Tuscany is full of nightingales, and in spring and summer they sing all the time, save in the middle of the night and the middle of the day. In the little leafy woods that hang on the steep of the hill towards the streamlet, as maidenhair hangs on a rock, you hear them piping up again in the wanness of dawn, about four o’clock in the morning: Hello!Hello!Hello! It is the brightest sound in the world: a nightingale piping up. Every time you hear it, you feel wonder and, it must be said, a thrill, because the sound is so bright, so glittering, it has so much power behind it.

“There goes the nightingale!” you say to yourself. It sounds in the half-dawn as if the stars were darting up from the little thicket and leaping away into the vast vagueness of the sky, to be hidden and gone. But the song rings on after sunrise, and each time you listen again, startled, you wonder: “Now why do they say he is a sad bird·”

He is the noisiest, most inconsiderate, most obstreperous and jaunty bird in the whole kingdom of birds. How John Keats managed to begin his Ode to a Nightingale with “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my senses—” is a mystery to anybody acquainted with the actual song. You hear the nightingale silverily shouting: “What· What· What John·—Heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains· —tra-la-la!—tri-li-lilylilyly. ”

And why the Greeks said he—or she—was sobbing in a bush for a lost lover, again I don’t know. Jug-jug-jug! say the mediaeval writers, to represent the rolling of the little balls of lightning in the nightingale’s throat. A wild rich sound, richer than the eyes in a peacock’s tail—

And the bright brown nightingale, amorous

Is half assuaged for Itylus—

They say, with that jug! jug! jug!—that she is sobbing. How they hear it, is a mystery. How anyone who didn’t have his ears on upside down ever heard the nightingale “sobbing”, I don’t know.

Anyhow, it’s a male sound, a most intensely and undilutedly male sound. A pure assertion. There is not a hint nor a shadow of echo and hollow recall. Nothing at all like a hollow low bell. Nothing in the world so unforlorn.

Perhaps that is what made Keats straightway feel forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Perhaps that is the reason of it: why they all hear sobs in the bush, when the nightingale sings, while any honest-to-God listening person hears the ringing shouts of small cherubim. Perhaps because of the discrepancy.