[34]This year (1886) I took all the sparrows’ nests on my house, and examined the young birds. Only one or two young peas and grains had been given them: they had been fed largely on insects.
[35]Mr. Aplin tells me, however, that the upper parts, in summer at least, “have a decided wash or gloss of green”: Mr. Seebohm calls it “dull olive-brown.”
[36]Stone-chats have been observed busy in this way near Oxford.—A. H. M.
[37]The chat of the Whin-chat is a dissyllable, ‘u-tic’; that of the Stone-chat a monosyllable, ‘chat.’ (O. V. A.)
[38]The Meadow Bunting (Emberiza cia) seemed to me, when I met with it in Switzerland this summer, to be more lively and restless than other Buntings.
[39]See [Note B] at the end of the volume.
[40]Or like a delicate electric bell, heard at some distance, while the door of your room is slowly opened and again closed.
[41]Another cause is doubtless the crescendo and diminuendo which the bird uses: see a valuable note in The Birds of Cumberland, by the Rev. H. A. Macpherson and W. Duckworth.
[42]In May this year (1886) I nearly trod upon a pair of these birds, near the same wood: yet they showed no fear, allowed me to approach them within six paces, and continued to reel close at hand.
[43]As in Milton’s “most musical, most melancholy.” But as Coleridge remarks in a note to his own poem of the Nightingale, in Sibylline Leaves, these words of Milton are spoken in the character of the melancholy man, and have therefore a dramatic rather than a descriptive propriety. Coleridge’s own conception of the song is the true one and most happily expressed.