ce of an opinion opposite to his own.

'And hark! the nightingale begins its song,
"Most musical, most melancholy" bird.
A melancholy bird? oh, idle thought![2]
In nature there is nothing melancholy.
But some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced
With the resemblance of a grievous wrong,
Or slow distemper, or neglected love,
First named these notes a melancholy strain:
And youths and maidens most poetical,
Who lose the deepening twilight of the spring
In ball-rooms and hot theatres, they still,
Full of meek sympathy, must heave their sighs
O'er Philomela's pity-pleading strains.
My friend, and thou, our sister! we have learnt
A different love: we may not thus profane
Nature's sweet voices, always full of love
And joyance! 'Tis the _merry_ nightingale
That crowds and hurries and precipitates
With fast-thick warble his delicious notes,
As he were fearful that an April night
Would be too short for him to utter forth
His love-chant and disburden his full soul
Of all its music!'

Little now remains to be said. We have laid before the reader
specimens of the two contending opinions, as well as of that which is
set up as a golden mean between them; and he has but to put down our
pages, and to walk forth--provided he does not live too far north, or
in some smoke-poisoned town--to judge for himself as to the true
character of the strains. Small risk, we think, would there be in
pronouncing on which side his verdict would be given! Well do we
remember the night when we first heard this sweet bird: how we
listened and refused to believe--for we were young, and our idea had
of course been that his song was a melancholy one--that those madly
hilarious sounds could come from the mournful nightingale. Wordsworth
attempts thus to account for the delusion under which the older poets
laboured on this subject:

'Fancy, who leads the pastimes of the glad,
Full oft is pleased a wayward dart to throw,
Sending sad shadows after things not sad,
Peopling the harmless fields with sighs of wo.
Beneath her sway, a simple forest cry
Becomes an echo of man's misery.
What wonder? at her bidding ancient lays
Steeped in dire grief the voice of Philomel,
And that blithe messenger of summer days,
The swallow, twittered, subject to like spell.'

It is curious that the people who first fixed the stigma of