f the
nightingale for the rose has been frequently the subject of poetical
allusion. Lord Byron speaks of it in the "Giaour":--

"The rose o'er crag or vale,
Sultana of the nightingale,
The maid for whom his melody,
His thousand songs are heard on high,
Blooms blushing to her lover's tale,
His queen, the garden queen, his rose,
Unbent by winds, unchilled by snows."

Thackeray, too, has given a pleasing rendering of this favourite
legend:--

"Under the boughs I sat and listened still,
I could not have my fill.
'How comes,' I said, 'such music to his bill?
Tell me for whom he sings so beautiful a trill.'

'Once I was dumb,' then did the bird disclose,
'But looked upon the rose,
And in the garden where the loved one grows,
I straightway did begin sweet music to compose.'"

Mrs. Browning, in her "Lay of the Early Rose," alludes to this legend,
and Moore in his "Lalla Rookh" asks:--

"Though rich the spot
With every flower this earth has got,
What is it to the nightingale,
If there his darling rose is not?"

But the rose is not the only plant for which the nightingale is said to
have a predilection, there being an old notion that its song is never
heard except where cowslips are to be found in profusion. Experience,
however, only too often proves the inaccuracy of this assertion. We may
also quote the following note from Yarrell's "British Birds" (4th ed.,
i. 316):--"Walcott, in his 'Synopsis of British Birds' (vol. ii. 228),
says that the nightingale has been observed to be met with only where
the _cowslip_ grows kindly, and the assertion receives a partial
approval from Montagu; but whether the statement be true or false, its
converse certainly cannot be maintained, for Mr. Watson gives the
cowslip (_Primula veris_) as found in all the 'provinces' into which he
divides Great Britain, as far north as Caithness and Shetland, where we
know that the nightingale does not occur." A correspondent of _Notes and
Queries_ (5th Ser. ix. 492) says that in East Sussex, on the borders of
Kent, "the cowslip is quite unknown, but nightingales are as common as
blackberries there."

A similar idea exists in connection with hops; and, according to a
tradition current in Yorkshire, the nightingale made its first
appearance in the neighbourhood of Doncaster when hops were planted. But
this, of course, is purely imaginary, and in Hargrove's "History of
Knaresborough" (1832) we read: "