This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle: Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed The air is delicate.[229] [Sidenote: _The Nightingale_] I have reserved for the last place in the list of Shakespeare’s birds his references to the NIGHTINGALE. These are numerous and may be divided into two groups. In one of them the style is somewhat artificial in tone, reflecting not the poet’s own experience of the bird, but the legendary interpretation of its song that had been handed down from remote antiquity. In the other group, the nightingale takes its natural place as one of our familiar English songsters. There was a Greek myth that Philomela, the daughter of an Attic King, after being cruelly treated by her brother Tereus, was compassionately changed by the gods into a nightingale, and that thereafter she spent her life among woods lamenting in mournful notes the fate that had befallen her. Her name came to be given to the bird. Shakespeare, following this legend, introduces the bird as Philomel into his separate Poems and into the lyrics included in his dramas. In the ordinary dialogue of the Plays, however, dropping the Greek name and legend, he uses the common English appellation of the bird, and, like ancient and modern poets, speaks of the bird as feminine, although it is the male alone that sings. [Illustration: THE HOUSE-MARTIN] Along with the ancient myth about Philomela he intertwined another and probably much more recent, but equally unfounded belief that the nightingale, when it sings, leans against a thorn that pierces its breast. This combination of ignorant fancies is most fully expressed in the following passage: Every thing did banish moan, Save the nightingale alone: She, poor bird, as all forlorn, Lean’d her breast up-till a thorn, And there sung the dolefull’st ditty, That to hear it was great pity: ‘Fie, fie, fie,’ now would she cry; ‘Tereu, tereu!’ by and by; That to hear her so complain, Scarce I could from tears refrain; For her griefs, so lively shown, Made me think upon my own.[230] The same artificial note of sadness runs through the other allusions to Philomel. In _Lucrece_ we read: By this, lamenting Philomel had ended The well-tuned warble of her nightly sorrow.[231] Again in the _Sonnets_: As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing, And stops her pipe in growth of riper days: Not that the summer is less pleasant now Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night, But that wild music burthens every bough, And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.[232]