Lions sing much as blackbirds do. Morning and evening they get on to an eminence and lift up their voices, informing all the other lions in their parish, and the continents adjoining, that they are going to bed or have just got up, and that they do not intend to stand any nonsense; that that particular eminence is their own, and no other lion in Lybia or thereabouts will be tolerated in its vicinity. If, while one is roaring, there should come rumbling along on the wind the voice of another, the vocal duet is prolonged; but when the rites have been duly performed, “matin-song and vespers eke,” they go about the business of the day or the night, as the case may be, without further ado.
So, again, in the ferocious old European fighting-days, warriors were perpetually singing—not love songs, for these were delegated to professionals and mercenaries, but war-chaunts. Heroes of the Berserker and hardy Norseman type got up and sang whenever they were excited, as naturally as blackbirds do, but their singing must have been much more like the lion’s than the bird’s. Savage races at the present day, whenever they are unamiably inclined, fall to “singing” war-songs, which they improvise, music and words alike; and to our ears their compositions are hideous. So, no doubt, the blackbird would think the lion’s, and the lion think the blackbird’s. Birds and beasts, no doubt, differ as much in ear as they do in voice. But reverse their sizes, and see the result. The emu bellows and booms; there are mice that “sing” quite prettily. If the lion were the size of a blackbird, he would, perhaps, as Bottom said, “roar you as gently as any sucking-dove: roar you as ’twere any nightingale.”
“Swallows obeying the South Summer’s call.”
Keats.
Voice alone does not make a bird a favourite, or what could we say for the swallow, that has so slight a song, and yet, excepting the robin, is
“privileged above the rest
Of all the birds as man’s familiar guest.”
In the old days Rome loved the swallows as the spirits of dead children revisiting their homes, and Rhodes welcomed the bird’s return with public song and canticles of thanks. And long before Rome and Rhodes, men said that it was the swallow that brought Noah back the leaf; and the swallow, when Adam and Eve were separated after the Flood, brought our first parents together again, by telling Adam in Serendib that Eve was on the Red Sea coast. In later days it is a sacred bird in all four quarters of Europe: “the bird of consolation” in the North; “bird of the happy beak” in the South; “the bird of the hearth” in the West; and “the bird of God” in the East. Apart from all this, “the clime-changing swallow,” slipt from the secret hand of Providence, that comes all the way from Southern Africa to hunt our May-flies, is one of the oracles of Nature and the joyous evangelist of happy Summer.
We all notice the first swallow almost as soon as the first cuckoo; for though the one bird’s note catches the ear, the flight of the other arrests the eye as certainly. And what a flight it is! Has it ever been computed how many hundred miles it flies every day? For hours they are on the wing, flying at the rate of a mile a minute, and always with exquisite grace. Watch a bird crossing a hay-field, winding in and out of the hay-cocks, rising just sufficiently to clear the hedge at the bottom, wheeling round over the gate, and then up the lane, almost, so it seems, skimming the ground as it goes, and yet without an effort lifting itself up over the spinney, and so dropping back into the hay-field. Their judgment is so accurate that they never have to turn at an angle, but, always allowing for the curve beforehand, make their course with a beautifully easy sweep. When there are young ones to feed their speed is even swifter, their industry more untiring, for instead of breaking off in their insect hunting to circle in play with their fellows, or to race the swifts across the sky, they have only the one idea, to fill their beaks as full as they will hold, and hurry back to the nest.