cheerful she is cheerful. Shakespeare in one of his sonnets speaks
of her song as mournful, while Martial calls her the "most
garrulous" of birds. Milton sang:--

"Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly,
Most musical, most melancholy,
Thee, chantress, oft the woods among
I woo, to hear thy evening song."

To Wordsworth she told another story:--

"O nightingale! thou surely art
A creature of ebullient heart;
These notes of thine,--they pierce and pierce,--
Tumultuous harmony and fierce!
Thou sing'st as if the god of wine
Had helped thee to a valentine;
A song in mockery and despite
Of shades, and dews, and silent night,
And steady bliss, and all the loves
Now sleeping in these peaceful groves."

In a like vein Coleridge sang:--

"'T is the merry nightingale
That crowds and hurries and precipitates
With fast, thick warble his delicious notes."

Keats's poem on the nightingale is doubtless more in the spirit of
the bird's strain than any other. It is less a description of the