THE NIGHTINGALE:
A MUSICAL QUESTION.
Is the song of the nightingale mirthful or melancholy? is a question that has been discussed so often, that anything new on the subject might be considered superfluous, were it not that the very fact of the discussion is in itself a curiosity worthy of attention. The note in dispute was heard with equal distinctness by Homer and Wordsworth; and indeed there are few poets of any age or country who have not, at one time or other in their lives, had the testimony of their own ears as to its character. Whence, then, this difference of opinion? Listen to Thomson's unqualified assertion, given with the seriousness of an affidavit:
——'all abandoned to despair, she sings
Her sorrows through the night, and on the bough
Sole sitting still at every dying fall
Takes up again her lamentable strain
Of winding wo; till wide around the woods
Sigh to her song and with her wail resound.'
Then Homer in the Odyssey, through Pope's paraphrase:
'Sad Philomel, in bowery shades unseen,
To vernal airs attunes her varied strains.'
Virgil, as rendered by Dryden:
——'she supplies the night with mournful strains
And melancholy music fills the plains.'