched with sadness, but more with
love, and that has had to battle hard through life to keep both faith
and love unimpaired.
“The blackbird’s song at eventide”:
thus it is described, and, in truth, it seems the passionate earnest
utterance of one who can understand the difficulties which have
blown down unrooted trees, and yet has itself possession of that
faith which can control into music notes that make a jarring in
undisciplined minds. The riddle of this painful earth has often wrung
the heart of this man, but his sorrowful thoughts concerning it have
shaped themselves into these rich utterances of yearning love. This
trumpet gives no uncertain sound; the speaking is clear, and distinct,
and unfaltering. You are, as I said, reminded of the controversial
storm-bird by its tones, but all that would have been harsh in its
outspoken truthfulness, is mellowed and softened by an exquisite
overmastering charm of tender and patient love. So that the blackbird’s
song is that of mature faith, which has met and vanquished anxious
questionings, and which, if that of a controversialist at all, is only
that of one on whom old age is stealing, and whom experience has made
gentle and patient; and yearning for souls has made passionate; and
love of Christ has made tenderly and invincibly loving. And so when it
thrills out clear and full from his hidden quiet retreat in the evening
time, even those that think that there is cause for old grudges against
the minstrel are arrested reverently to listen to his deep, thoughtful,
loving song.
We are at the wood now, at last. We have followed a pleasant stream
that played hide-and-seek among its willows, and, while we talked and
listened, we have gathered in gleanings of its beauty. And now we
cross the narrow plank--parting the branches that half conceal it--and
enter the wood. There are tiny pink balls ready to burst into vivid
buds, gemming the hawthorn bushes; but the trees and underwood are
bare, except for the willow catkins and the hazel tassels, or perhaps
the dull green of the elder in a tuft here and there, or the early
leaf-bud of a twining honeysuckle. But the pale smooth ash saplings,
tall and slim, and silver-grey in the sun, with a narrow shadow edge,
the branches studded with black buds; and the golden twigs of the
white-stemmed birch; and the warm light brown of the hazel boughs; and
the red of the cherry,--these make the wood, though bare, yet neither
dull nor colourless. And here, farther in, the many stems are fringed
and bearded with the hoary and abundant growth of lichen, cool as the
bloom on a greengage, against the pale orange which still lingers in
ragged patches upon the six-feet stalks of last year’s bracken.
[Illustration]
Certainly there is, all around us in the wood, much material for
musing. But we have come hither for a special end. For it is the
thirteenth of March, and by this time the first of the train of those
songsters, that fly to warmer shores to escape our Winter, ought
to have returned. So, all ears, we proceed over the crisp leaves,
disturbing the bobbing rabbits. And there! I heard the note--simple
enough, yet pleasing even in itself, and sweet as being the forerunner
of songs more rich. _Chiff-chaff_,--this dissyllable gives this
Willow-wren’s note and name. There is not much in it, may be, still it
is the little tuning-fork of the coming concert. And we are reminded
by it of some gentle spirit which longs and tries to say a cheery and
hopeful word to a heart which has been under wintry skies; that which
it repeats may not indeed be very new, very powerful, or very varied;
still, it is accepted and loved for the sake of its truth and affection.
This bird has a relation, due some few days later, whose song, though
but little more pretentious, is yet a great favourite with me. I call
it the laughing Willow-wren; and indeed its note does at once suggest a
small silvery peal of merry light-hearted glee. Again and again, peal
after peal; flitting through the boughs, almost the tiniest of slim
birdlings.
“Gaiety without eclipse,”
it certainly is, and yet it does not weary us, this ceaseless
“silver-treble laughter.” This song has its parallel in some life, gay
and blight and glad from first to last; hiding for a sobered moment
from a shower or a storm, but anon and on a sudden recovering its
innocent glee again. Delicate and slim, and easily frightened, but
never long troubled; very winning and loveable; too tender and pretty
for the hardest hand to crush; never doing huge deeds in the world,
but of the same value that a fugitive sunbeam would be in a heavy and
gloomy wood, or a daisy in a desert. Keeping the Child’s heart through
the Woman’s life; feeling sorrow lightly, and with an April heart;
disarming anger or harshness by its simple gleeful innocence; frail yet
safe as a feather upon the whirls and eddies of life. Laugh on, light
and cheery heart, amid the jay’s harsh dissonance, and the blackbird’s
thought, and the thrush’s strength, and the dove’s sadness! Amid Life’s
gravities and stern realities there is a grateful place for the gleams
of a glad-hearted song like thine!
[Illustration]
What variety in the character of the bird-music! Hark, for a moment,
at those wise, solemn caws, and watch those sedate, respectable,
gravely-clad Rooks sailing across this opening above us; so black and
cleanly painted against the filmy blue. _Caw!_ This is the voice of a
steady, respectable mediocrity, that by reason of its deep, portentous
gravity, and weighty utterance, and staid appearance, might be almost
mistaken for philosophy. True, the utterance, if profound, is not
remarkable for variety; but then the manner will often make up for lack
of matter. And it is something to have one maxim or apophthegm which
may be fitted to every case. To all the world’s customs and businesses,
its problems and aspirings, its cries and laughter, he gravely and
meditatively listens. And when you eagerly await his verdict, he puts
his sapient head on one side, looks at you out of one eye,
“And says,--what says he? CAW!”
The young impatient askers, the subtle and patient tracers of truth’s
hidden vein, will chafe at his sedate utterances, and in time take
their confidences elsewhere. But he can get on without them, and will
never want for company of his kind. Raised above all intellectual
excitements, and never in a hurry, the rooks step side by side with
stately dignity over the scarred earth; or wing a heavy and cautious
flight towards the trees; or sail serene in the still sky. For though
there may be times when
“The rooks are blown about the skies,”
this haste is involuntary, and must no doubt for the time much
discomfort the methodical and stately traveller. And no doubt such
characters are as useful ballast in the world, and well counterbalance
the full excited sails, and the mad fluttering pennons above them.
Commonplace, unruffled, happy Christians are these; with some they gain
reputation for wisdom, with some for folly; but they go evenly on; not
much troubled by sunshine or storm; not caring to enter into the dusks
and gleams of the more passionate songsters and thinkers; ever with one
quiet and not unmelodious answer: a life rather of deeds than of words.
_Caw_, to all your spasms and heart-searchings,--and then I must just
away to my work. Up in the tall trees, bending and swaying to break off
the twigs for the nest; practical, if not colloquial; early at work
in the morning, and at home in good time in the evening; a life not
excited nor greatly eventful, but that has its own quiet, serene lesson.
A day or two hence we might hear a notable and distinguished visitor
to the woods and shrubberies. Even now, I have once or twice paused,
half-fancying that I heard his voice, and ready to do honour to such
a guest. For, while you are momently expecting to hear the Blackcap,
the warbling of the meditative Robin has, here and there, a note which
puzzles you. You follow out the voice, and there, on an elm branch,
is the dark eye, and the warm breast, and the comfortable shape; and
you feel half ashamed to have mistaken such a familiar friend for a
stranger.
The Blackcap is indeed a wonderful little warbler. So small and so
energetic, thrilling song and swelling throat; brown body and whitish
chest and jetty head. There are those who trace a resemblance to the
nightingale’s song in its quick joyous utterances. If so, certainly
the melody is but a suggestion here and there, and not a sustained and
continuous resemblance. Shall I be unkind to the sweet little songster,
if here I write that its song has its counterpart in the life of
unequal Christians? Many there are who, now and then, in thought, word,
or deed, seem to touch some perfect chord, and then disappoint the
intent listener by sinking down to the more commonplace again.
A moment, and there seemed a strain of angelic utterance, but it was
not sustained, and you turn away disappointed at a more homely song
which would otherwise have pleased you well. You do not look for
Seraph notes in the hedge-sparrow’s song, or the wren’s chatting, and
so you are well content with these. But high hopes unfulfilled become
disappointment, and you feel an injury in having to resign the exalted
idea which you had taken up; until, at last you see _yourself_ in the
sweet, but unequal and inadequate song; and learn to reverence and to
love the ever-failing and unsustained effort after higher things. Thus,
ay thus, do you aim high, and ever fall below your aim; there is one
touch of heaven, and a hundred of earth, in the broken and unsustained
song of your life; and yet you would rather strive with hopeless
yearning after the nightingale’s music, than acquiesce content with
the lesser warblings, which accomplish the less that they attempted.
Sing on, then, little bird, to an answering heart! In your song I read
the rises and falls, the endeavours and failings, the aspirings and
rare glimpses of attainment, which are the sweet exceptions, and the
commonplace and every-day Christianity, which is the rule, of a life
that would fain become the song of an Angel, but that scarce reaches
the homeliest warble of the simplest wayside bird. Let us aim high, if
we still fall below our passionate striving; let us never acquiesce
quietly in less than Perfection; hereafter--who knows? who knows?
[Illustration]
It is evening now, as we wend our way home. A thin sickle of light
is barred by the slender topmost ash twigs, and the sky is deepening
to that cold, clear dusk, that foreruns twilight. We hear a quiet
song, far away--the Woodlark’s note always seems far away--you would
have asked me the name of the not-generally-familiar songster, but I
have just given it. “_That_, the woodlark? Well, I never heard, or
never noticed it before” I dare say. But if is a quiet, saintly song;
a heavenly voice, serene and clear, never passionate: a twilight,
still, calm song, removed far away from the world’s bustle, and
deeply imbued with wisdom and melody from a Land far beyond this eager
fevered strife. It is not glad, nor sorrowful; nor so much thoughtful
as spiritual. It images to us that life which, separated from the
world, is yet not ascetic; unobtrusive, yet fascinating when once
perceived and heeded; simple, somewhat as is the language of St. John,
but with unfathomable suggestions and revelations when you come to
study and learn it. Quite away from controversy and strife, there is in
it a divine peace, an entranced contemplation, a serene and peaceful
uplifting of the soul. Perhaps the writings of Archbishop Leighton best
give words to my ideal of the woodlark’s song.
But those throbbing coos must stay our foot ere we quite leave the
wood. The Dove--its voice is, of course, the embodiment of love;
troubled, but not passionate; earnest, but not of earth merely. It has
a melancholy vehemence, a sobbing urging of its cause, that is rather
the voice of one seeking the good of another than its own delight.
There is a tremulousness, a trembling fulness that might be that of
one bidding farewell in death to some very dear friend whom he fain
would win to the right and happy path, but for whom he sadly stands
in doubt. There is such abundance from which to speak, such love and
such mournfulness in saying it, that you smile with the tears near
your eyes, on suddenly recollecting whither fancy was leading you, and
that it is, after all, but the old old story being beautifully and
melodiously told. For you caught a sight of the ash-blue wing, the mild
eye, and swelling crop, and of the mate on a branch close by; and so
your fancy was overturned.
But there is one song which we shall not hear yet, as we return home
from the wood; of which, nevertheless, some words must be said. Yet
what words have even the greatest word-masters yet found for the
NIGHTINGALE’S unearthly melody! What other song has even a likeness
of the instantaneous and riveting fascination that is produced by
one note of this? It is music which speaks, not to what we call the
heart, merely, or the intellect, merely, but straight at once to that
mysterious divine thing within us, which we call the spirit.
And so it represents that recognition of, and yearning for, an ideal
perfection and beauty, which many own, but few can express. And thus we
start to hear it represented and embodied in sound without language,
and, without knowing how, acknowledge a dumb music in ourselves which
is closely akin to this superhuman and unearthly song. And we cannot,
if we try, exactly define its character; some call it joyous; more
sorrowful. But perhaps there is a hint in it of something within us
higher and deeper than either of these; else how can it thus startle
and electrify our being? At least it tells us of melody that we cannot
yet grasp or fully understand, of beauty and harmony and perfection
that is not yet our own. And I liken it to the raptured speakings of
the prophet, or to an echo of the angelic messages seldom brought to
earth.
Well, ’tis difficult, and perhaps hopeless, to strive to interpret
the songs of these little minstrels of God. After all, each heart
will set them to words of its own. And, by leading others to do so,
perhaps my musings may best fulfil their end. Many a one who would have
appreciated them, misses the pictures in earth’s great gallery, and
the music of earth’s great concert, for want of a finger to point him
once to the one, and a hand on his shoulder to arrest his attention for
the other. And it is worth regarding pictures at which God is working,
and to listen to songs which yet remain in a saddened world, exactly as
He first taught them.
[Illustration]