to the heart of genius during thousands of springs and summers! How many generations have they not charmed with their undying melodies! They would almost seem by their sweetness to have soothed the inexorable powers of Time and Death. Were an old Greek or an ancient Roman to rise from the dust this summer's day-were he to awaken, after ages of sleep, to walk his native soil again, scarce an object on which his eye fell would wear a familiar aspect; scarce a sound which struck his ear but would vibrate there most strangely; yet with the dawn, rising from the plain of Marathon, or the Latin Hills, he would hear the same noble lark which sung in his boyhood; and with the moon, among the olives and ilexes shading the fallen temple, would come the same sweet nightingale which entranced his youth.

row.

THE NOTE OF THE NIGHTINGALE.

A LETTER OF CHARLES JAMES FOX.

DEAR GREY-In defense of my opinion about the nightingales, I find Chaucer who of all poets seems to have been the fondest of the singing of birds-calls it a merry note; and though Theocritus mentions nightingales six or seven times, he never mentions their note as plaintive or melancholy. It is true he does not call it anywhere merry, as Chaucer does, but by mentioning it with the song of the blackbird, and as answering it, he seems to imply that it was a cheerful note. Sophocles is against us; but he says, "lamenting Itys," and the comparison of her to Electra is rather as to perseverance, day and night, than as to sorAt all events, a tragic poet is not half so good authority in this question as Theocritus and Chaucer. I can not light upon the passage in the "Odyssey," where Penelope's restlessness is compared to the nightingale, but I am sure it is only as to restlessness that he makes the comparison. If you will read the last twelve books of the "Odyssey" you will certainly find it, and I am sure you will be paid for your hunt, whether you find it or not. The passage in Chaucer is in the "Flower and Leaf." The one I particularly allude to in Theocritus is in his "Epigrams," I think in the fourth. Dryden has transferred the word merry to the goldfinch, in the "Flower and the Leaf"-in deference, may be, to the vulgar error. But pray read his description of the nightingale there; it is quite delightful. I am afraid that I like these researches as much better than those that relate to Shaftesbury and Sunderland, as I do those better than attending the House of Commons.

The nightingale with so merry a note
Answered him, that all the wood rong
So sodainly, that as it were a sote,

I stood astonied, so was I with the song
Thorow ravished, that till late and long
I ne wist in what place I was, ne where;

And ayen, me thought, she song ever by mine ear.
CHAUCER'S "Flower and Leaf.”

A goldfinch there I saw, with gaudy pride
Of painted plumes, that hopp'd from side to side,
Still perching as she pass'd; and still she drew
The sweets from every flower, and sucked the dew:
Suffic'd at length, she warbled in her throat,
And tun'd her voice to many a merry note,
But indistinct, and neither sweet nor clear.
Her short performance was no sooner tried,
When she I sought, the nightingale, replied:
So sweet, so shrill, so variously she sung,
That the grove echoed, and the valleys rung;
And I so ravish'd with her heavenly note,

I stood entranc'd, and had no room for thought;
But all o'erpower'd with an ecstasy of bliss,
Was in a pleasing dream of Paradise.

DRYDEN'S "Flower and Leaf."

As when the months are clad in flowery green,
Sad Philomel, in bowery shades unseen,

To vernal airs attunes her varied strains,
And Itylus sound warbling o'er the plains.
Young Itylus! his parent's darling joy,
Whom chance misled the mother to destroy,

Now doom'd a wakeful bird to wail the beauteous boy.

So in nocturnal solitude forlorn,

A sad variety of woes I mourn.

Odyssey, Book XIX.

SONNET.

O, nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray,
Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still;
Thou with fresh hope the lover's heart dost fill,
While the jolly hours lead on propitious May.
Thy liquid notes, that close the eye of day,

First heard before the shallow cuckoo's bill,
Portend success in love; O if Jove's will
Have link'd that amorous power to thy soft lay,

Now timely sing, ere the rude bird of hate
Foretell my hopeless doom in some grove nigh.
As thou from year to year hast sung too late
For my relief, yet hadst no reason why :

Whether the muse or love call thee his mate, Both them I serve, and of their train am I.

JOHN MILTON.

THE NIGHTINGALE.

APRIL, 1798.

No cloud, no relic of the sunken day,
Distinguishes the west; no long, thin slip
Of sullen light-no obscure, trembling hues.
Come; we will rest on this old mossy bridge!
You see the glimmer of the stream beneath,
But hear no murmuring; it flows silently
O'er its soft bed of verdure. All is still-
A balmy night! and though the stars be dim,
Yet let us think upon the vernal showers
That gladden the green earth, and we shall find
A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.
And hark! the nightingale begins its song,
"Most musical, most melancholy" bird!
A melancholy bird! Oh, idle thought!
In nature there is nothing melancholy.
* * * "Tis the merrry nightingale
That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates
With fast, thick warble his delicious notes,
As he were fearful that an April night
Would be too short for him to utter forth
His lone chant, and disburden his full soul
Of all its music!

I know a grove

Of large extent, hard by a castle huge,
Which the great lord inhabits not; and so
This grove is wild with tangling underwood,
And the trim walks are broken up, and grass-
Thin grass, and king-cups grow within the paths.
But never elsewhere in one place I knew
So many nightingales; and far and near,

In wood and thicket, over the wide grove
They answer, and provoke each other's song
With skirmish and capricious passagings,
And murmurs musical, and swift jug-jug,
And one low, piping sound, more sweet than all,
Stirring the air with such a harmony,

That should you close your eyes, you might almost
Forget it was not day! On moonlit bushes,

Whose dewy leaflets are but half disclosed,

You may, perchance, behold them on the twigs,
Their bright, bright eyes—their eyes both bright and full,
Glistening, while many a glow-worm in the shade

Lights up her love-torch.

A most gentle maid,

Who dwelleth in her hospitable home,
Hard by the castle, and at latest eve

(Even like a lady, vowed and dedicate

To something more than Nature in the grove),

Glides through the pathways; she knows all their notes,
That gentle maid! and oft a moment's space,
What time the moon was lost behind a cloud,
Hath heard a pause of silence; till the moon
Emerging, hath awakened earth and sky
With one sensation, and these wakeful birds
Have all burst forth in choral minstrelsy,
As if some sudden gale had swept at once
A hundred airy harps! and she hath watched
Many a nightingale perched giddily

On blossoming twig still swinging from the breeze,
And to that motion tune his wanton song,

Like tipsy joy that reels with tossing head.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

ODE TO A

NIGHTINGALE.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-ward sunk :
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,
Than thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Oh for a draught of vintage,

Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sun-burned mirth! Oh for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth,

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret;

Here, where men sit and hear each other groanWhere palsy shakes a few sad, last gray hairs—

Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow,

And leaden-eyed despairs;

Where beauty can not keep her lustrous eyes, Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of poesy,

Though the dull train perplexes and retards; Already with thee tender is the night,

And haply the queen-moon is on her throne, Clustered around by all her starry fays;

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I can not see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets, covered up in leaves,

And mid-May's oldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of bees on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful death,