“‘Deem me not faithless, if all day
Among my dusty books I linger,
No pipe, like thee, for June to play
With fancy-led, half-conscious finger.
“‘A bird is singing in my brain,
And bubbling o’er with mingled fancies,
Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain
Fed with the sap of old romances;’”
and so for once the poet of the birds cannot be lured from his study, where he has been caught in the weft of old Moorish and Castilian legends, and he concludes his apology with the only slighting allusion in all his verses, so far as I have discovered, to his beloved winged minstrels:—
“‘Bird of to-day, thy songs are stale