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How interminable seemed his absence! I sat so still that the crickets and grasshoppers in the tufted grass about me kept up their ceaseless chirruping, and leaped about my feet, unaware that I could crush their merry life out of them by a single movement. The birds in the dusky branches overhead whistled their wild wood-notes, as gayly as if no one were near their haunts.
In spite of the war between playwright and precisian, a Puritan youth could still in Milton's days avow his love of the stage, 'if Jonson's learned sock be on, or sweetest Shakspeare Fancy's child, warble his native wood-notes wild' and gather from the 'masques and antique pageantry, of the court revels, hints for his own 'Comus' and 'Arcades'."
The tradition followed by Milton, who was eight years of age when Shakespeare died, and who wrote L'Allegro just after leaving Cambridge, makes Shakespeare "sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child," with "native wood-notes wild"; and gives to Jonson "the LEARNED sock." Fuller, like Milton, was born eight years before the death of Shakespeare, namely, in 1608. Like Milton he was a Cambridge man.
How well he paints the gold and scarlet plumage of the American birds, only to lament more pathetically the want of the wild wood-notes of his native land! The groves of the Ohio that had just fallen beneath the axe's stroke 'live in his description, and the turnips that he transplanted from Botley 'look green' in prose!
Bred up amid the stately, measured, melodious platitudes of the eighteenth century, that Golden Age of commonplace, he struck down through them all with simple, untaught, unconscious directness, and smote the spring of ever-living waters. Such wood-notes wild as trill in Shakspeare's verse sprang from the stricken chords beneath his hand.
The invention is his; the first earnest impulse; the unmisgivings joy; the primitive morning breath, when the town-smoke has not polluted the fields, and the birds are singing their "wood-notes wild." Besides, after all, one cannot be sure that Berni could have invented as Boiardo did. If he could, he would probably have written some fine serious poem of his own.
while even Milton, who, Puritan as he was, loved art with all his soul, only remarks on Shakspeare's marvellous lyrical sweetness, 'his native wood-notes wild'; what shame to the Puritans if they, too, did not discover the stork among the cranes? An answer has often been given to arguments of this kind, which deserves a few moments' consideration.
Like the American mocking-bird, he is harsh only when aping other men's tunes his true power lies in his own "native wood-notes wild." But it is not this faculty of his which has been imitated by his scholars; for it is not this faculty which made him their ideal, however it may have attracted them. All which sensible men deplore in him is that which poetasters have exalted in him.
Returning to earth, we have a pastoral, of which Sir Egerton Brydges justly and sufficiently remarks, "The censorious may say what they will, but there are speeches in the mouth of Cain and Adah, especially regarding their child, which nothing in English poetry but the 'wood-notes wild' of Shakespeare, ever equalled."
At this hour the birds are wide awake and hungry; a hundred unknown songsters warble their native wood-notes wild. Its rival is the tsil-fui-fui-fui, or 'hair grown, meaning that his locks are too long and there is no one to cut or shave them.
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