[62.] An excellent dissertation on the organ of voice in the raven will be found in the second volume of Yarrell’s “British Birds,” 3rd ed. p. 72.
[63.] Willughby’s “Ornithology,” folio, 1678. Book I. p. 25.
[64.] Stanley’s “Familiar History of Birds,” p. 188.
[65.] Compare, “A cyprus, not a bosom, hides my heart.” Twelfth Night, Act iii. Sc. 1.
[66.] “To fear,” that is, “to frighten.”
[67.] According to Steevens, this is not merely a poetical supposition. “It is observed,” he says, “of the nightingale that, if undisturbed, she sits and sings upon the same tree for many weeks together;” and Russell, in his “Account of Aleppo,” tells us “the nightingale sings from the pomegranate groves in the day-time.”
[68.] “Ovid. Metamorph.” Book vi. Fab. 6.
[69.] These lines, although included in most editions of Shakespeare’s Poems, are said to have been written by Richard Barnefield, and published in 1598 in a volume entitled “Poems in Divers Humors.” (See Ellis’s “Specimens of the Early English Poets,” vol. ii. p. 356, and F. T. Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language,” p. 21.) The “Passionate Pilgrim” was not published until 1599.
[70.] “Sir Thomas Browne’s Works” (Wilkin’s ed.), Vol. II. p. 537.
[71.] Not only does the nightingale sing by day, but she is by no means the only bird which sings at night. We have frequently listened with delight to the wood lark, skylark, thrush, sedge-warbler and grasshopper-warbler long after sunset, and we have heard the cuckoo and corncrake at midnight.