To neither a word will I say.”
The rival birds are in their gayest spring plumage; and when tired of mere vulgar scolding and abuse, they try to sing each other down; and then it is that they are well worth not merely the listening to, but the looking at. Directly opposite the gean-tree near the top of which the lady chaffinch sits preening her feathers, and occasionally uttering a twink-twink of self-admiration, is an aged hawthorn, on which the rivals select to hold their tournament of song; and the energy and heart with which a bird sings in such a case must be seen and quietly studied to be fully appreciated. Swaying lightly each on his own bough, the rivals begin to sing as if their very lives depended upon it; their throats swollen almost to bursting; the feathers on their polls erected into a crest, and their whole bodies tremulous to the very tips of the quill feathers of their wings, as they pour forth a torrent of song so rapid, clear, and loud, that all the other birds in the neighbourhood are for the moment silent, as if they had purposely ceased their own aimless melodies to listen to the impassioned strains of the competitors in the thorn. Of human eloquence, Quintilian says, “Pectus, id est quod disertum facit”—the heart (and not the brain) is that which makes a man eloquent; and even more than of eloquence, with all the might of its “winged words,” is the same thing true of song. To be all it ought to be, and be at its best, it must well up a living stream from the hot, impassioned heart; not from the marble fountain of mere intellect, which, if always clear, is not the less always cold. If ever song came, in Quintilian’s phrase, direct a pectore—from the heart, it is the song at this moment of the rival competitors in yonder thorn. It is only when one has seen and studied a bird singing after this fashion that the full force and meaning of a line in Gray’s Ode to Spring can be understood and appreciated. Under the lens of a cold, critical analysis, the line is sheer nonsense; in sight of the bird itself, as at this moment, singing with all his might, heart and soul in every note, its truth and beauty are at once apparent. The line is this—
“The Attic warbler pours her throat,
Responsive to the cuckoo’s note.”
Had not the poet seen, and closely and intelligently observed, a bird in the act of loud and excited song, he would never have ventured on an assertion that at first sight seems so curiously extravagant, that a warbler “pours her throat.” It is to be observed, however, that the really beautiful and expressive phrase is not original, but second-hand as regards Gray. He borrows it from Pope, in whose Essay on Man (Ep. iii.), published ten or a dozen years before Grays ode, occurs this line—
“Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat?”
But it is a pity to separate the line from its context, and as the passage is not too well known, we may be pardoned for quoting it:—
“Has God, thou fool! worked solely for thy good,
Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food?
Who for thy table feeds the wanton fawn,