The dying swan is said to utter a pleasing song, and the poets have for ages attested its truth. We will give a few specimens. Foreseeing how happy it is to die, they leave this world with singing and joy. Yonge’s Cicero.—Tusculan Disputations, Book I. Div. 30.
Lamenting, in a low voice, her very woes, as when the swan, now about to die, sings his own funeral dirge. Riley’s Ovid, Metamorphoses, Picus and Canens, Page 499.
[And see Spenser, in the “Ruins of Time;” Shakespeare, in the Merchant of Venice, Act III. Scene 2—King John, Act V. Scene 7—Othello, Act V. Scene 2; Cowley, in his Pyramus and Thisbe; Garth, in the Dispensary; Pope, in Windsor Forest—Rape of the Lock—Winter a Pastoral; Prior’s Turtle and Sparrow; Fenton’s Florelio; Lansdowne, in the Muses’ Dying Song; and Shelley, in “the Alastor.”]
