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 _AEneids_, 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.

However, of all testimonies which can be brought on this side of the
question, the strongest is that of Coleridge. No other has so
accurately described the song itself; moreover, he alone has entered
the lists avowedly as an antagonist, and confessing in so many words
to the existen