Hark! ah, the Nightingale! The tawny-throated! Hark! from that moonlit cedar what a burst! What triumph! harköwhat pain!

-Arnold, Matthew
  Poems:  A New Edition,'Philomela', l.1^4.

Ask me no more whither dost haste The nightingale when May is past; For in your sweet dividing throat She winters, and keeps warm her note.

-Carew,Thomas
  'A Song'.

And hark! the Nightingale begins its song, 'Most musical, most melancholy' bird! A melancholy bird?†his song Should make all Nature lovelier, and itself Be loved like Nature!

-Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
  'The Nightingale'.

This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And nestlings fly: And the little brown nightingale bills his best, And they sit outside at 'TheTravellers' Rest', And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest, And citizens dream of the south and west, And so do I.

-Hardy,Thomas
  Late Lyrics and Earlier,'Weathers'.

   What bird so sings, yet so does wail? O 'tis the ravished nightingale. Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu, she cries, And still her woes at midnight rise.

-Lyly,John
  Campaspe, act 5, sc.1.

Ye living lamps, by whose dear light The nightingale does sit so late, And studying all the summer night, Her matchless songs does meditate. 556

-Marvell, Andrew
c.1650^1652  'The Mower to the Glo- Worms' (published1681).

'Before she came,'said a soldier,'there was cussin'and swearin', but after that it was 'oly as a church.' The most cherished privilege of the fighting man was abandoned for the sake of Miss Nightingale.

-Strachey, (Giles) Lytton
  EminentVictorians,'Florence Nightingale'.

When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, The mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain; And the brown bright nightingale amorous Is half assured for Itylus, For theThracian ships and the foreign faces, The tongueless vigil and all the pain.

-Swinburne, Algernon Charles
  Atlanta in Calydon, chorus,'When the hounds of spring'.