"A scythe-sweep and a scythe-sweep,
We mow the grass together."
And again, what does not the garden owe to the voice of birds; the deep cawing of the rook in its "curious flight" around the elm-trees; the clear note of the cuckoo from the limes that bound the orchard; and, best of all, the rich, full melody of the thrush! The nightingale's song may be sweeter and stronger, but the nightingale only sings in certain places (certainly not with us), and the thrush is everywhere. The nightingale sings later in the night, but the thrush will go on till nine, and begin again at four, and surely that is all we need. Can anything be truer, or better said, than these lines of Browning's about a thrush?—
"Hark! where my blossomed Pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field, and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops, at the bent spray's edge—
That's the wise thrush—he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture."
But there is one bird dearer to us than the thrush, and that is the swallow, which for some years past has built its nest in our porch. It has been pretty to mark her skimming round and round with anxious watching, till we have left the place. Prettier still, when we have kept ourselves concealed, to see her darting upwards to the nest, which was fringed by four little heads all in a row, and, going from one to the other, give each its share. We could hear the sharp little cry of satisfaction as each nestling was attended to. How much the poets have written about swallows! There is the charming passage in Longfellow's "Golden Legend," where the old monk is speaking; he is the librarian, whose duty it is to illuminate the missals for the convent's use and pride:—
"How the swallows twitter under the eaves!
There, now there is one in her nest;
I can just catch a glimpse of her head and breast,
And will sketch her thus in her quiet nook,
For the margin of my gospel-book."
Then how delightful is the boast, which Mr. Courthope, in his Paradise of Birds, puts into the nightingale's mouth, that a bird is better than a man, for—
"He never will mount as the swallows,
Who dashed round his steeples to pair,
Or hawked the bright flies in the hollows
Of delicate air."
And, long before this, Banquo had marked their "pendent beds" on Macbeth's castle, and noticed that—