May this to me,
Now happy be.
Then look between your great toe and the next, you'll find a hair that will easily come off. Take and look at it, and of the same colour will that of your lover be; wrap it in a piece of paper, and keep it ten days carefully; then, if it has not changed, the person will be constant: but if it dies, you are flattered." Gay alludes to this method of divination in his Fourth Pastoral, ed. 1742, p. 32.
[THE ROBIN AND THE WREN.]
The superstitious reverence with which these birds are almost universally regarded takes its origin from a pretty belief that they undertake the delicate office of covering the dead bodies of any of the human race with moss or leaves, if by any means left exposed to the heavens. This opinion is alluded to by Shakespeare and many writers of his time, as by Drayton, for example:
Cov'ring with moss the dead's unclosed eye,
The little red-breast teacheth charitie.
Webster, in his tragedy of Vittoria Corombona, 1612, couples the wren with the robin as coadjutors in this friendly office:
Call for the robin red-breast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Notwithstanding the beautiful passage in Shakespeare to which we have alluded, it is nevertheless undeniable that, even to this day, the ancient belief attached to these birds is perpetuated chiefly by the simple ballad of the Babes in the Wood. Early in the last century, Addison was infatuated with that primitive song. "Admitting," he says, "there is even a despicable simplicity in the verse, yet because the sentiments appear genuine and unaffected, they are able to move the mind of the most polite reader with inward meltings of humanity and compassion." Exactly so; but this result arises from the extraordinary influence of early association over the mind, not from the pathos of the ballad itself, which is infinitely inferior to the following beautiful little nursery song I have the pleasure of transcribing into these pages:
My dear, do you know
How a long time ago,
Two poor little children,
Whose names I don't know,
Were stolen away
On a fine summer's day,
And left in a wood,
As I've heard people say.
And when it was night,
So sad was their plight,
The sun it went down,
And the moon gave no light!
They sobb'd and they sigh'd,
And they bitterly cried,
And the poor little things,
They laid down and died.
And when they were dead,
The robins so red
Brought strawberry leaves,
And over them spread;
And all the day long,
They sang them this song,—
Poor babes in the wood!
Poor babes in the wood!
And don't you remember
The babes in the wood?
Adages respecting the robin and the wren, generally including the martin and swallow, are common in all parts of the country. In giving the following, it should be premised it is a popular notion that the wren is the wife of the robin; and Mr. Chambers mentions an extraordinary addition to this belief current in Scotland, that the wren is the paramour of the tom-tit!