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Updated: May 25, 2025
The French 'rossignol, a nightingale, is undoubtedly the Latin 'lusciniola, the diminutive of 'luscinia, with the alteration, so frequent in the Romance languages, of the commencing 'l' into 'r. Whatever may be the etymology of 'luscinia, it is plain that for Frenchmen in general the word would no longer suggest any meaning at all, hardly even for French scholars, after the serious transformations which it had undergone; while yet, at the same time, in the exquisitely musical 'rossignol, and still more perhaps in the Italian 'usignuolo, there is an evident intention and endeavour to express something of the music of the bird's song in the liquid melody of the imitative name which it bears; and thus to put a new soul into the word, in lieu of that other which had escaped.
But as for our own Luscinia, who winters not in Egypt and Arabia, but in Morocco and Algeria, the only note of his which can be mistaken for sorrow, is rather one of too great joy; that cry, which is his highest feat of art; which he cannot utter when he first comes to our shores, but practises carefully, slowly, gradually, till he has it perfect by the beginning of June; that cry, long, repeated, loudening and sharpening in the intensity of rising passion, till it stops suddenly, exhausted at the point where pleasure, from very keenness, turns to pain; and
The Elizabethan poets, however, when they talked of Philomel, 'her breast against a thorn, were unaware that they and the Greeks were talking of two different birds; that our English Lusciola Luscinia is not Lusciola Philomela, one of the various birds called Bulbul in the East. Whether his song be really sad, let those who have heard him say.
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