T . he Nightingale . T USCANY is full of nightingales, and in

spring and summer they sing all the time, save in the middle of the night and the middle of the day. In the little leafy woods that hang on the steep of the hill towards the streamlet, as maidenhair hangs on a rock, you hear them -piping up again in the wanness of dawn, about four o'clock in the morning : " Hello ! Hello ! Hello ! " It is the brightest sound in the world. And every time you hear it you feel wonder and, it must be said, a thrill, because the sound is so bright, so glittering, and has such power behind it.

"There goes- the nightingale ! " you say to yourself. It sounds in the half-dawn as if the stars were darting up from the little thicket and leaping away into the vast vagueness of the sky, to be hidden and gone. But the song rings on after sunrise, and each time you listen again, startled, you wonder : Now why do they say he is a sad bird ?

He is the noisiest, most inconsiderate, most obstrep- erous and jaunty bird in the whole kingdom of birds. How John Keats managed to begin his "Ode to a Nightingale" with : "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense" is a mystery to anybody acquainted with the actual song. You hear the nightin- gale siWerily shouting : " What? What ? What, John ? Heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains . • . ? Tra-la-la ! Tri-li-lilylilylilylily ! "

And why the Greeks said he, or she, was sobbing in a bush for a lost lover, again I don't know. Jug-jug-jug! say the mediaeval writers, to represent the rolling of the little balls of lightning in the nightingale's throat. A wild, rich sound, richer than the eyes in a. peacock's tail !

"And the bright brown nightingale, amorous, - Is half assuaged for Itylus,"

They say—with that jug ! jug ! jug !—that she is sobbing. How they hear it is a mystery. How anyone who didn't have his ears on upside down ever heard the nightingale " sobbing " I don't know.

Anyhow, it's a male sound, a most intensely and un- dilutedly male sound. A pure assertion. There is not a hint nor a shadow of echo and hollow recall. Nothing at all like a hollow low bell. Nothing so unforlom.

In sober fact, the nightingale sings with a ringing, punching vividness and a pristine assertiveness, a kind of brilliant calling and interweaving of exclamation such as must have been heard on the first day of creation, when the angels suddenly found themselves created, and shouting aloud before they knew it. Then there must have been a to-do of angels in the thickets of heaven!

For the pure splendidness of vocal assertion : " Lo ! It is I ! " you must listen to the nightingale. Perhaps for the visual perfection of the same assertion you have to look at a peacock shaking all his eyes. Among all creatures created in final splendour these two are perhaps the most finally perfect : the one in invisible, triumphing sound, the other in voiceless visibility. The nightingale is a quite undistinguished grey-brown bird, if- you-do' see him, although he has got that tender, hopping Mystery about him of a thing that is rich alive inside.

Yet the nightingale, let me repeat, is the least sad thing in the world. He has nothing to be sad about. He feels perfect with life. It isn't conceit. He just feels life-perfect, and he trills it out : shouts, jugs, gurgles, trills, gives long, Mock-plaintive calls, makes declarations, assertions, and triumphs ; but he never reflects. It is pure music, in so far as you could never put words to it. But there are words for the feelings aroused in us by the song. No! Even that is not true. There are no words to tell what one really feels, hearing the nightingale. It is something so much purer than words, which are all tainted. Yet we can say it is some sort of feeling of triumph in one's own life-perfection.

"'Tie not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thy happiness—

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease."

Poor Keats ! He has to be "too happy" in the nightingale's happiness, not being very happy in himself at all. So he wants to drink the blushful Hippocrene, and fade away with the nightingale into the forest dim -- "Fade far away, dissolve, and quite fotget

What thou among the leaves bast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret."

doesn't succeed, however. The viewless wings of Poesy carry him only into the bushes, not into the nightingale world. He is still outside :— " Darkling I listen : and for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful death."

The nightingale never made any man in love with easeful death, except by contrast. The contrast between the bright flame of positive pure self-aliveness in the bird, and the uneasy flickering of yearning selflessness, forever yearning for something outside himself, which is Keats :- - "To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy !

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

To thy high requiem become a sod."

How astonished the nightingale would be if he could be made to realize what the poet was answering to his song ! He would fall off the bough with amazement.

Because a nightingale, when you answer him back, only shouts and sings louder. Suppose a few other nightin- gales pipe up in the neighbouring bushes—as they always do—then the blue-white sparks of sound go dazzling up to heaven. And suppose you, mere mortal, happen to be sitting on the shady bank having an altercation with the mistress of your heart, hammer and tongues, then the chief nightingale swells and goes at it like Caruso in the third act, simply a brilliant, bursting frenzy of music, singing you down : till you simply can't hear yourself speak to quarrel.

There was, in fact, something very like a nightingale in Caruso, that bird-like bursting miraculous energy of song, the fulness of himself, and self-luxuriance :— " Thou west not born for death, immortal Bird !

No hungry generations tread thee down."

Not yet in Tuscany, anyhow. They are twenty to the dozen. Whereas the cuckoo seems remote and low- voiced, calling his low, half-secretive call as he flies past. Perhaps it really is different in England :- " The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown :•Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn."

But why in tears ? Always tears ! Did Diocletian, I wonder, among the emperors, burst into tears when he heard the nightingale, and Aesop among the clowns ? And Ruth, really ? Myself, I strongly suspect that young lady of setting the nightingale singing, like the nice damsel in Boccaccio's story, who went to sleep with the lively bird in her hand. " —tua figliuola è stata si vaga dell' usignuolo, che ella l'ha preso e tienlosi in mano ! "

And what does the hen nightingale think of it all, as she mildly sits upon the eggs and hears milord giving himself forth ? Probably she likes it, for she goes on breeding him as jaunty as ever. Probably she prefers his high cockalorum to the poet's humble moan :-- "Now more than ever seems it rich, to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain."

That wouldn't be much use to the hen nightingale. And

one sympathizes with Keats's Fanny, and understands why she wasn't having any. Much good such a midnight would have been to her !

Perhaps, when all's said and done, the female of the species gets more out of life when the male isn't wanting to cease upon the midnight, with or without pain. There are better uses for midnights. And a bird that sings because he's full of his own bright life, and leaves her to keep the eggs cosy, •is perhaps preferable to one who moans, even with love of her.

Of course, the nightingale is utterly unconscious of the little dim hen while he sings. And he never mentions her name. But she knows well enough that the song is hall her ; just as she knows the eggs are half him. And just as she doesn't want him coming and putting a heavy foot down on her little bunch of eggs, he doesn't want her poking into his song, and fussing over it, and mussing it up. Every man to his trade; and every woman to hers!

"Adieu' Adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades."

It never was a plaintive anthem ; it was Caruso at his jauntiest. But don't try to argue with a poet.