Another strange notion is, that the nightingale fixes her eyes--
"Her bright, bright eyes; her eyes both bright and full"--
on some particular star, from which she never withdraws them till her song is concluded, unless she be alarmed by the approach of some footstep, or other sound indicative of danger. We remember once, in Kent, going forth to spend a night in the fields to enjoy the strange delight imparted by the nightingale's notes. We placed ourselves on a little eminence overlooking a valley, covered at intervals by scattered woods. It was the dead watch and middle of the night; silence the most absolute brooded over the earth. We stood still in high expectation. Presently, one lordly nightingale flung forth at no great distance from the summit of a lofty tree his music on the night. The lay was not protracted, but a rich, short, defiant burst of melody; he then, like the Roman orator, paused for a reply. The reply came, not close at hand, but, as it seemed, from some copse or thicket far down in the valley. If one might presume to judge on the spur of the moment, the second songster did really outdo the first. The notes came forth bubbling, gushing, quivering, palpitating, as it were, with soul, for nothing material ever resembled it. He went over a broad area of song, with a sort of wilderness of melody; his notes followed each other so rapidly, high, low, linked, broken--now sweeping away like a torrent, now sinking till it sounded like the scarcely audible murmur of a distant bee. He then stopped abruptly, confident that he had given his rival something to reflect upon. We now waited to hear that rival's answer, but he appeared to consider himself defeated, and remained silent. Another champion now stepped forward, and took up the challenge. He must surely have been the prince of his race. From a tree on the slope of a height, not far to the right of our position, he gave us a new specimen of the poetry of his race. The former two, evidently younger and more inexperienced, had been in a hurry. He took up his parable at leisure, beginning with a few light flourishes by way of preface, after which he plunged into his epic, seeming to carry on the subject from the epoch of Deucalion and Pyrrha, down to that moment, displaying all the resources of art, and presenting us with every form into which music could be moulded. What he might have achieved at last, or to what pitch he might have raised our ecstasy, must remain a mystery, for before he had concluded his song, a thundering railway train, belching forth fire and smoke as it advanced, seemed to be on the very point of annihilating the songsters; so they all took to flight, or at least remained obstinately silent. We waited hour after hour, now pacing in one direction, now in another; stopping short, pausing in our talk, listening till the streaky dawn, climbing slowly up the eastern hills, revealed to us the inutility of further hope.
The first time we heard the nightingale was from the deck of a vessel in the Avon, near Lee Woods. It was a starlight night; we were leaning on the bulwarks, speculating on the reception we were to meet with in England--in which we had that day arrived for the first time. As we were chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy, from an indenture in the woods, called, as we have since learned, Nightingale Valley, there burst forth at once a flood of sound, the strangest, the sweetest, the most intoxicating we had ever heard--it must be, it was the voice of the nightingale---
To the land of my fathers that welcomed me back.
Years not a few have rolled by since then, but we remember as distinctly as if it were yesternight the pleasure of that exquisite surprise. We heard the nightingale in England before the cuckoo--a circumstance which, according to Chaucer, should portend good-luck; and so it did--good-luck and happy days.
Perhaps much of the pleasure tasted in such cases is derived from the time of year--for both the cuckoo and the nightingale belong to the spring--when the air is full of balm, when the foliage is thick, when the grass is green and young--and when, especially in the morning, delicate odors ascend from the earth, which produce a wonderful effect upon the animal spirits. Through these scents, the cry of one bird and the song of the other invariably come to us: the one flitting at early dawn over the summits of woods, the other in loneliest covert hid, making night lovely, and smoothing the raven down of darkness till it smiles.
[ORIGINAL.]