'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,
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.
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