To the Editor of the Every-Day Book.
Dear Sir,
Though I have not the pleasure of a personal acquaintance, I know enough to persuade me that you are no every-day body. The love of nature seems to form so prominent a trait in your character, that I, who am also one of her votaries, can rest no longer without communicating with you on the subject. I like, too, the sober and solitary feeling with which you ruminate over by-gone pleasures, and scenes wherein your youth delighted: for, though I am but young myself, I have witnessed by far too many changes, and have had cause to indulge too frequently in such cogitations.
I am a “Surrey-man,” as the worthy author of the “Athenæ Oxon.” would say: and though born with a desire to ramble, and a mind set on change, I have never till lately had an opportunity of strolling so far northward as “ould Iselton,” or “merry Islington:”—you may take which reading you please, but I prefer the first. But from the circumstance of your “walk out of London” having been directed that way, and having led you into so pleasant a mood, I am induced to look for similar enjoyment in my rambling excursions through its “town-like” and dim atmosphere. I am not ashamed to declare, that my taste in these matters differs widely from that of the “great and good” Johnson; who, though entitled, as a constellation of no ordinary “brilliance,” to the high sounding name of “the Great Bear,” (which I am not the first to appropriate to him,) seems to have set his whole soul on “bookes olde,” and “modern authors” of every other description, while the book of nature, which was schooling the negro-wanderer of the desert, proffered nothing to arrest his attention! Day unto day was uttering speech, and night unto night showing knowledge; the sun was going forth in glory, and the placid moon “walking in brightness;” and could he close his ears, and revert his gaze?—“De gustibus nil disputandum” I cannot say, for I do most heartily protest against his taste in such matters.
“The time of the singing of birds is come,” but, what is the worst of it, all these “songsters” are not “feathered.” There is a noted “Dickey” bird, who took it into his head, so long ago as the 25th of December last, to “sing through the heavens,”[158]—but I will have nothing to do with the “Christemasse Caroles” of modern day. Give me the “musical pyping” and “pleasaunte songes” of olden tyme, and I care not whether any more “ditees” of the kind are concocted till doomsday.
But I must not leave the singing of birds where I found it: I love to hear the nightingales emulating each other, and forming, by their “sweet jug jug,” a means of communication from one skirt of the wood to the other, while every tree seems joying in the sun’s first rays. There is such a wildness and variety in the note, that I could listen to it, unwearied, for hours. The dew still lies on the ground, and there is a breezy freshness about us: as our walk is continued, a “birde of songe, and mynstrell of the woode,” holds the tenor of its way across the path:—but it is no “noiseless tenor.” “Sweet jug, jug, jug,” says the olde balade:—
“Sweet jug, jug, jug,
The nightingale doth sing,
From morning until evening,
As they are hay-making.”
Was this “songe” put into their throats “aforen yt this balade ywritten was?” I doubt it, but in later day Wordsworth and Conder have made use of it; but they are both poets of nature, and might have fancied it in the song itself.
I look to my schoolboy days as the happiest I ever spent: but I was never a genius, and laboured under habitual laziness, and love of ease: “the which,” as Andrew Borde says, “doth much comber young persones.” I often rose for a “lark,” but seldom with it, though I have more than once “cribbed out” betimes, and always found enough to reward me for it. But these days are gone by, and you will find below all I have to say of the matter “collected into English metre:”—