As the singing of birds is the voice of courtship and conjugal love, the concerts of the groves begin to fill all with their various melody. In England the return of the nightingale in the spring is hailed with much joy; he sings by day as well as night; but in the daytime his voice is drowned in the multitude of performers; in the evening it is heard alone, whence the poets have always made the song of the nightingale a nocturnal serenade. The author of the “_Rime of the Ancient Mariner_,” thus beautifully describes an April night, and the song of this siren:— All is still, A balmy night! and though the stars be dim, Yet let us think upon the vernal showers That gladden the green earth, and we shall find A pleasure in the dimness of the stars. And hark! the nightingale begins his song; He 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 disburden his full soul Of all his music! I know a grove, Of large extent, hard by a castle huge, Which the great lord inhabits not; and so This grove is wild with tangling underwood, And the trim walks are broken up; and grass, Thin grass and king-cups, grow within the paths; But never elsewhere in one place I knew So many nightingales. And far and near, In wood and thicket o’er the wide grove, They answer and provoke each other’s songs— With skirmish and capricious passagings, And murmurs musical and swift—jug, jug! And one low, piping sound, more sweet than all, Stirring the air with such a harmony That, should you close your eyes, you might almost Forget it was not day! On moonlight bushes Whose dewy leaflets are but half disclosed, You may, perchance, behold them on the twigs, Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full, Glistening, while many a glow-worm in the shade Lifts up her love-torch. Oft a moment’s space, What time the moon was lost behind a cloud, Hath heard a pause of silence; till the moon Emerging, hath awakened earth and sky With one sensation, and those wakeful birds Have all burst forth in choral minstrelsy, As if one quick and sodden gale had swept An hundred airy harps! And I have watched Many a nightingale perched giddily On blossoming twig, still swinging from the breeze, And to that motion tune his wanton song, Like tipsy joy that reels with tossing head. Milton, too, in the first of his sonnets, has a beautiful address to this success portending songster: