difference of their notes. Each has its own speech, inarticulate,
expressing not thought but hereditary feeling; save a few birds who,
like those little dumb darlings, the spotted flycatchers, seem to
have absolutely nothing to say, and accordingly have the wit to hold
their tongues; and devote the whole of their small intellect to
sitting on the iron rails, flitting off them a yard or two to catch a
butterfly in air, and flitting back with it to their nest.

But listen to the charm of birds in any sequestered woodland, on a
bright forenoon in June. As you try to disentangle the medley of
sounds, the first, perhaps, which will strike your ear will be the
loud, harsh, monotonous, flippant song of the chaffinch; and the
metallic clinking of two or three sorts of titmice. But above the
tree-tops, rising, hovering, sinking, the woodlark is fluting, tender
and low. Above the pastures outside the skylark sings--as he alone
can sing; and close by, from the hollies rings out the blackbird's
tenor--rollicking, audacious, humorous, all but articulate. From the
tree above him rises the treble of the thrush, pure as the song of
angels: more pure, perhaps, in tone, though neither so varied nor so
rich, as the song of the nightingale. And there, in the next holly,
is the nightingale himself: now croaking like a frog; now talking
aside to his wife on the nest below; and now bursting out into that
song, or cycle of songs, in which if any man finds sorrow, he himself
surely finds none. All the morning he will sing; and again at
evening, till the small hours, and the chill before the dawn: but if
his voice sounds melancholy at night, heard all alone, or only mocked
by the ambitious black-cap, it sounds in the bright morning that
which it is, the fulness of joy and love. Milton's