represents the nightingale's misery when thus bereaved. This portion of the lines shall stand entire; none, we are sure, would wish us further to mangle the passage:
'But chief, let not the nightingale lament
Her ruined care, too delicately framed
To brook the harsh confinement of the cage.
Oft, when returning with her loaded bill,
The astonished mother finds a vacant nest,
By the rude hands of unrelenting clowns
Robbed: to the ground the vain provision falls.
Her pinions ruffle, and low drooping, scarce
Can bear the mourner to the poplar shade;
Where all abandoned to despair, she sings
Her sorrows through the night.'
It will at once be seen that this description relates to an exceptional condition, and we have yet to seek what character Virgil and Thomson would give to the ordinary song of this paradoxical musician. For the Roman, we do not know that any passage exists in his works which can help us to a conclusion; but Thomson's testimony must undoubtedly be ranged on the contra side, as appears from the following lines in his Agamemnon:
'Ah, far unlike the nightingale! she sings
Unceasing through the balmy nights of May—
She sings from love and joy.'
In the passage from his Spring, which we have given, we cannot but fancy that the poet endeavoured—if we may so say—to effect a compromise between the opinion which, through the influence of classical poetry, generally prevailed as to the character of the bird's music, and the opposing convictions which his own senses had forced upon him. It was desirable to describe its strains according to the popular fancy, and therefore he borrowed from Virgil such a description of the bird's sorrow as under the assumed circumstances did no violence to his own judgment.
Thomson is not the only poet in whom we fancy we detect some such attempt at compromise. It appears to us that Villega, the Anacreon of Spain, in the following little poem, which we give in Mr Wiffen's translation, adopted, with a similar object, this idea of the nightingale robbed of her young. The truthful and somewhat minute description in the song, however, represents the bird's ordinary performance, and but ill suits the circumstances under which it is supposed to be uttered. The failure on the part of the poet may be ascribed to his secret conviction, that the nightingale's was a cheerful melody; and his labouring against that conviction to the necessity he felt himself under of following his classical masters.
'I have seen a nightingale
On a sprig of thyme bewail,
Seeing the dear nest that was
Hers alone, borne off, alas!
By a labourer: I heard,
For this outrage, the poor bird
Say a thousand mournful things
To the wind, which on its wings
From her to the guardian sky
Bore her melancholy cry—
Bore her tender tears. She spake
As if her fond heart would break.
One while in a sad, sweet note,
Gurgled from her straining throat,
She enforced her piteous tale,
Mournful prayer and plaintive wail;
One while with the shrill dispute,
Quite o'er-wearied, she was mute;
Then afresh, for her dear brood,
Her harmonious shrieks renewed;
Now she winged it round and round,
Now she skimmed along the ground;
Now from bough to bough in haste
The delighted robber chased;
And alighting in his path,
Seemed to say, 'twixt grief and wrath:
"Give me back, fierce rustic rude!
Give me back my pretty brood!"
And I saw the rustic still
Answer: "That I never will!"'
Independently of the untruthfulness of which a naturalist would complain in this description—for no birds under such circumstances of distress sing, but merely repeat each its own peculiar piercing cry, never at any other time heard, and which cannot be mistaken—there is a palpable effort of ingenuity discoverable in the representation, which seems to tell us that the writer was making up a story, rather than uttering his own belief. It may even be doubted whether Virgil himself, who seems first to have invented this fancy, and behind whose broad mantle later poets have sheltered themselves, may not have felt an inclination to depart from the Greek opinion of Philomel's ditty. Why otherwise did he not simply and at once—as his masters Homer and Theocritus had done before him—describe her notes as mournful, instead of casting about for some cause that might excuse him for giving them that character? But however this may be, we cannot conceal from ourselves, that some stubborn passages still remain in the poets, proclaiming that there are men, and those among the greatest and most tasteful, to whose fancy the voice of the nightingale has sounded full of wo.
Homer must be counted of this number—unless we think with Fox, in the preface to his History of Lord Holland, that it is only as to her wakefulness Penelope is compared to the night singing-bird; and so must Milton (for although Coleridge has satisfactorily dealt with the passage in Il Penseroso, the line of the Lady's song in Comus remains still); and Shakspeare himself, who could scarcely be influenced, as Milton might very possibly be, by the opinions of the Grecian poets.
It is a strange contest we are here considering. Which of us would for a moment doubt our ability to decide in a dispute as to the liveliness or sadness of any given melody?—yet here we see the greatest poets, the favoured children of nature, utterly at variance on a point concerning which we should have expected to find even the most ordinary minds able to decide.