may sometimes become importunate. There is a landscape-painter in Paris who is a great canary-fancier, and has a very large cage full of these birds in the studio where he paints. So long as he is alone it may be very delightful, for perhaps his little yellow friends sing to him with moderation; but no sooner does a visitor enter the room and try to begin a conversation than all the canaries set up such a clatter that no human voice is audible.

The birds in the free woods fill the air incessantly in spring with their merry noises, but their garrulity never tries our patience like that of the poor prisoners in cages. Is it really music that they make, and do they charm the ear as music does, or move some fibre of poetic sentiment in our hearts? I believe that the feeling they reach within us is a poetical and not a musical feeling. The notes of birds may be imitated with deceptive accuracy, and yet a concert of such imitations would not attract an audience. The wild bird utters its notes and we are delighted; the human imitator accurately reproduces the same notes with ingeniously contrived whistles, and we remain indifferent. Here, too, is another consideration which may be worth notice. So long as one bird performs a solo it may be a melody, but when half-a-dozen are singing at the same time is it concerted music that they sing? Does each of them take his part in a general harmony, like a chorus-singer at the opera? No, their science is not equal to any thing requiring subordination of parts. And the plain truth is, that the warbling of a multitude

136

May-Reason and Sentiment.

of birds must necessarily be full of discords; yet people of musical taste endure it, and even delight in it. For the birds are pets of ours, they have especially been pets of the poets, and we regard their performances with the most tender and affectionate indulgence. It has occurred to me more than once to hear what I took for birds' notes, and to think 'what delicious purity of tone, what softness, what ravishing quality!' and immediately afterwards to discover that these wondrous notes had been simply whistled by some boy behind a hedge, after which discovery all their fine qualities vanished.

So much for the criticism of reason; but when we let sentiment have her way, as in this matter we may and ought to do, then we fall at once under the old charm and can listen enraptured, as Chaucer did. For the songs of birds convey to us far more than the mere sound; they are voices of Nature speaking to us joyously, tenderly, caressing the childish part of our being with simple lullabies, and thus gently effacing the too sad or awful impression which many other sounds of wild things make upon us; such as the screeching of churchyard owls, the croak of the raven, the wild cry of plovers toppling over in the wind on the ridges of desolate moors. We love the little singing-birds because they so prettily tell us that, notwithstanding the hard regularity of the laws that govern the world, the Divine Mind condescended to take pleasure in cheerful little beings that sing of gladness only, and know no other theme. Who can tell what man himself may have gained from the singing of the birds, how much his heart may have

been cheered by it, and his labor lightened? All the poets, without exception, who have written of what is charming and beautiful in Nature, have spoken lovingly of singing-birds; and therefore it may be presumed that the great multitude of poets who have never penned their inspiration,' and the still greater multitude who, without being mute poets, have nevertheless some share of poetic faculty or feeling, do all take pleasure in this simple sylvan music. In aviaries it easily becomes overpowering, but in the open woods it is mellowed by many various distances; and as there is a perspective in what we see there, as the trees at a distance mingle a thousand various tints into a quiet harmony of color, so do the songs of a thousand birds mix together into a delicious indistinguishable warbling, of which the most perfect ear could never analyze the elements. And just as some one branch or leaf will detach itself brilliantly in the sunshine from the rich mystery that lies behind it, so will the voice of one songster pipe clearly over all the rest till it is lost again in the pervading atmosphere of sound.

Every one who cares for old poetry will remember the stanzas in Chaucer's 'Court of Love,' where he makes all the birds sing religiously in May, - one of the quaintest and prettiest of his fancies, but worked out too fully in detail to admit of any complete quotation. Here are just a couple of stanzas as specimens of the whole:

""Te deum amoris," sang the throstel cocke;
Tuball himself, the first musician,

138

May-Chaucer's Fancy.

With key of armony could not unlocke

So swete tune as that the throstel can :
"The lorde of love we praisen" (quod he then,
And so done all the foules great and lite),
Honour we May, in false lover's despite.
"Dominus regnavit," said the pecocke there,
"The lord of love, that mighty prince ywis,
He is received here and everywhere.

Now Jubilate sing.".

"What meaneth this?"

Said then the linnet: "Welcome, lord of blisse."

Out sterte the owl with "Benedicite,

What meaneth all this merry fare?" (quod he.)'

There is no end to the allusions to singing-birds in Chaucer, but one of the most delicately charming of these consists of three couplets in the Romaunt of the Rose,' which always come back to my memory when I hear the birds in May. 'Harde is his heart,' says the poet :

'Harde is his heart that loveth nought

In May, when all this mirth is wrought,
When he may on these branches here
The smalle birdes singen clere
Hir blissful sweet song piteous,
And in this season delitious.'

XXVII.

Hymn of the Birds to the Sun, by Gawin Douglas - The Birds hail the

catchers love them -The Mistletoe Seasons-Gentle Heartlessness

St. Lambert's Poem of the Four - The Bird-catcher in Buffon - The Work of Nest-building — Are Birds Architects or Masons?— Magpies -The Labor given to a Magpie's Nest - Thrush, Tom-tit, Linnet — Greenfinch and Goldfinch-Wren - Excellent Arrangement of Wren's Nest Building a House - Building for Oneself- - Varieties of Nestbuilding — Raising and Fixing of Material — Adhesion of Martin's Nests Birds that like to be rocked in their Nests - The CuckooPoet-cuckoos Birds and Plants - The Cuckoo-pint-Value of the Common Arum for Artists.

OF

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F all the fine passages in old poetry concerning the life of birds in Nature, the most magnificent is the hymn of the birds to the Sun in Gawin Douglas's prologue to the twelfth book of the 'Eneid.' I should have been glad to abridge the quotation had it been possible without spoiling it, but I find, as the reader will also, that the series of verses beginning with the word 'Welcome' could not have their due effect if given by themselves; the mind needs to be led up to them and tuned to the proper poetical pitch before it can fully enter into the fine spirit of the hymn itself. As for the little difficulty with the old Scottish words it vanishes