Milton, too:
——'Philomel will deign a song
In her sweetest, saddest plight,
Smoothing the rugged brow of night,
While Cynthia checks her dragon yoke
Gently o'er the accustom'd oak:
Sweet bird, that shun'st the noise of folly—
Most musical, most melancholy.'
And again in Comus:
——'the love-lorn nightingale
Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well.'
And Shakspeare makes his poor banished Valentine congratulate himself, that in the forest he can
——'to the nightingale's complaining note
Tune his distresses and record his wo.
We might go on much longer in this strain. We might give, likewise, the mythological cause assigned for the imputed melancholy, and add that some, not content with this, represent the bird as leaning its breast against a thorn—
'To aggravate the inward grief,
Which makes its music so forlorn.'
But we would rather pause to admit candidly, that two of the above witnesses might be challenged—Virgil and Thomson; who indeed should be counted but as one, for the author of the Seasons, in the lines quoted, has translated, though not so closely as Dryden, from the Georgics of the Latin poet. If you will read the passage—it matters not whether in Virgil, Dryden, or Thomson—you will perceive that it is a special occurrence that is spoken of: no statement whatever is made as to the character of the nightingale's ordinary song. Thomson, in the course of his humane and touching protest against the barbarous art: 'through which birds are
—— by tyrant man
Inhuman caught, and in the narrow cage
From liberty confined, and boundless air,'