"La gentille aloüette, avec son tire-lire, Tire-lire, à lire, et tire-liran tire; Vers la voute du ciel, puis son vol vers ce lieu, Vire et desire dire adieu Dieu, adieu Dieu!"
The last line, if rapidly repeated with the proper beat and intonation, will be found a really very successful imitation of the concluding notes of the lark's well-known song. Many of our readers will remember that the North Uist bard, Ian Mac Codrum, in his Smeorach Chlann-Domhnuill, manages very happily to imitate the smeorach or song-thrush's notes in the burden or chorus; while Alexander Macdonald--Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair--very naturally falls, like the French poet, into an imitation of the wild-bird music of the woods and groves in a stanza that may be quoted not inappropriately at this season:--
"Cha bhi crèutair fo chupan nan spèur 'N sin nach tiunndaidh ri'n speuràd 's ri'n dreach, 'S gun toir Phoebus le buadhan a bhlàis Anam-fas daibh a's caileachdan ceart, Ni iad ais-eiridh choitcheann on uaigh Far na mhiotaich am fuachd iad a steach, 'S their iad--guileag-doro-hidola-hann Dh-fhalbh an geamhra's tha'n samhradh air teachd!"
The lines of Du Bartas have little meaning in themselves, and are untranslatable, being simply an attempt on the poet's part, in some odd moment of hilarity and abandon, to embody the notes of the skylark's song in something like articulate verse. The general sense of Macdonald's lines describing the irrepressible inclination of all living creatures to be jubilant and joyous at the return of spring, cannot better be rendered than in the first part of Scott's introductory stanza to the second canto of the Lady of the Lake, only that the return of spring in the one case, instead of the return of morn in the other, prompts to the outburst of gladness and song:--
"At morn the black-cock trims his jetty wing, 'Tis morning prompts the linnet's blithest lay, All Nature's children feel the matin spring Of life reviving, with reviving day; And while yon little bark glides down the bay, Wafting the stranger on his way again, Morn's genial influence roused a minstrel grey, And sweetly o'er the lake was heard thy strain, Mixed with the sounding harp, O white-hair'd Allan-bane!"