Birds and Poets | Page 3

of birds the Greek said of this favorite insect. When Socrates and Phaedrus came to the fountain shaded by the planetree, where they had their famous discourse, Socrates said:?"Observe the freshness of the spot, how charming and very?delightful it is, and how summer-like and shrill it sounds from the choir of grasshoppers." One of the poets in the Anthology finds a grasshopper struggling in a spider's web, which he releases with the words:--
"Go safe and free with your sweet voice of song."
Another one makes the insect say to a rustic who had captured him:--
"Me, the Nymphs' wayside minstrel whose sweet note?O'er sultry hill is heard, and shady grove to float."
Still another sings how a grasshopper took the place of a broken string on his lyre, and "filled the cadence due."
"For while six chords beneath my fingers cried,?He with his tuneful voice the seventh supplied;?The midday songster of the mountain set?His pastoral ditty to my canzonet;?And when he sang, his modulated throat?Accorded with the lifeless string I smote."
While we are trying to introduce the lark in this country, why not try this Pindaric grasshopper also?
It is to the literary poets and to the minstrels of a softer age that we must look for special mention of the song-birds and for poetical rhapsodies upon them. The nightingale is the most general favorite, and nearly all the more noted English poets have sung her praises. To the melancholy poet she is melancholy, and to the cheerful she is cheerful. Shakespeare in one of his sonnets speaks of her song as mournful, while Martial calls her the "most?garrulous" of birds. Milton sang:--
"Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly,?Most musical, most melancholy,?Thee, chantress, oft the woods among?I woo, to hear thy evening song."
To Wordsworth she told another story:--
"O nightingale! thou surely art?A creature of ebullient heart;?These notes of thine,--they pierce and pierce,--?Tumultuous harmony and fierce!?Thou sing'st as if the god of wine?Had helped thee to a valentine;?A song in mockery and despite?Of shades, and dews, and silent night,?And steady bliss, and all the loves?Now sleeping in these peaceful groves."
In a like vein Coleridge sang:--
"'T is the merry nightingale?That crowds and hurries and precipitates?With fast, thick warble his delicious notes."
Keats's poem on the nightingale is doubtless more in the spirit of the bird's strain than any other. It is less a description of the song and more the song itself. Hood called the nightingale
"The sweet and plaintive Sappho of the dell."
I mention the nightingale only to point my remarks upon its American rival, the famous mockingbird of the Southern States, which is also a nightingale,--a night-singer,--and which no doubt excels the Old World bird in the variety and compass of its powers. The two birds belong to totally distinct families, there being no American species which answers to the European nightingale, as there are that answer to the robin, the cuckoo, the blackbird, and numerous others. Philomel has the color, manners, and habits of a thrush,--our hermit thrush,--but it is not a thrush at all, but a warbler. I gather from the books that its song is protracted and full rather than melodious,--a capricious, long-continued warble, doubling and redoubling, rising and falling, issuing from the groves and the great gardens, and associated in the minds of the poets with love and moonlight and the privacy of sequestered walks. All our sympathies and attractions are with the bird, and we do not forget that Arabia and Persia are there back of its song.
Our nightingale has mainly the reputation of the caged bird, and is famed mostly for its powers of mimicry, which are truly?wonderful, enabling the bird to exactly reproduce and even improve upon the notes of almost any other songster. But in a state of freedom it has a song of its own which is infinitely rich and various. It is a garrulous polyglot when it chooses to be, and there is a dash of the clown and the buffoon in its nature which too often flavors its whole performance, especially in captivity; but in its native haunts, and when its love-passion is upon it, the serious and even grand side of its character comes out. In Alabama and Florida its song may be heard all through the sultry summer night, at times low and plaintive, then full and strong. A friend of Thoreau and a careful observer, who has resided in Florida, tells me that this bird is a much more marvelous singer than it has the credit of being. He describes a habit it has of singing on the wing on moonlight nights, that would be worth going South to hear. Starting from a low bush, it mounts in the air and continues its flight apparently to an altitude of several hundred feet, remaining on the wing a number of minutes, and pouring