“Wherein,” writes the author of the “Speculum Mundi,” “he is a perfect embleme and pattern to us, that our death ought to be cheerfull, and life not so deare unto us as it is.” Martial writes of the swan’s “joyful death, and sweet expiring song,” and Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, Ovid, and other ancient authors all refer to the belief. Cicero compared the excellent discourse which Crassus made in the senate a few days before his death to the melodious singing of a dying swan, while Socrates declared that good men ought to imitate swans, who, perceiving by a secret instinct what gain there was in death, die singing with joy. Shakespeare refers frequently to the belief: thus in the Merchant of Venice Portia says: “Then if he lose he makes a swan-like end, fading in music.” After King John is poisoned his son, Prince Henry, is told that in his dying frenzy he sang; whereupon the prince replies:— “’Tis strange that death should sing, I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan, Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death; And from the organ-pipes of frailty sings His soul and body to their lasting rest.” Many similar passages might be quoted from the poets; it will suffice to give but one example:— “Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep, Where nothing, save the waves and I, May hear our mutual murmurs sweep. There, swan-like, let me sing and die.”[81] Though the ordinary swan of our English lakes and rivers would appear to be without a grain of music in its composition, the black swan of Australia,[82] now naturalized in our midst, has a really very musical note, and one, too, which it very readily utters, not by any means reserving it as a pæan of approaching dissolution. It was a firm article of belief with the older writers, such as Pliny, Aristotle, and Ælian, that the swan was especially exposed to attack from the eagle, and that when thus assailed it fought with extreme determination, and never failed to come off victor in the fray. [Illustration: FIG. 18.]