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
translated into it at all.
And so it may be, that in some simpler age, poets may go back, like
the old Minnesingers, to the birds of the forest, and learn of them
to sing.
And little do most of them know how much there is to learn; what
variety of character, as well as variety of emotion, may be
distinguished by the practised ear, in a 'charm of birds' (to use the
old southern phrase), from the wild cry of the missel-thrush, ringing
from afar in the first bright days of March, a passage of one or two
bars repeated three or four times, and then another and another,
clear and sweet, and yet defiant--for the great 'stormcock' loves to
sing when rain and wind is coming on, and faces the elements as
boldly as he faces hawk and crow--down to the delicate warble of the
wren, who slips out of his hole in the brown bank, where he has
huddled through the frost with wife and children, all folded in each
other's arms like human beings, for the sake of warmth,--which, alas!
does not always suffice; for many a lump of wrens may be found,
frozen and shrivelled, after a severe winter.
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