"Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings?"
And replies:
"Joy tunes his voice, joy animates his wings."
So with the nightingale--
"Loves of his own and raptures swell the note."
Some one speaking of our own species, says:
"We think, we toil, we war, we rove.
And all we ask is--woman's love."
It is to win the love of Philomela that the male nightingale studies, watches, and pours forth his soul in song. He had much rather that men did not listen; he is a shy, solitary, and timid bird, and takes his love away into [{547}] the forests, where, undisturbed by the sounds of vulgar life, he ravishes her ears with music. It is a question much discussed by poets and naturalists, whether the nightingale's song be joyous or melancholy. It probably derives its character from the frame of mind in which the listener happens to be--to the joyous it is mirthful, to the sorrowful it is sad--but in its real nature it is what Milton suggests--
"She all night long her amorous descant sung."
Still it must be owned that they who discover melancholy in her long, low, meltingly sweet notes, seem to approach nearer the truth than they who describe her as a merry bird. It is superstition, perhaps, that attributes to her the strange philosophy which makes anguish the well-spring of pleasure. When desirous, it is said, of reaching the sublimest heights of song, she leans her breast against a thorn, in order that the sense of pain may tone down her impetuous rapture into sympathy with human sorrow.