song and more the song itself. Hood called the nightingale

"The sweet and plaintive Sappho of the dell."

I mention the nightingale only to point my remarks upon its
American rival, the famous mockingbird of the Southern States,
which is also a nightingale,--a night-singer,--and which no doubt
excels the Old World bird in the variety and compass of its powers.
The two birds belong to totally distinct families, there being no
American species which answers to the European nightingale, as
there are that answer to the robin, the cuckoo, the blackbird, and
numerous others. Philomel has the color, manners, and habits of a
thrush,--our hermit thrush,--but it is not a thrush at all, but a
warbler. I gather from the books that its song is protracted and
full rather than melodious,--a capricious, long-continued warble,
doubling and redoubling, rising and falling, issuing from the
groves and the great gardens, and associated in the minds of the
poets with love and moonlight and the privacy of sequestered walks.
All our sympathies and attractions are with the bird, and we do not
forget that Arabia and Persia are there back of its song.

_Our_ nightingale has mainly the reputation of the caged bird, and
is famed mostly for its powers of mimicry, which are truly
wonderful, enabling the bird to exactly reproduce and even improve
upon the notes of almost any other songster. But in a state of
freedom it has a song of its own which is infinitely rich and
various. It is a garrulous polyglot when it chooses to be, and
there is a dash of the clown and the buffoon in its nature which
too often flavors its whole performance, especially in captivity;
but in its native haunts, and when its love-passion is upon it, the