At this late hour;—and then all is still.’
He said, ‘which cannot be a nightingale,’ because he wrote this on the 1st of July, and nightingales rarely sing after June is past. But I have heard nightingales sing in Italy until the middle of July if the weather were cool and if their haunts, leafy and shady, were well protected from the sun; so that this bird which he heard was most likely Philomel. Blackbirds and woodlarks sing late into the dark of evening, but never in the actual night.
How he heard and studied the nightingale!
‘There the voluptuous nightingales
Are awake through all the broad noonday,
When one with bliss or sadness fails,
And through the windless ivy-boughs,
Sick with sweet love, droops dying away
On its mate’s music-panting bosom;
Another from the swinging blossom,