In Gardiner’s “Music of Nature,” the following passage is given from the song of the Nightingale:—

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Although the male bird only is the songster, yet we talk of her singing:—

“It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear;

Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree;[67]

Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.”

Romeo and Juliet, Act iii. Sc. 5.

The origin of this change of sex is to be found, no