Cannot be heard so high.[150]
It is interesting to notice that while birds are here taken as a help to the eye in estimating the height of the precipice as seen from the summit, a bird is again used as a guide to gauge the height as seen from below:
Look up a-height; the shrill-gorged lark so far
Cannot be seen or heard.[151]
The habits of the chough were not unknown to the poet, since he chose the bird as a symbol for a certain courtier of whom it was said that “it was a vice to know him”:
’Tis a chough, but, as I say, spacious in the possession of dirt.[152]
The chough’s continuous and unmusical chatter is more than once contemptuously invoked to describe the talk of some men. When Antonio in The Tempest tempts Sebastian to assassinate the honest old Counsellor Gonzalo, he speaks of
Lords that can prate
As amply and unnecessarily
As this Gonzalo; I myself could make