Suddenly he flits away, and flutters
round the pendant tips of the beech-sprays like a great yellow
butterfly, picking the insects from the leaves; then flits back to a
bare bough, and sings, with heaving breast and quivering wings, a
short, shrill, feeble, tremulous song; and then returns to his old
sadness, wandering and complaining all day long.
Is there no melancholy in that cry? It sounds sad: why should it
not be meant to be sad? We recognize joyful notes, angry notes,
fearful notes. They are very similar (strangely enough) in all
birds. They are very similar (more strangely still) to the cries of
human beings, especially children, when influenced by the same
passions. And when we hear a note which to us expresses sadness, why
should not the bird be sad? Yon wood wren has had enough to make him
sad, if only he recollects it; and if he can recollect his road from
Morocco hither, he may be recollects likewise what happened on the
road--the long weary journey up the Portuguese coast, and through the
gap between the Pyrenees and the Jaysquivel, and up the Landes of
Bordeaux, and across Brittany, flitting by night, and hiding and
feeding as he could by day; and how his mates flew against the
lighthouses, and were killed by hundreds; and how he essayed the
British Channel, and was blown back, shrivelled up by bitter blasts;
and how he felt, nevertheless, that 'that wan water he must cross,'
he knew not why: but something told him that his mother had done it
before him, and he was flesh of her flesh, life of her life, and had
inherited her 'instinct'--as we call hereditary memory, in order to
avoid the trouble of finding out what it is, and how it comes.
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