strong a soul, and make him sing as Milton's new-created birds sang
to Milton's Eve in Milton's Paradise. Sweet he is, and various,
rich, and strong, beyond all English warblers, save the nightingale:
but his speciality is his force, his rush, his overflow, not so much
of love as of happiness. The spirit carries him away. He riots up
and down the gamut till he cannot stop himself; his notes tumble over
each other; he chuckles, laughs, shrieks with delight, throws back
his head, droops his tail, sets up his back, and sings with every
fibre of his body: and yet he never forgets his good manners. He is
never coarse, never harsh, for a single note. Always graceful,
always sweet, he keeps perfect delicacy in his most utter
carelessness.

And why should we overlook, common though he be, yon hedge-sparrow,
who is singing so modestly, and yet so firmly and so true? Or cock-
robin himself, who is here, as everywhere, honest, self-confident,
and cheerful? Most people are not aware, one sometimes fancies, how
fine a singer is cock-robin now in the spring-time, when his song is
drowned by, or at least confounded with, a dozen other songs. We
know him and love him best in winter, when he takes up (as he does
sometimes in cold wet summer days) that sudden wistful warble,
struggling to be happy, half in vain, which surely contradicts
Coleridge's verse:-


'In Nature there is nothing melancholy.'


But he who will listen carefully to the robin's breeding song on a
bright day in May, will agree, I think, that he is no mean musician;