single flash, so seven years of sweet, priceless home love--seven times
four changing seasons of simple, genial, prae-imperial Frenchness; an
ideal house, with all its pretty furniture, and shape, and color; a
garden full of trees and flowers; a large park, and all the wild live
things therein; a town and its inhabitants; a mile or two of historic
river; a wood big enough to reach from the Arc de Triomphe to St. Cloud
(and in it the pond of ponds); and every wind and weather that the
changing seasons can bring--all lie embedded and embalmed for me in
every single bar of at least a hundred different tunes, to be evoked at
will for the small trouble and cost of just whistling or humming the
same, or even playing it with one finger on the piano--when I had a
piano within reach.

Enough to last me for a lifetime--with proper economy, of course--it
will not do to exhaust, by too frequent experiment, the strange capacity
of a melodic bar for preserving the essence of by-gone things, and days
that are no more.

Oh, Nightingale! whether thou singest thyself or, better still, if thy
voice by not in thy throat, but in thy fiery heart and subtle brain, and
thou makest songs for the singing of many others, blessed be thy name!
The very sound of it is sweet in every clime and tongue: Nightingale,
Rossignol, Usignuolo, Bulbul! Even Nachtigall does not sound amiss in
the mouth of a fair English girl who has had a Hanoverian for a
governess! and, indeed, it is in the Nachtigall's country that the best
music is made!

[Illustration: "OH, NIGHTINGALE!"]

And oh, Nightingale! never, never grudge thy song to those who love