To Wordsworth she told another story:

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"O nightingale! thou surely art

they pierce and pierce;

A creature of ebullient heart;
These notes of thine
Tumultuous harmony and fierce!
Thou sing'st as if the god of wine
Had helped thee to a valentine ;
A song in mockery and despite

Of shades, and dews, and silent night,
And steady bliss, and all the loves
Now sleeping in these peaceful groves."

In a like vein Coleridge sang:

"T is the merry nightingale

That crowds and hurries and precipitates

With fast, thick warble his delicious notes."

5. Keats's poem on the nightingale is doubtless more in the spirit of the bird's strain than any other. It is less a description of the song, and more the song itself. Hood called the nightingale

"The sweet and plaintive Sappho of the dell."

I mention the nightingale only to point my remarks upon its American rival, the famous mocking-bird of the Southern States, which is also a nightingale, a nightsinger, and which no doubt excels the Old World bird in the variety and compass of its powers.

6. Our nightingale has mainly the reputation of the aged bird, and is famed mostly for its powers of mimicry, which are truly wonderful, enabling the bird to exactly reproduce and even improve upon the notes of almost any other songster. But in a state of freedom it has a song of its own which is infinitely rich and various. It is a garrulous polyglot when it chooses to be, and there is a dash of

the clown and the buffoon in its nature which too often flavors its whole performance, especially in captivity.

7. In Alabama and Florida its song may be heard all through the sultry summer night, at times low and plaintive, then full and strong. A friend of Thoreau, and a careful observer, who has resided in Florida, tells me that this bird is a much more marvelous singer than it has the credit of being. He describes a habit it has of singing on the wing on moonlight nights that would be worth going south to hear. Starting from a low bush, it mounts in the air, and continues its flight apparently to an altitude of several hundred feet, remaining on the wing a number of minutes, and pouring out its song with the utmost clearness and abandon, a slowly rising musical rocket that fills the night air with harmonious sounds. Here are both the lark and nightingale in one.

8. The southern poet, Wilde, has celebrated this bird in the following admirable sonnet:

Winged mimic of the woods! thou motley fool,

Who shall thy gay buffoonery describe?

Thine ever-ready notes of ridicule

Pursue thy fellows still with jest and jibe.
Wit-sophist songster - Yorick of thy tribe,
Thou sportive satirist of Nature's school,
To thee the palm of scoffing we ascribe,
Arch scoffer, and mad Abbot of Misrule!
For such thou art by day; but all night long

Thou pour'st a soft, sweet, pensive, solemn strain,
As if thou didst in this, thy moonlight song,
Like to the melancholy Jacques, complain,
Musing on falsehood, violence, and wrong,
And sighing for thy motley coat again.

JNO. BURROUGHS.

78.- THE LUTIST AND THE NIGHTINGALE.

To Thessaly I came, and living private,

Without acquaintance of more sweet companions
Than the old inmates to my love, my thoughts,
I day by day frequented silent groves
And solitary walks. One morning early
This accident encountered1 me: I heard
The sweetest and most ravishing contention
That art and nature ever were at strife in.

A sound of music touched mine ears, or rather,
Indeed, entranced my soul. As I stole nearer,
Invited by the melody, I saw

A youth, a fair-faced youth, upon his lute,
With strains of strange variety and harmony,
Proclaiming, as it seemed, so bold a challenge
To the clear choristers2 of the woods, the birds,
That, as they flocked about him, all stood silent,
Wondering at what they heard. I wondered too.

A nightingale,

Nature's best skilled musician, undertakes3

The challenge; and for every several strain

The well-shaped youth could touch, she sang him down.
He could not run divisions with more art
Upon his quaking instrument than she,
The nightingale, did with her various notes
Reply to.

1 en-count'ered, befel.

2 chor'is-ters, chorus-singers.

8 un-der-takes', assumes, accepts.

Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last
Into a pretty anger, that a bird,

Whom art had never taught clefs,5 moods, or notes,
Should vie with him for mastery, whose study
Had busied many hours to perfect practice.
To end the controversy, in a rapture
Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly
So many voluntaries, and so quick,
That there was curiosity in cunning,
Concord in discord, lines of differing method
Meeting in one full center of delight.

The bird (ordained to be

Music's true martyr) strove to imitate

These several sounds; which when her warbling throat
Failed in, for grief down dropped she on his lute,
And brake her heart. It was the quaintest sadness
To see the conqueror upon her hearse,

To weep a funeral elegy of tears.

He looked upon the trophies of his art,

Then sighed, then wiped his eyes; then sighed and cried,

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Alas, poor creature! I will soon revenge

This cruelty upon the author of it.

Henceforth this lute, guilty of innocent blood,
Shall never more betray a harmless peace
To an untimely end." And in that sorrow,
As he was dashing it against a tree,

I suddenly stepped in.

5 clefs, certain musical characters.

6 el'e-gy, mournful song.

FORD.

79. — THE MOCKING-BIRD'S SONG.

EARLY on a pleasant day,

In the poet's month of May,
Field and forest looked so fair,
So refreshing was the air,

That, in spite of morning dew,
Forth I walked where tangling grew
Many a thorn and breezy bush;
When the red breast and the thrush
Gaily raised their early lay,
Thankful for returning day.

Every thicket, bush, and tree
Swelled the grateful harmony:
As it mildly swept along,
Echo seemed to catch the song;
But the plain was wide and clear,—
Echo never whispered near.
From a neighboring mocking-bird
Came the answering notes I heard.