To Keats the Nightingale was singing of “summer.” Shelley asks the Skylark: What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields, or waves, or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? What ignorance of pain? Again, to the poet’s ear the bird-music awakens memories of the past. To Wordsworth the notes of the Cuckoo brought “a tale of visionary hours” in his boyhood when, in his endeavour to set eyes upon the bird, he would Often rove Through woods and on the green; And thou were still a hope, a love; Still longed for, never seen. To Keats the vista unfolded of the past reached far beyond his own time: The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown; Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charmed magic easements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. The modern poet finds in the varied notes of the birds not the bodings and portents, superstitiously associated in the olden time with such cries as those of the raven and the owl, but high and solemn thoughts of death and the hereafter. Shelley wrote of his Skylark: Waking or asleep, Thou of death must deem Things more true and deep Than we mortals dream, Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? And Keats found his heart attuned by the voice of the Nightingale to the contemplation of his own dissolution: Darkling I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain―― To thy high requiem become a sod. What the future course of English Poetry will be in this same domain cannot be confidently predicted. Already, after the lapse of another century since the three poems appeared which we have been considering, a certain change in the poetic mood with regard to living Nature can be more or less distinctly perceived. With such a splendid past to contemplate, we may be well assured that our Poetry will continue to be radiant with sympathy for all living things. The birds will not fail to retain their “pride of place” in the affections of each generation of poets, and their voices, in the future as in the past, will abide with man as the source of some of the purest pleasure that can solace his heart. [Illustration: A FRIENDLY CHOUGH] FOOTNOTES: [1] _Legende of Goode Women_, Prologue, 30.