But the occurrence,
and the song of the bird, have wholly faded from my memory.
When I was abroad in 1892 and '96 I hoped to hear the song.
But I was too late. Mrs. Warre, wife of the Rector of Bemerton,
George Herbert's Parsonage, told me that the nightingales
were abundant in her own garden close to the Avon, but that
they did not sing after the beginning of the nesting session
which, according to a note to White's "History of Selborne,"
lasts from the beginning of May to the early part of June.
Waller says:

Thus the wise nightingale that leaves her home,
Pursuing constantly the cheerful spring,
To foreign groves does her old music bring.

There are some counties in England where the bird is not
found. It is abundant in Warwickshire, Gloucester and the
Isle of Wight. It is not found in Scotland, Derbyshire or
Yorkshire or Devon or Cornwall. Attempts to introduce it
in those places have failed. The reason is said to be that
its insect food does not exist there.

I utterly failed to hear the nightingale, although I was
very close upon his track. On the night of the fifth of
June at Freshwater, close to Tennyson's home, we were taken
by a driver, between eleven and twelve at night, to two copses
in one of which he said he had heard the nightingale the night
before; and at the other they had been heard by somebody,
from whom he got the information, within a very few days.
But the silence was unbroken, notwithstanding our patience
and the standing reward I had offered to anybody who would
find one that I could hear. Two different nights shortly
afterward, I was driven out several miles past groves where
the bird was said to be heard frequently. Nothing came of
it. May 29, at Gloucester, I rode with my friend, H. Y.
J. Taylor, Esq., an accomplished antiquary, out into the country.
We passed a hillside where he said he had heard the nightingale
about eleven o'clock in the daytime the week before. Shakespeare
says:

The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be
No better a musician than the wren.

But the nightingale does sometimes sing by day. Mr. Taylor
says that on the morning he spoke of the whole field seemed
to be full of singing birds. There were larks and finches
and linnets and thrushes, and I think other birds whose name
I do not remember. But when the nightingale set up his song
every other bird stopped. They seemed as much spellbound
by