(17)

(18)

The cuckoo-seasons sing

The same dull note to such, as nothing prize

But what those seasons, from the teeming earth
To doting sense indulge.— Young: The Complaint.

So does the cuckow, when the mavis sings,

Begin his witlesse note apace to clatter.-Spenser: Sonnets.

(19) "The foolish cuckoo" (Dryden, Hind and Panther); "The vagrant cuckoo's tale" (Gilbert White); "The hollow cuckoo" (Thomson, Spring); "The shallow cuckoo" (Milton, Sonnet to Nightingale); "Hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows' nests (Shakespeare, Lucrece); "The cuckoo calls aloud his wand'ring love" (A. Phillips, Pastoral); "Unwearying cuckoo soothes my ear" (Coleridge, Poems); "Slanderous cuckoo" (Beaumont and Fletcher); "Jolly cuckoos" (Lely).

(20) The long-loved cuckoo.-Faber: The Cherwell.

(21) Ubiquitous, like cuckoo's muffled cries.-Faber: Sir Launcelot.

(22)

(23)

(24)

(25)

(26)

(27)

When fairy harps the Hesperian planet hail,
And the lone cuckoo sighs along the vale.

-Campbell: Pleasures of Hope.

And she sang, as the cuckoo sings,

Alone, in the evening air.-Barry Cornwall: By the River.

The Attic warbler pours her throat

Responsive to the cuckoo's note.-Gray: Spring.

The cuckoo stood on the lady-birch

To bid her last good-bye.-Cook: Old Green Lane.

Wand'ring at return of May,

Catch the first cuckoo's vernal lay.-Warton: Ole.

When first the year I heard the cuckoo sing,
And call with welcome note the budding spring,
I straightway set a-running with such haste,
Deb'rah that ran the smock scarce ran so fast;
Till, spent for lack of breath, quite weary grown,
Upon a rising bank I sat adown

(28)

(29)

(30)

And doffed my shoe, and by my troth I swear,
Therein I spied this yellow frizzled hair,
As like to Lubberkin's in curl and hue,
As if upon his comely pate it grew.

-Gay: Shepherd's Week.

The nightingale, the pretty nightingale,

The sweetest singer in all the forest's quire,

Entreats thee, sweet Peggy, to hear thy true love's tale;

Lo! yonder she sitteth, her heart against a brier.

But O! I spy the cuckoo, the cuckoo, the cuckoo;
See where she sitteth; come away, my joy,

Come away, I prithee, I do not like the cuckoo
Should sing where my Peggy I kiss and toy.

-Wilson: Shoemaker's Holiday.

The idle cuckoo, having made a feast

On sparrow's eggs, layes down her own i' th' nest;
The silly bird she ownes it, hatches, feeds it,

Protects it from the weather, clocks and breeds it;
But when this gaping monster hath found strength
To shift without a helper, she at length,
Not caring for the tender care that bred her,
Forgets her parent, kills the bird that fed her.

-Quarles: Divine Fancies.

But, there, the stranger flees close to the ground,
With harshlike pinion, of a leaden blue.
Poor wanderer; from hedge to hedge she flies,
And trusts her offspring to another's care:
The sooty-plum'd hedge-sparrow often acts
The foster-mother, warming into life
The youngling, destin'd to supplant her own.
Meanwhile, the cuckoo sings her idle song,
Monotonous, yet sweet, now here, now there,
Herself but rarely seen; nor does she cease
Her changeless note until the brood full blown
Give warning that her time for flight is come.
How sweet the first sound of the cuckoo's note !
Whence is the magic pleasure of the sound?
Nor do we long recall the very tree,

A bush near which we stood, when on the ear
The unexpected note, Cuckoo ! again

1

And again came down the budding vale.
It is the voice of spring among the trees,

That tells of lengthening days, of coming blooms;
It is the symphony of many a song.

Thus ever journeying on from land to land,

She, sole of all the innumerous feathered tribes,

Passes a stranger's life, without a home.

(31)

The warme sunne

-Grahame: Birds of Scotland.

.. gives a second birth

To the dead swallow; wakes in hollow tree1
The drowsie cuckoo."-Carew: Spring.

That's unco easy said aye.-Burns: a Dream.

(32)

"God save the king" 's a cuckoo sang,

(33)

(34)

"I love thee" is a cuckoo song.-Cook: A Birthday Poem.

She hadde a cuckow sitting on hire hond.?

-Chaucer: Knight's Tale.

CURLEW.

(1)

(2)

Wild as the scream of the curlew,

From crag to crag the signal flew.-Scott: Lady of the Lake.

Screamed o'er the moss the scared curlew.

-Scott: Harold the Dauntless.

And scream, the hoarse curlew.-Leyden: Keildar.

(4)

Now wild and harsh the moorland music floats,
And clamorous curlews scream with long-drawn notes.

-Leyden: Scenes of Infancy.

1 For in his hollowe trunk and perished graine,
The cuckowe nowe had many a winter laine.

2 Jealousy.

-Brown: Pastoral.

(5)

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(7)

The clamorous curlew calls his mate.-Gilbert White.

Ye curlews calling through a clud.-Burns: Elegy.

To the lochs the curlew flocks,

Wi' gleesome speed.—Burns: Elegy.

(S)

The godwits running by the water edge,
The little curlews creeping from the sedge.

-Jean Ingelow: Four Bridges.

(9)

A gentle curlew bidding kind good-night

To the spent villager.-Hurdis: Favourite Village.

DAB-CHICK.

As when a dab-chick waddles through the copse
On feet and wings, and flies, and wades, and hops.

-Pope: Dunciad.

DOTTEREL.1

The dotterell, which we think a very dainty dish,

Whose taking makes more sport, as man no more can wish,

For as you creepe, or coure, or lye, or stoupe, or goe,
So marking you (with care) the apish bird doth soe,
And acting everything, doth never mark the net,
Till he be in the snare, which men for him have set.
-Drayton: Polyolbion.

DOVES.

"How those quarrelsome and loosely conducted birds, the doves, would coo satirically under their wings at our romantic ascription to them of innocence and fidelity!" says

1 "The sand-lark chants a joyous song," says Wordsworth in “The Idle Shepherd's Boy;" but it is doubtful whether the poet was aware that the only "sand-lark" known to the prosaic was the dotterel, for which sand-lark is a local name.

the author of "False Beasts and True." And how, if the doves could ever read English poetry, they would put their tongues in their cheeks and wink at each other, and how the worse conditioned of them would explode with laughter! For the poets, adopting the Mosaical "purity" of the dove as true in every sense, and remembering, perhaps, how sacred the Mahomedan East still holds them, have conspired to represent this bird as of an extraordinary inno. cence of character and blameless life. Once or twice, as in Dryden's "Hind and Panther," "the spleenful pigeon' is hit off with natural fidelity, and "wanton" is not an infrequent epithet, but it is used in a kindly sense, and as equivalent to "amorous "-as the Birds of Venus, the dovedrawn Paphian, who

"Mounts her car, she shakes the reins,

And steers her turtles to Cytheria's plains,"

ought to be. Nor does it in any way preclude them, even when in the goddess's service and "harnessed to bright Venus' rolling throne," from being called "guiltless," "gentle," "constant," and "chaste!"

Indeed, a volume of serious size might be filled with the poets' compliments to the virtues of the pigeon-folk, but the tenor of the whole may be guessed from the following:-"Pale solitary dove," "gentle as the dove," "in tenderness the dove," "constant and true as the widowed dove," "dove-like innocence," "heavenly dove," "like turtle chaste."

"And love is still an emptier sound,
The modern fair one's jest,
On earth unseen, or only found
To warm the turtle's nest."

"Romances and the turtle.doves
The virtue boast alone."

Fidelity in love.