‘Vogele im Tannenwald pfeifet so hell. Pfeifet de Wald aus und ein, wo wird mein Schätze sein? Vogele im Tannenwald pfeitet so hell.’ And he has nothing more to say. That is his whole soul for the time being; and, like a bird, he sings it over and over again, and never tires. Another, a Nieder-Rheinischer, watches the moon rise over the Löwenburg, and thinks upon his love within the castle hall, till he breaks out in a strange, sad, tender melody—not without stateliness and manly confidence in himself and in his beloved—in the true strain of the nightingale: ‘Verstohlen geht der Mond auf, Blau, blau, Blümelein, Durch Silberwölkchen führt sein Lauf. Rosen im Thal, Mädel im Saal, O schönste Rosa! * * * Und siehst du mich, Und siehst du sie, Blau, blau, Blümelein, Zwei treu’re Herzen sah’st du nie; Rosen im Thal u. s. w.’ There is little sense in the words, doubtless, according to our modern notions of poetry; but they are like enough to the long, plaintive notes of the nightingale to say all that the poet has to say, again and again through all his stanzas. Thus the birds were, to the mediæval singers, their orchestra, or rather their chorus; from the birds they caught their melodies; the sounds which the birds gave them they rendered into words. And the same bird keynote surely is to be traced in the early English and Scotch songs and ballads, with their often meaningless refrains, sung for the mere pleasure of singing: ‘Binnorie, O Binnorie. Or— ‘With a hey lillelu and a how lo lan, And the birk and the broom blooms bonnie.’ Or— ‘She sat down below a thorn, Fine flowers in the valley, And there has she her sweet babe born, And the green leaves they grow rarely.’ Or even those ‘fal-la-las,’ and other nonsense refrains, which, if they were not meant to imitate bird-notes, for what were they meant? In the old ballads, too, one may hear the bird keynote. He who wrote (and a great rhymer he was) ‘As I was walking all alane, I heard twa corbies making a mane,’ had surely the ‘mane’ of the ‘corbies’ in his ears before it shaped itself into words in his mind: and he had listened to many a ‘woodwele’ who first thrummed on harp, or fiddled on crowd, how— ‘In summer, when the shawes be shene, And leaves be large and long, It is full merry in fair forest To hear the fowlés’ song. ‘The wood-wele sang, and wolde not cease, Sitting upon the spray; So loud, it wakened Robin Hood In the greenwood where he lay.’