If only some master dramatist could write the tragedies of bird land! They would be highly exciting, and would afford ample room for the play of genius; for there are adventures and disasters without number. Perhaps it is on account of the many reverses that there is so often a pensive strain in the songs of the birds,—a minor chord running like a shimmering silver line through the weft of the woodland music. Robert Burns, in his “Address to a Woodlark,” touched the very marrow of bird sadness, and pleaded with the little singer to cease its song, or he himself would go distracted,—
“Say, was thy little mate unkind,
And heard thee as the careless wind?
Oh! nocht but love and sorrow joined
Sic notes o’ wae could wauken.
“Thou tells o’ never-ending care,
O’ speechless grief and dark despair;
For pity’s sake, sweet bird, nae mair!
Or my poor heart is broken.”
If Coleridge had studied the birds more carefully, and acquainted himself with their griefs, he never would have written, in mockery of Milton’s “L’Allegro,”—