'As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane,'


had surely the 'mane' of the 'corbies' in his ears before it shaped
itself into words in his mind: and he had listened to many a
'woodwele' who first thrummed on harp, or fiddled on crowd, how -


'In summer, when the shawes be shene,
And leaves be large and long,
It is full merry in fair forest
To hear the fowles' song.

'The wood-wele sang, and wolde not cease,
Sitting upon the spray;
So loud, it wakened Robin Hood
In the greenwood where he lay.'


And Shakespeare--are not his scraps of song saturated with these same
bird-notes? 'Where the bee sucks,' 'When daisies pied,' 'Under the
greenwood tree,' 'It was a lover and his lass,' 'When daffodils begin
to peer,' 'Ye spotted snakes,' have all a ring in them which was
caught not in the roar of London, or the babble of the Globe theatre,
but in the woods of Charlecote, and along the banks of Avon, from


'The ouzel-cock so black of hue,