"....In this bower, This little lime tree bower, have I not marked Much that has soothed me? Pale beneath the blaze Hung the transparent foliage, and I watched Some broad and sunny leaf and stem above Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut tree Was richly tinged, and a deep radiance lay Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue Through the late twilight, and though now the bat Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters, Yet still the solitary humble bee Sings in the bean flower!" The recurrence of the word "and" in four consecutive lines is perhaps the most noticeable blemish here. It is at Nether Stowey when Coleridge was five-and-twenty years old that we find the first utterance which seems to treat Nature as the theme and not merely as a subsidiary aid to the expression of certain thoughts. "Frost at Midnight," belonging to 1798, has some fine lines addressed to little Hartley: "Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun thaw, whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles Quietly shining to the quiet Moon." This is full of promise, and so too is the "Conversation Poem" called "The Nightingale," written in April of that year, in which Coleridge shows the true instinct by rejecting the suggestion that the bird's notes are sad: "....'Tis the merry Nightingale That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates With fast thick warble his delicious notes As he were fearful that an April night Would be too short for him to utter forth His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul Of all its music." If the presence of Lamb inspired the "Lime Tree Bower" music, it is undoubtedly to the happy association at Alfoxden with the Wordsworths that we owe the "Nightingale" song, though the image of his child, presumably little Berkeley, the short-lived second-born, runs sparkling through the closing lines.