“I was amused by your interrogatory to me about the Nightingale’s note. You meant to put me in a dilemma with my politics on one side and my gallantry on the other. Of course you consider it as a plaintive note, and you were in hopes that no idolater of Charles Fox would venture to agree with that opinion. In this difficulty I must make the best escape I can by saying, that it seems to me neither cheerful nor melancholy,—but always according to the circumstances in which you hear it, the scenery, your own temper of mind, and so on. I settled it so with myself early in this month, when I heard them every night and all day long at Wells. In daylight, when all the other birds are in active concert, the Nightingale only strikes you as the most active, emulous, and successful of the whole band. At night, especially if it is a calm one, with light enough to give you a wide indistinct view, the solitary music of this bird takes quite another character, from all the associations of the scene, from the languor one feels at the close of the day, and from the stillness of spirits and elevation of mind which comes upon one when walking out at that time. But it is not always so—different circumstances will vary in every possible way the effect. Will the Nightingale’s note sound alike to the man who is going on an adventure to meet his mistress (supposing he heeds it at all), and when he loiters along upon his return? The last time I heard the Nightingale it was an experiment of another sort. It was after a thunderstorm in a mild night, while there was silent lightning opening every few minutes, first on one side of the heavens then on the other. The careless little fellow was piping away in the midst of all this terror. To _me_, there was no melancholy in his note, but a sort of sublimity; yet it was the same song which I had heard in the morning, and which then seemed nothing but bustle.” And in the same spirit Portia moralises:— The nightingale, if she should sing by day, When every goose is cackling, would be thought No better a musician than the wren. How many things by season, seasoned are To their right praise and true perfection! Nor will Coleridge allow the song of the nightingale to be always plaintive,—“most musical, most _melancholy_;” he defies the epithet though it be Milton’s. ’Tis the _merry_ nightingale, That crowds and hurries and precipitates With thick fast warble his delicious notes, As he were fearful that an April night Would be too short for him to utter forth His love-chaunt, and disburthen his full soul Of all its music.