two sweet little pictures, entitled, “the lark,” and “the nightingale,” have greatly charmed me. in one, there was a blue-flecked sky, a spring morning landscape, and a glad-eyed girl, with a lapful of daisies, lying back and looking up with shaded gaze and listening eyes, into those blue depths, wherein
“the lark became a sightless song.”
in the other, there was an evening glow: warm, orange-grey sky, cooling into steel-blue; a bower of rose-leaves; an earnest face, with darker hair, and pensive brow, flushed into warmth by the setting sun. and you would know, even had you not been told, that the child, old enough just to enjoy that young melancholy which is pleasant,—is listening to that
“wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet, rings eden through the budded quicks.”
for in neither case is the songster seen: with true art the66 minstrel is left to the imagination to supply, and this subtler artist can furnish voice, form, motion; only one of which three could be given by the painter.
these pictures were in the winter exhibition; hence, no doubt, their suggestion of the absent bird-songs was the more valued. for perhaps these, like other delights, are the sweetest when they are not possessed, but only remembered and longed-for.
that remembrance, however, of winter, will serve, by contrast, to freshen our enjoyment, as we start, on this warm march day, for bramley wood, to descry and collect the old familiar bird-songs as they come back to us in the spring. to collect these and the flowers, i say, in the heart’s cases and herbarium, for use when winter comes, and woods are dead, and bird-songs gone. this is a better way than to crowd the staircase and hall with stuffed, silent birds, or to encumber your shelves with dried, brittle, brown specimens; which can never suggest the fresh, juicy, sweet-breathed blossoms, or the quick, never-still, bright-glancing inhabitants of the bushes. for the heart keeps these collections all fresh and full of life, and if a picture or a poem or a strain of music does but summon them up, why, there they are in a minute. though they may have seemed laid by and forgotten, yet, at the magic call, lo! the heart is a lane of primroses, or a copse of bluebells; the lark is high in the heaven, and the thrush answering the blackbird out of great white sheets of the may.
we soon settle down to the bird-songs when once they have really all come back; and we plod on our preoccupied way, hearing them without hearing, unless, indeed, one day-note of a67 nightingale should electrify our heart. but there is no doubt that, at first returning, the silver minstrelsy of the woods is welcomed by most. and we never grow too old to feel a heart-kindling and a brightening of the eye, on that mild november day, when we start, and listen, and—yes, it is, the first thrush-song breaking the meditative misty hush of the landscape. autumn is stringing the woods with tears, and the first gripe of winter has ere now pinched to death the more delicate garden flowers; but, even before his reign has begun in earnest, here is a voice which prophesies of his overthrow. then the frosts come in defiance, and the last leaves spin down, and the snow-sheet falls, and the thrush is silent as though dead, and resistance seems overcome, and winter’s reign established. an observant eye will, however, still detect a speckled clean breast, flitting into alternate concealment and sight behind the bushes in the shrubbery, and rustling the counterpane of dry leaves, under which those many little dull-green points are crowding out of the frost-held ground. but his song is kept in reserve for a time. and it seems that spring is close at hand, and that the year is indeed turned, when next you hear him, high on the boughs of that tulip tree, large against the pale blue sky, singing out loud and clear from early morning to dusk of a bright february day. and the dry leaves have huddled away from the searching wind, and left the brown moist beds, over which trembles a surprise of delicate white cups, where the blunt dull-green points had been.
but i mean now to muse in a fanciful way about the characteristics of these returning songs, and the teaching that68 may be gathered from them. canon evans’ little book, “the songs of the birds,” might seem to have preoccupied this ground, but the treatment will differ, if the idea be the same.
to what, then, shall we liken the song of the thrush? different temperaments of men and women may well be illustrated by the variety in the character of the bird-songs. in the thrush’s song, then, i seem to hear the utterance of the strong and happy christian. he has never been troubled with any doubts; the dark dismays and hidden misgivings of other minds are without meaning to him. clear and glad, and untroubled, and strong in faith, the soul of this man sits upon wintry trees, above few trembling flowers, under a pale still sky, and sings from the early morning to the dusking eve an unwavering, undoubting, happy song. a song in which there are not weird mysterious depths of feeling, nor ecstatic, incomprehensible heights, but in which there is ever an even tenor, a stedfast sustained gladness, an unchecked unvarying trust. a song, perhaps, not of the highest intellect, but of the firmest faith. here are no dark questionings, that must be content to pause for an answer hereafter; no evil suggestions, fiery darts which the shield of faith must ever be upheld to quench. there is almost a hard ignoring and turning away from minds otherwise fashioned; minds full of anxieties and searchings, that are troubles indeed, but not doubts; struggles, but not defeats, because faith upholds where sight fails. these sing more broken snatches of more passionate music, amid thicker branches, and in the dusk; while the thrush-spirit, unknowing of these fierce alternations, sings out, up there69 upon the naked bough, clear and distinct against the blue soft sky.
there is a wild stormy note which must detain us awhile from our march wood. it comes early in january, and on stormy days, under thin driving clouds, you may hear short bursts, as though the broken song of a husky blackbird, flung from the ivy-clad top of some tall, ancient spruce-fir. this is the note of the missel-thrush, or storm-cock. he seems rather to exult in the disturbed sky, and swaying boughs, and passing gleams and showers. there is a wild beauty, tempered with a little harshness, in the short sharp snatches of defiant and militant song. in him i find a type of the religious controversialist and disputant; the watchman set on his tower amid storms and lowering days. such watchers there are, and they are useful to detect and descry the insidious approach of error. controversialists-born, as it were, you shall ever hear their sharp short utterances under a stormy sky; and while you value the note, you will often detect and deplore some touch of harshness that grates upon the heart, some falling short of the mellow flute-like tones of love.
but on our way to the wood, and as we pass through this meadow, a skylark springs up, and flutters higher and higher; fountain-like, as it rises, scattering about its silver spray of song. very soon the eye wanders about, searching after it for some time in vain, pleased at last to recover the dim black speck in the grey sky.
i suppose that the picture of which i spoke above gives the natural embodiment of the song of the lark.
70
“heigh ho! daisies and buttercups, fair yellow daffodils, stately and tall; a sunshiny world full of laughter and leisure, and fresh hearts unconscious of sorrow and thrall.”
up into the sky, bright thoughts and dreams, quivering wings, swelling throat, hurrying ecstasies and crowding notes of joy, impatient, yet impossible to be uttered. careless flowers upon the lap,—withering, are they? but there is a worldful more to be had for the gathering. oh yes, the lark’s song is that of the young heart—young enough to stop short at the attainment of simple gladness. there is not yet upon it the sweet hush even of love and sentiment, the upward soaring has no alternate dip and rise; the quick beat of the wings no pause; the bright flash of song no dyings-down into shade. wonder at life goes hand in hand with joy in it; all is new and all is delicious; all is hope, and nothing is disappointing; the whole widening prospect is one of beauty and glad surprise. the year is in its early spring, and has never so much as heard of autumn yet; nor can guess, nor cares to try to divine, what those old brown leaves can mean, out of which huddle the thick primrose clumps. higher and higher, and brighter and brighter, and gladder and gladder, and more and more impetuous the thronging notes, and more and more untiring the ecstatic wing. and god loves to see this, for he gave the feeling; and we may perceive that he has allotted to most things a young life of fresh colour and unmixed joyfulness. kittens and lambs, and spring leaves, and young children—they all sober down soon enough—and well they should. but let us not grudge the short hour of pure lightness of heart, that was god’s gift; nor hunt for ripe71 fruit among the sheets of blossom; nor dull with our heart’s twilight the first flush of the morning; nor desire, in the song of the lark, the thoughtfulness of the blackbird—far less the moan of the dove. let not our work ever be to check, only to guide, and to tend, and to develop, the heart’s songful gladness, pointing it, indeed, heavenward; or, again, ready to tend the germ which some gust has stolen from its white petal-wings.
i spoke of the blackbird. and here, as we near the wood, towards which for some long time we have been walking, we catch the smooth, rich, lyric fragments of this deep-hearted poet. less openly, freely, fearlessly confident and exulting in an unclouded soul, than the thrush,—there is something exceedingly fascinating in the intermitted, but not broken song of the blackbird. the pauses which sever the stanzas of his song, seem well suited to its lyric character. there are in these separate and finished verses the polish and completeness, also the richness and liquid flow, of a set of stanzas of “in memoriam,” and, moreover, something of their wild mournfulness and tender, deep, questioning thought. the blackbird’s song is that of the grave, mature mind, highly intellectual, somewhat touched with sadness, but more with love, and that has had to battle hard through life to keep both faith and love unimpaired.
“the blackbird’s song at eventide”:
thus it is described, and, in truth, it seems the passionate earnest utterance of one who can understand the difficulties which have blown down unrooted trees, and yet has itself72 possession of that faith which can control into music notes that make a jarring in undisciplined minds. the riddle of this painful earth has often wrung the heart of this man, but his sorrowful thoughts concerning it have shaped themselves into these rich utterances of yearning love. this trumpet gives no uncertain sound; the speaking is clear, and distinct, and unfaltering. you are, as i said, reminded of the controversial storm-bird by its tones, but all that would have been harsh in its outspoken truthfulness, is mellowed and softened by an exquisite overmastering charm of tender and patient love. so that the blackbird’s song is that of mature faith, which has met and vanquished anxious questionings, and which, if that of a controversialist at all, is only that of one on whom old age is stealing, and whom experience has made gentle and patient; and yearning for souls has made passionate; and love of christ has made tenderly and invincibly loving. and so when it thrills out clear and full from his hidden quiet retreat in the evening time, even those that think that there is cause for old grudges against the minstrel are arrested reverently to listen to his deep, thoughtful, loving song.
we are at the wood now, at last. we have followed a pleasant stream that played hide-and-seek among its willows, and, while we talked and listened, we have gathered in gleanings of its beauty. and now we cross the narrow plank—parting the branches that half conceal it—and enter the wood. there are tiny pink balls ready to burst into vivid buds, gemming the hawthorn bushes; but the trees and underwood are bare, except for the willow catkins and the hazel tassels, or perhaps the dull green of the elder in a tuft here and there,75 or the early leaf-bud of a twining honeysuckle. but the pale smooth ash saplings, tall and slim, and silver-grey in the sun, with a narrow shadow edge, the branches studded with black buds; and the golden twigs of the white-stemmed birch; and the warm light brown of the hazel boughs; and the red of the cherry,—these make the wood, though bare, yet neither dull nor colourless. and here, farther in, the many stems are fringed and bearded with the hoary and abundant growth of lichen, cool as the bloom on a greengage, against the pale orange which still lingers in ragged patches upon the six-feet stalks of last year’s bracken.
certainly there is, all around us in the wood, much material for musing. but we have come hither for a special end. for it is the thirteenth of march, and by this time the first of the train of those songsters, that fly to warmer shores to escape our winter, ought to have returned. so, all ears, we proceed over the crisp leaves, disturbing the bobbing rabbits. and there! i heard the note—simple enough, yet pleasing even in itself, and sweet as being the forerunner of songs more rich. chiff-chaff,—this dissyllable gives this willow-wren’s note and name. there is not much in it, may be, still it is the little tuning-fork of the coming concert. and we are reminded by it of some gentle spirit which longs and tries to say a cheery and hopeful word to a heart which has been under wintry skies; that which it repeats may not indeed be very new, very powerful, or very varied; still, it is accepted and loved for the sake of its truth and affection.
this bird has a relation, due some few days later, whose song, though but little more pretentious, is yet a great favourite76 with me. i call it the laughing willow-wren; and indeed its note does at once suggest a small silvery peal of merry light-hearted glee. again and again, peal after peal; flitting through the boughs, almost the tiniest of slim birdlings.
“gaiety without eclipse,”
it certainly is, and yet it does not weary us, this ceaseless “silver-treble laughter.” this song has its parallel in some life, gay and blight and glad from first to last; hiding for a sobered moment from a shower or a storm, but anon and on a sudden recovering its innocent glee again. delicate and slim, and easily frightened, but never long troubled; very winning and loveable; too tender and pretty for the hardest hand to crush; never doing huge deeds in the world, but of the same value that a fugitive sunbeam would be in a heavy and gloomy wood, or a daisy in a desert. keeping the child’s heart through the woman’s life; feeling sorrow lightly, and with an april heart; disarming anger or harshness by its simple gleeful innocence; frail yet safe as a feather upon the whirls and eddies of life. laugh on, light and cheery heart, amid the jay’s harsh dissonance, and the blackbird’s thought, and the thrush’s strength, and the dove’s sadness! amid life’s gravities and stern realities there is a grateful place for the gleams of a glad-hearted song like thine!
what variety in the character of the bird-music! hark, for a moment, at those wise, solemn caws, and watch those sedate, respectable, gravely-clad rooks sailing across this opening above us; so black and cleanly painted against the filmy blue. caw! this is the voice of a steady, respectable mediocrity,77 that by reason of its deep, portentous gravity, and weighty utterance, and staid appearance, might be almost mistaken for philosophy. true, the utterance, if profound, is not remarkable for variety; but then the manner will often make up for lack of matter. and it is something to have one maxim or apophthegm which may be fitted to every case. to all the world’s customs and businesses, its problems and aspirings, its cries and laughter, he gravely and meditatively listens. and when you eagerly await his verdict, he puts his sapient head on one side, looks at you out of one eye,
“and says,—what says he? caw!”
the young impatient askers, the subtle and patient tracers of78 truth’s hidden vein, will chafe at his sedate utterances, and in time take their confidences elsewhere. but he can get on without them, and will never want for company of his kind. raised above all intellectual excitements, and never in a hurry, the rooks step side by side with stately dignity over the scarred earth; or wing a heavy and cautious flight towards the trees; or sail serene in the still sky. for though there may be times when
“the rooks are blown about the skies,”
this haste is involuntary, and must no doubt for the time much discomfort the methodical and stately traveller. and no doubt such characters are as useful ballast in the world, and well counterbalance the full excited sails, and the mad fluttering pennons above them. commonplace, unruffled, happy christians are these; with some they gain reputation for wisdom, with some for folly; but they go evenly on; not much troubled by sunshine or storm; not caring to enter into the dusks and gleams of the more passionate songsters and thinkers; ever with one quiet and not unmelodious answer: a life rather of deeds than of words. caw, to all your spasms and heart-searchings,—and then i must just away to my work. up in the tall trees, bending and swaying to break off the twigs for the nest; practical, if not colloquial; early at work in the morning, and at home in good time in the evening; a life not excited nor greatly eventful, but that has its own quiet, serene lesson.
a day or two hence we might hear a notable and distinguished visitor to the woods and shrubberies. even now,79 i have once or twice paused, half-fancying that i heard his voice, and ready to do honour to such a guest. for, while you are momently expecting to hear the blackcap, the warbling of the meditative robin has, here and there, a note which puzzles you. you follow out the voice, and there, on an elm branch, is the dark eye, and the warm breast, and the comfortable shape; and you feel half ashamed to have mistaken such a familiar friend for a stranger.
the blackcap is indeed a wonderful little warbler. so small and so energetic, thrilling song and swelling throat; brown body and whitish chest and jetty head. there are those who trace a resemblance to the nightingale’s song in its quick joyous utterances. if so, certainly the melody is but a suggestion here and there, and not a sustained and continuous resemblance. shall i be unkind to the sweet little songster, if here i write that its song has its counterpart in the life of unequal christians? many there are who, now and then, in thought, word, or deed, seem to touch some perfect chord, and then disappoint the intent listener by sinking down to the more commonplace again.
a moment, and there seemed a strain of angelic utterance, but it was not sustained, and you turn away disappointed at a more homely song which would otherwise have pleased you well. you do not look for seraph notes in the hedge-sparrow’s song, or the wren’s chatting, and so you are well content with these. but high hopes unfulfilled become disappointment, and you feel an injury in having to resign the exalted idea which you had taken up; until, at last you see yourself in the sweet,80 but unequal and inadequate song; and learn to reverence and to love the ever-failing and unsustained effort after higher things. thus, ay thus, do you aim high, and ever fall below your aim; there is one touch of heaven, and a hundred of earth, in the broken and unsustained song of your life; and yet you would rather strive with hopeless yearning after the nightingale’s music, than acquiesce content with the lesser warblings, which accomplish the less that they attempted. sing on, then, little bird, to an answering heart! in your song i read the rises and falls, the endeavours and failings, the aspirings and rare glimpses of attainment, which are the sweet exceptions, and the commonplace and every-day christianity, which is the rule, of a life that would fain become the song of an angel, but that scarce reaches the homeliest warble of the simplest wayside bird. let us aim high, if we still fall below our passionate striving; let us never acquiesce quietly in less than perfection; hereafter—who knows? who knows?
it is evening now, as we wend our way home. a thin sickle of light is barred by the slender topmost ash twigs, and the sky is deepening to that cold, clear dusk, that foreruns twilight. we hear a quiet song, far away—the woodlark’s note always seems far away—you would have asked me the name of the not-generally-familiar songster, but i have just given it. “that, the woodlark? well, i never heard, or never noticed it before” i dare say. but if is a quiet, saintly song; a heavenly voice, serene and clear, never passionate: a twilight, still, calm song, removed far away from the world’s81 bustle, and deeply imbued with wisdom and melody from a land far beyond this eager fevered strife. it is not glad, nor sorrowful; nor so much thoughtful as spiritual. it images to us that life which, separated from the world, is yet not ascetic;82 unobtrusive, yet fascinating when once perceived and heeded; simple, somewhat as is the language of st. john, but with unfathomable suggestions and revelations when you come to study and learn it. quite away from controversy and strife, there is in it a divine peace, an entranced contemplation, a serene and peaceful uplifting of the soul. perhaps the writings of archbishop leighton best give words to my ideal of the woodlark’s song.
but those throbbing coos must stay our foot ere we quite leave the wood. the dove—its voice is, of course, the embodiment of love; troubled, but not passionate; earnest, but not of earth merely. it has a melancholy vehemence, a sobbing urging of its cause, that is rather the voice of one seeking the good of another than its own delight. there is a tremulousness, a trembling fulness that might be that of one bidding farewell in death to some very dear friend whom he fain would win to the right and happy path, but for whom he sadly stands in doubt. there is such abundance from which to speak, such love and such mournfulness in saying it, that you smile with the tears near your eyes, on suddenly recollecting whither fancy was leading you, and that it is, after all, but the old old story being beautifully and melodiously told. for you caught a sight of the ash-blue wing, the mild eye, and swelling crop, and of the mate on a branch close by; and so your fancy was overturned.
but there is one song which we shall not hear yet, as we return home from the wood; of which, nevertheless, some words must be said. yet what words have even the greatest83 word-masters yet found for the nightingale’s unearthly melody! what other song has even a likeness of the instantaneous and riveting fascination that is produced by one note of this? it is music which speaks, not to what we call the heart, merely, or the intellect, merely, but straight at once to that mysterious divine thing within us, which we call the spirit.
and so it represents that recognition of, and yearning for, an ideal perfection and beauty, which many own, but few can express. and thus we start to hear it represented and embodied in sound without language, and, without knowing how, acknowledge a dumb music in ourselves which is closely akin to this superhuman and unearthly song. and we cannot, if we try, exactly define its character; some call it joyous; more sorrowful. but perhaps there is a hint in it of something within us higher and deeper than either of these; else how can it thus startle and electrify our being? at least it tells us of melody that we cannot yet grasp or fully understand, of beauty and harmony and perfection that is not yet our own. and i liken it to the raptured speakings of the prophet, or to an echo of the angelic messages seldom brought to earth.
well, ’tis difficult, and perhaps hopeless, to strive to interpret the songs of these little minstrels of god. after all, each heart will set them to words of its own. and, by leading others to do so, perhaps my musings may best fulfil their end. many a one who would have appreciated them, misses the pictures in earth’s great gallery, and84 the music of earth’s great concert, for want of a finger to point him once to the one, and a hand on his shoulder to arrest his attention for the other. and it is worth regarding pictures at which god is working, and to listen to songs which yet remain in a saddened world, exactly as he first taught them.