Classic Poem

The pretty lark, climbing the welkin clear,
Chants with a cheer, here peer I near my dear;
Then stooping thence, seeming her fall to rue,
Adieu, she saith, adieu, dear, dear, adieu.
The spink, the linnet, and the goldfinch fill
All the fresh air with their sweet warbles shrill.
But all this's nothing to the nightingal,
Breathing so sweetly from a breast so small
So many tunes, whose harmony excels
Our voice, our viols, and all music else.
Good Lord! how oft in a green oaken grove
In the cool shadow have I stood, and strove
To marry mine immortal lays to theirs,
Rapt with delight of their delicious airs?
And yet, methinks, in a thick thorn I hear
A nightingale to warble sweetly clear:
One while she bears the base, anon the tenor,
Anon the treble, then the counter-tenor;
Then all at once, as it were challenging
The rarest voices with herself to sing:
Thence thirty steps, amid the leafy sprays,
Another nightingale repeats her lays,
Just note for note, and adds some strain at last,
That she had connid all the winter past:
The first replies, and descants thereupon
With divine warbles of division,
Redoubling quavers; and so, turn by turn,
Alternately they sing away the morn,
So that the conquest in this curious strife
Doth often cost the one her voice and life.
Then the glad victor all the rest admire,
And after count her mistress of the choir.
At break of day, in a delicious song,
She sets the gamut to a hundred young;
And when as fit for higher tunes she sees them,
Then learnedly she harder lessons gives them,
Which strain by strain they studiously recite,
And follow all their mistress' rules aright.