_Marc._ Pardon me, sir; it was a black ill-favour’d fly Like to the Empress’ Moor; therefore I kill’d him. _Tit._ O, O, O. Then pardon me for reprehending thee, For thou hast done a charitable deed. * * * * * * * I think we are not brought so low, But that between us we can kill a fly That comes in likeness of a coal-black Moor.[31] [Sidenote: “_The poor harmless Fly_”] The mind of Titus, broken down by a succession of crushing calamities, had by this time become unhinged, and the extravagance of his language is doubtless designed to show this derangement, though it may perhaps also express the poet’s own underlying pity with even “the poor harmless fly.” Modern science, however, has recently discovered that the house-fly is far from harmless, and that its ruthless extirpation from human habitations, as a dangerous carrier of disease, should be regarded as really what Titus called “a charitable deed.” Not less effectively than his forerunner Chaucer, does Shakespeare enliven his pictures of day and night and of the seasons of the year by introducing the voices of the birds. He loves the summer bird Which ever in the haunch of winter sings The lifting up of day.[32] He tells how “The birds chant melody on every bush,”[33] and recounts where As it fell upon a day In the merry month of May, Sitting in a pleasant shade Which a grove of myrtles made, Beasts did leap and birds did sing, Trees did grow and plants did spring; Everything did banish moan.[34] He leads us where we may See the shepherds feed their flocks By shallow rivers, by whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals.[35] The movement of spring and the renewal of the activity of the birds are well pictured in the song at the end of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_: When shepherds pipe on oaten straws, And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks, When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws, And maidens bleach their summer smocks. The sadness and silence of the woods in autumn when the birds are dumb, are recorded in these musical lines: [Sidenote: _In Winter and Storm_] That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.[36] Again, in a song from which I have just quoted, a graphic picture of winter shows the changed aspect of the birds at that season: When all aloud the wind doth blow, And coughing drowns the parson’s saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian’s nose looks red and raw.[37] Or we are presented with a storm in which we see A flight of fowl Scattered by winds and high tempestuous gusts.[38]