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By-Ways and Bird Notes
Excerpt from By-Ways and Bird Notes
The mocking-bird has been called the American nightingale, with a view, no doubt, to inflicting a compliment involving the operation, known to us all, of damning with faint praise. The nightingale presumably is not the sufferer by the comparison, since she holds immemorial title to preeminence amongst singing-birds. The story of Philomela, however, as first told, was not an especially pleasing one, and the poets made no great use of it. Nowhere in Greek or Roman literature, so far as I know, is there any genuine lyric apostrophe to the nightingale comparable to Sapphos fragment To the Rose; still the bird has a prestige gathered from centuries of poetry and upheld by the master romancers of the world. To compare the song of any other bird with that of the nightingale is like instituting a comparison between some poet of to-day and Shakespeare, so far as any sympathy with the would-be rival is concerned.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
The mocking-bird has been called the American nightingale, with a view, no doubt, to inflicting a compliment involving the operation, known to us all, of damning with faint praise. The nightingale presumably is not the sufferer by the comparison, since she holds immemorial title to preeminence amongst singing-birds. The story of Philomela, however, as first told, was not an especially pleasing one, and the poets made no great use of it. Nowhere in Greek or Roman literature, so far as I know, is there any genuine lyric apostrophe to the nightingale comparable to Sapphos fragment To the Rose; still the bird has a prestige gathered from centuries of poetry and upheld by the master romancers of the world. To compare the song of any other bird with that of the nightingale is like instituting a comparison between some poet of to-day and Shakespeare, so far as any sympathy with the would-be rival is concerned.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
183 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2007
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June 24, 2021
This book has no reviews of course which makes sense since its some random 19th century book about birds that i picked up at a wildlife refuge lol. A la Annie Dillard i enjoyed it bc of its attention to life, chronicling details of botany, plumage, genus, song type. It quickly got tedious bc the author repeats platitudes about the beauty of nature quite a bit.
Displaying 1 of 1 review