With orange-tawny bill;
The throstle with his note so true:
The wren with little quill;
The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
The plain-song cuckoo gray' -


and all the rest of the birds of the air.

Why is it, again, that so few of our modern songs are truly songful,
and fit to be set to music? Is it not that the writers of them--
persons often of much taste and poetic imagination--have gone for
their inspiration to the intellect, rather than to the ear? That (as
Shelley does by the skylark, and Wordsworth by the cuckoo), instead
of trying to sing like the birds, they only think and talk about the
birds, and therefore, however beautiful and true the thoughts and
words may be, they are not song? Surely they have not, like the
mediaeval songsters, studied the speech of the birds, the primaeval
teachers of melody; nor even melodies already extant, round which, as
round a framework of pure music, their thoughts and images might
crystallize themselves, certain thereby of becoming musical likewise.
The best modern song writers, Burns and Moore, were inspired by their
old national airs; and followed them, Moore at least, with a reverent
fidelity, which has had its full reward. They wrote words to music
and not, as modern poets are wont, wrote the words first, and left
others to set music to the words. They were right; and we are wrong.
As long as song is to be the expression of pure emotion, so long it
must take its key from music,--which is already pure emotion,
untranslated into the grosser medium of thought and speech--often (as
in the case of Mendelssohn's Songs without Words) not to be