I had a great longing to hear the nightingale. I find in an old memorandum that I heard the nightingale in Warwickshire in 1860, somewhere about the twentieth of May. But the occurrence, and the song of the bird, have wholly faded from my memory. When I was abroad in 1892 and '96 I hoped to hear the song. But I was too late. Mrs. Warre, wife of the Rector of Bemerton, George Herbert's Parsonage, told me that the nightingales were abundant in her own garden close to the Avon, but that they did not sing after the beginning of the nesting session which, according to a note to White's "History of Selborne," lasts from the beginning of May to the early part of June. Waller says:
Thus the wise nightingale that leaves her home,
Pursuing constantly the cheerful spring,
To foreign groves does her old music bring.
There are some counties in England where the bird is not found. It is abundant in Warwickshire, Gloucester and the Isle of Wight. It is not found in Scotland, Derbyshire or Yorkshire or Devon or Cornwall. Attempts to introduce it in those places have failed. The reason is said to be that its insect food does not exist there.
I utterly failed to hear the nightingale, although I was very close upon his track. On the night of the fifth of June at Freshwater, close to Tennyson's home, we were taken by a driver, between eleven and twelve at night, to two copses in one of which he said he had heard the nightingale the night before; and at the other they had been heard by somebody, from whom he got the information, within a very few days. But the silence was unbroken, notwithstanding our patience and the standing reward I had offered to anybody who would find one that I could hear. Two different nights shortly afterward, I was driven out several miles past groves where the bird was said to be heard frequently. Nothing came of it. May 29, at Gloucester, I rode with my friend, H. Y. J. Taylor, Esq., an accomplished antiquary, out into the country. We passed a hillside where he said he had heard the nightingale about eleven o'clock in the daytime the week before. Shakespeare says:
The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be
No better a musician than the wren.
But the nightingale does sometimes sing by day. Mr. Taylor says that on the morning he spoke of the whole field seemed to be full of singing birds. There were larks and finches and linnets and thrushes, and I think other birds whose name I do not remember. But when the nightingale set up his song every other bird stopped. They seemed as much spellbound by the singing as he was, and Philomel had the field to himself till the song was over. It was as if Jenny Lind had come into a country church when the rustic choir of boys and girls were performing.
The nightingale will sometimes sing out of season if his mate be killed, or if the nest with the eggs therein be destroyed.
He is not a shy bird. He comes out into the highway and will fly in and out of the hedges, sometimes following a traveller. And the note of one bird will, in the singing season, provoke the others, so that a dozen or twenty will sometimes be heard rivalling one another at night, making it impossible for the occupants of the farmhouses to sleep.
The superstition is well known that if a new-married man hear the cuckoo before he hear the nightingale in the spring, his married peace will be invaded by some stranger within the year. But if the nightingale be heard first he will be happy in his love. It is said that the young married swains in the country take great pains to hear the nightingale first. We all remember Milton's sonnet:
O nightingale, that on yon bloomy Spray
Warbl'est 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,
They 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 linkt 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.