and Hartley Coleridge, in the following beautiful song, which we transcribe the more readily because it has not long been published, and may be new to many of our readers:
''Tis sweet to hear the merry lark, That bids a blithe good-morrow; But sweeter to hark in the twinkling dark To the soothing song of sorrow. Oh, nightingale! what doth she ail? And is she _sad_ or _jolly_? For ne'er on earth was sound of mirth So like to melancholy.
The merry lark he soars on high, No worldly thought o'ertakes him; He sings aloud to the clear blue sky, And the daylight that awakes him. As sweet a lay, as loud, as gay, The nightingale is trilling; With feeling bliss, no less than his Her little heart is thrilling.
Yet ever and anon a sigh Peers through her lavish mirth; For the lark's bold song is of the sky, And hers is of the earth. By night and day she tunes her lay, To drive away all sorrow; For bliss, alas! to-night may pass, And wo may come to-morrow.'
We must now cite one or two of the many passages which represent the nightingale's as an _absolutely_ cheerful song. We fear we cannot insist so much as Fox is disposed to do, on the evidence of Chaucer, who continually styles the nightingale's a merry note, because it is evident that in _his_ day the word had a somewhat different meaning from that which it at present conveys. For example, the poet calls the organ 'merry.' Nor dare we lay stress upon the instance which Cary cites--in a note to his _Purgatory_--of a 'neglected poet,' Vallans, who in his _Tale of Two Swannes_ ranks the 'merrie nightingale among the cheerful birds,' because we do not know whether, even at the time when Vallans wrote--the book was published, it seems, in 1590--'merrie' had come to bear its present signification.
We shall, however, find a witness among the writers of his period in Gawain Douglas, who died Bishop of Dunkeld in 1522. He, in a prologue to one of his _Æneids_, applies not only the word 'merry' to our bird, but one of less questionable signification--'mirthful.' If we come down to more modern times, we shall find Wordsworth, who seems above all others, except Burns, to have had a catholic ear for the whole multitude of natural sounds, not only refusing the character of melancholy to the nightingale's song, but placing it below the stock-dove's, because it is deficient in the pensiveness and seriousness which mark the note of the latter.