"Me, the Nymphs' wayside minstrel whose sweet note
O'er sultry hill is heard, and shady grove to float."
Still another sings how a grasshopper took the place of a broken string
on his lyre, and "filled the cadence due."
"For while six chords beneath my fingers cried,
He with his tuneful voice the seventh supplied;
The midday songster of the mountain set
His pastoral ditty to my canzonet;
And when he sang, his modulated throat
Accorded with the lifeless string I smote."
While we are trying to introduce the lark in this country, why not try
this Pindaric grasshopper also?
It is to the literary poets and to the minstrels of a softer age that
we must look for special mention of the song-birds and for poetical
rhapsodies upon them. The nightingale is the most general favorite, and
nearly all the more noted English poets have sung her praises. To the
melancholy poet she is melancholy, and to the cheerful she is cheerful.
Shakespeare in one of his sonnets speaks of her song as mournful, while
Martial calls her the "most garrulous" of birds. Milton sang:--
"Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly,
Most musical, most melancholy,
Thee, chantress, oft the woods among
I woo, to hear thy evening song."