mercy that they do. For if all the thrushes that leave us were to come back again, the consequences would be simply disastrous. Suppose all the human emigrants from Great Britain were to come back again! The population of these islands would be sitting three deep on top of one another.
No, the thrush is not a migrant in the sense that the nightingale is or the turtle-dove. By a wise dispensation of Nature the superfluous increment is drafted off annually. But the same number that sing in the garden in March sing every month in the year till March comes round again.
There is, I confess it, something very pleasing in the thought that a particular turtle-dove, all the time that it was enjoying itself in the palm-gardens by Cairo, or among the arbutus and olives of Athens, should keep in its memory a particular tree in my garden in England, and in spite of all temptations should come straight back to it every summer. For such fidelity I am cordially grateful, and I appreciate the dainty little bird’s soft purring in the copse all the better for its pretty compliment of remembrance.
So with the nightingale, that, out of all the whole world, prefers an old juniper near my house to nest in, and that sits and sings gloriously every night as if in requital of my hospitality. I am proud of the small brown bird’s preference for my garden over others, and proud of my neighbour’s envy, whose garden the nightingale—“dear angel of the Spring,” “the dearling of the somer’s pryde”—never visits. And I take care that the rites shall not be violated; that my guests shall never have cause to regret their choice.
But they cannot stay with us. They come when our daffodils are all abloom, and go when the roses are fading. It is a far cry from London to Magdala, but the nightingale goes away even farther than that, and then in the Spring it turns northward again, and, by-and-by, with myriads of other birds, comes back to us to find the lilacs in flower, and the home-staying thrush with young ones already in the nest.
And they come in strange company. Sometimes the wild swan, quite an island for the little birds, flies winnowing the air beside them; sometimes a flight of hawks, but with their minds too full of their journey to think of harming their small fellow-voyagers; always with the sound of a multitude about them, and the murmuring of innumerable wings. Pitch dark the night, but somewhere or another is a leader, and they follow, wild duck and swallow, sea-fowl and dove, broad-winged geese and tiny gold-crest wrens, an instinct-driven mob that, in spite of all perils of storm and of distance, keeps its course, with dogged courage, and steers straight for the land that is to be its summer home. Lighthouses have become our best observatories for these annual transits, and the descriptions that are given of the mobbing of the great sea-lanterns by the hurrying flights of strangely assorted birds, are so curious as to be scarcely credible. What they suppose it to be, this bright revolving light in the dark waste, we cannot of course tell; but they have learned by experience that it means that land is very near, and so they all swerve in their course to pass through its rays. And those who keep the lighthouses tell us of the streams of birds that pass, flashing white for an instant in the glare of the lamp and then disappearing, and of still larger companies that fly overhead and out of sight, filling the night-air with the sound of rushing wings and the clamour of different voices, “feeling for each other in the dark,” as Bunyan says, “with words.”
“From worlds unknown
The birds of passage transmigrating come;
Unnumbered colonies of foreign wing
At Nature’s summons in bold voyage steer
O’er the wide ocean, through the pathless sky.”
Mallet.