“Grief’s sharpest Thorn hard-pressing on my breast,
I share with wakeful melody to cheer
The sullen gloom, sweet Philomel! like thee,
And call the stars to listen.”
And in Thomson’s ‘Hymn to May,’ we find this allusion:—
“The lowly Nightingale,
A Thorn her pillow, trills her doleful tale.”
In a sonnet by Sir Philip Sydney, afterwards set to music by Bateson, we read—
“The Nightingale, as soon as April bringeth
Unto her rested sense a perfect waking,