The songs of birds are as intimately allied with poetry as with music. The lark has been aptly denominated a "feathered lyric" by one of the English poets; and the analogy becomes apparent when we consider how much the song of a bird resembles a lyrical ballad in its influence on the mind. Though it utters no words, how plainly it suggests a long train of agreeable images of love, beauty, friendship, and home! When a young person has suffered any severe wound of the affections, he seldom fails, if endowed with a sensitive mind, to listen to the birds as sharers in his affliction. Through them the deities of the groves seem to offer him their consolation. By indulging this habit of making companionship with the objects of Nature, all pleasing sights and sounds gradually become certain anodynes for his sorrow; and those who have this mental alembic for turning grief into a poetic melancholy can seldom be reduced to a state of absolute despondency. Poetry, or rather the poetic sentiment, exalts all our pleasures and soothes all our afflictions by some illusive charm, whether it be turned into the channel of religion or romance. Without this reflection of light from the imagination, what is the passion of love? and what is our love of beauty and of sweet sounds, but a mere gravitation?
The voice of every singing-bird has its associations in the minds of all susceptible persons who were born and nurtured within the precincts of its untutored minstrelsy. The music of birds is modulated in pleasant unison with all the chords of affection and imagination, filling the soul with a lively consciousness of happiness and beauty, and soothing it with romantic visions of memory,of love, when it was an ethereal sentiment of adoration and not a passion, and of friendship, when it was a passion and not an expedience,of dear and simple adventures, and of comrades who had part in them,of dappled mornings, and serene and glowing sunsets,of sequestered nooks and mossy seats in the old wood,of paths by the riverside, and flowers that smiled a bright welcome to our rambling,of lingering departures from home, and of old by-ways, overshadowed by trees and hedged with roses and viburnums, that spread their shade and their perfume around our path to gladden our return. By this pleasant instrumentality has Nature provided for the happiness of those who have learned to be delighted with the survey of her works, and with the sound of those voices which she has appointed to communicate to the human soul the joys of her inferior creation.
The singing-birds, with reference to their songs, may be divided into four classes. First, the Rapid Singers, whose song is uninterrupted, of considerable length, and uttered with fervor, and in apparent ecstasy. Second, the Moderate Singers, whose notes are slowly modulated, but without pauses or rests between their different strains. Third, the Interrupted Singers, who seldom modulate their notes with rapidity, and make decided pauses between their several strains, of which there are in general from five to eight or nine. Fourth, the Warblers, whose notes consist of only one or two strains, not combined into a song.
The canary, among foreign birds, and the linnet and bobolink, among American birds, are familiar examples of the first class; the common robin and the veery of the second; the wood-thrush, the cat-bird, and the mocking-bird, of the third; and the blue-bird, the pewee, and the purple martin, of the fourth class. It may be added, that some birds are nearly periodical in their habits of singing, preferring the morning and evening, and occasional periods in other parts of the day, while others sing almost indifferently at all hours. The greater number of species, however, are more tuneful in the early morning than at any other hour.
June, in this part of the world, is the most vocal month of the year. Many of our principal songsters do not arrive until near the middle of May; and all, whether they come early or late, continue in song throughout the month of June. The bobolink, which is one of the first to become silent, continues vocal until the second week in July. So nearly simultaneous is the discontinuance of the songs of this species, that it might seem as if their silence were preconcerted, and that by a vote they had, on a certain day, adjourned over to another year. If an unusually genial day occurs about the seventh of July, we may hear multitudes of them singing merrily on that occasion. Should this time be followed by two or three successive days of chilly and rainy weather, their tunefulness is so generally brought to a close during this period, that we may not hear another musical note from a single individual after the seventh. The songs of birds are discontinued as soon as their amorous dalliances and the care of their offspring have ceased. Hence those birds that raise but one brood of young during the season, like the bobolink, are the first to become silent.
No one of the New England birds is an autumnal warbler; though the song-sparrow often greets the fine mornings in October with his lays, and the shore-lark, after spending the summer in Labrador and about the shores of Hudson's Bay, is sometimes heard in autumn, soaring and singing at the dawn of day, while on his passage to the South. The bobolink, the veery, or Wilson's thrush, the red thrush, and the golden robin, are silent after the middle of July; the wood-thrush, the cat-bird, and the common robin, not until a month later; but the song-sparrow alone continues to sing throughout the summer. The tuneful season of the year, in New England, embraces a period of about four months, from the middle of April to the middle of August.
There are certain times of the day, as well as certain seasons of the year, when the birds are most musical. The grand concert of the feathered tribe takes place during the hour between dawn and sunrise. During the remainder of the day they sing less in concert, though many species are very musical at noonday, and seem, like the nocturnal birds, to prefer the hour when others are silent. At sunset there is an apparent attempt to unite once more in chorus, but this is far from being so loud or so general as in the morning. The little birds which I have classed in the fourth division are a very important accompaniment to the anthem of dawn, their notes, though short, serving agreeably to fill up the pauses made by the other musicians. Thus, the hair-bird (Fringilla Socialis) has a sharp and trilling note, without any modulation, and not at all melodious, when heard alone; but in the morning it is the chief harmonizer of the whole chorus, and serves, more than any other voice, to give unity and symphony to the multitude of miscellaneous parts.
There are not many birds whose notes could be accurately described upon the gamut. The nearest approach we can make to accuracy is to give some general idea of their time and modulation. Their musical intervals can be distinguished but with difficulty, on account of the rapidity of their utterance. I have often attempted to transcribe some of their notes upon the musical scale, but I am persuaded that such sketches can be only approximations to literal correctness. As different individuals of the same species sing very differently, the notes, as transcribed from the song of one individual, will never exactly represent the song of another. If we listen attentively, however, to a number of songs, we shall detect in all of them a theme
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1
SPENSER: Faery Queen. See also the Two Cantos of Mutability, Cant. VII.:
"That old Dan Geffrey, in whose gentle spright
The pure well-head of poesie did dwell."
2
MILTON: Il Penseroso.
3
WORDSWORTH: Poems of Later Years.
4
CHAUCER: Clerke's Tale, Prologue.
5
WARTON: Ode on his Majesty's Birthday, 1787
6
Tyrwhitt's Chaucer: Historical Notes on his Life.
7
Masque of the Fortunate Islands
8
History of English Poetry, Vol. II. pp. 335-336, ed. 1840.
9
WARTON: Birthday Ode, 1787.
10
See his British Poets, from Chaucer to Jonson, Art. Daniel. Southey contemplated a continuation of Warton's History, and, in preparing for that labor, learned many things he had never known of the earlier writers.
11
Jonson's classification. See his Poetaster.
12
Lamb's Works, and Life, by Talfourd, Vol. IV. p. 89.
13
Hesperides, Encomiastic Verses.
14
Herrick, ubi supra.--To the haunts here named must be added the celebrated Mermaid, of which Shakspeare was the Magnus Apollo, and The Devil, where Pope imagines Ben to have gathered peculiar inspiration: "And each true Briton is to Ben so civil, He swears the Muses met him at The Devil." Imitation of Horace, Bk. ii. Epist. i.
15
Election of a Poet-Laureate, 1719, Works, Vol. II.
16
Feast of the Poets, 1814.
17
Fable for Critics, 1850.
18
This story rests on the authority of Thomas Betterton, the actor, who received it from Davenant.
19
Dedication of the Pastorals of Virgil, to Hugh, Lord Clifford, the son of Sir Thomas.
20
There were some indications that portions of the farce had been written while Davenant was living and had been intended for him. Mr. Bayes appears in one place with a plaster on his nose, an evident allusion to Davenant's loss of that feature. In a lively satire of the time, by Richard Duke, it is asserted that Villiers was occupied with the composition of The Rehearsal from the Restoration down to the day of its production on the stage:
"But with playhouses, wars, immortal wars,
He waged, and ten years' rage produced a farce.
As many rolling years he did employ,
And hands almost as many, to destroy
Heroic rhyme, as Greece to ruin Troy.
Once more, says Fame, for battle he prepares,
And threatens rhymers with a second farce:
But, if as long for this as that we stay,
He'll finish Clevedon sooner than his play."
21
It is little to the credit of Dryden, that, having saved up his wrath against Flecknoe so long, he had not reserved it altogether. Flecknoe had been dead at least four years when the satire appeared.
22
Macaulay quotes Blackmore's Prince Arthur, to illustrate Dryden's dependence upon Dorset:
"The poets' nation did obsequious wait
For the kind dole divided at his gate.
Laurus among the meagre crowd appeared,
An old, revolted, unbelieving bard,
Who thronged, and shoved, and pressed, and would be heard.
"Sakil's high roof, the Muse's palace, rung
With endless cries, and endless songs he sung.
To bless good Sakil Laurus would be first;
But Sakil's prince and Sakil's God he curst.
Sakil without distinction threw his bread,
Despised the flatterer, but the poet fed."
Laurus, of course, stands for Dryden, and Sakil for Dorset.
23
The Squire of Alsatia is said to have realized him £130.
24
An Allusion to the Tenth Satire of the First Book of Horace.The word "censure" will, of course, be understood to mean judgment, not condemnation.
25
Imitation of Horace, Bk. ii. Epist. i.
26
See the History of England, Vol. IV., Chapter 17, for reference to Shadwell's Volunteers.
27
History of England, Chapter 19.