Little now remains to be said. We have laid before the reader specimens of the two contending opinions, as well as of that which is set up as a golden mean between them; and he has but to put down our pages, and to walk forth—provided he does not live too far north, or in some smoke-poisoned town—to judge for himself as to the true character of the strains. Small risk, we think, would there be in pronouncing on which side his verdict would be given! Well do we remember the night when we first heard this sweet bird: how we listened and refused to believe—for we were young, and our idea had of course been that his song was a melancholy one—that those madly hilarious sounds could come from the mournful nightingale. Wordsworth attempts thus to account for the delusion under which the older poets laboured on this subject:
'Fancy, who leads the pastimes of the glad,
Full oft is pleased a wayward dart to throw,
Sending sad shadows after things not sad,
Peopling the harmless fields with sighs of wo.
Beneath her sway, a simple forest cry
Becomes an echo of man's misery.
What wonder? at her bidding ancient lays
Steeped in dire grief the voice of Philomel,
And that blithe messenger of summer days,
The swallow, twittered, subject to like spell.'
It is curious that the people who first fixed the stigma of melancholy upon our bird—the Greeks, or at least the Athenians, and it is of them we speak—were perhaps the very gayest people that ever danced upon the earth—absolute Frenchmen. The very sprightliness of their temper, however, by the universally prevailing law of contrast, may have induced in them a fondness for sad and doleful legends; and we confess, for our own part, that while we from our hearts admire the poetical beauty and elegance of their various fables, we do not a little disrelish the constant vein of melancholy which pervades them all. Not the least sad of their fictions is that which relates to the nightingale; a story that has found its way—and even more universally the opinion of the bird's music which it implied—amongst all the nations whom Greece has instructed and civilised.
But we have yet another reply to the question, 'Why do most people call the nightingale's a melancholy song?' It is heard by night, 'whilst our spirits are attentive,' and the solemn gloom of the hour influences the judgment of the ear; for another false impression, which like the monster Error of Spenser, has bred a thousand young ones as ill-favoured as herself, ascribes melancholy to night. There is no good reason why we should think thus of the night, still less that the impression should influence our judgment in other matters; and we owe no small thanks to those who have endeavoured to reclaim to their proper uses these misdirected associations, and to teach, that
'In nature there is nothing melancholy;'
but on the contrary,
'Healing her wandering and distempered child,
She pours around her softest influences,
Her sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,
Her melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,
Till he relent, and can no more endure
To be a jarring and a dissonant thing
Amid the general dance and harmony;
But, bursting into tears, wins back his way,
His angry spirit healed and harmonised
By the benignant touch of love and beauty.'
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Note by Coleridge.—'The passage in Milton possesses an excellence far superior to that of mere description. It is spoken in the character of the Melancholy Man, and has, therefore, a dramatic propriety. The author makes this remark, to rescue himself from the charge of having alluded with levity to a line of Milton's.'