And its departure is mentioned in "Timon of Athens" (iii. 6): "The swallow follows not summer more willing than we your lordship."
We may compare Tennyson's notice of the bird's approach and migration in "The May Queen:"
"And the swallow 'll come back again with summer o'er the wave."
It has been long considered lucky for the swallow to build its nest on the roof of a house, but just as unlucky for it to forsake a place which it has once tenanted. Shakespeare probably had this superstition in his mind when he represents Scarus as saying, in "Antony and Cleopatra" (iv. 12):
"Swallows have built In Cleopatra's sails their nests: the augurers Say, they know not,--they cannot tell;--look grimly, And dare not speak their knowledge."
_Swan._ According to a romantic notion, dating from antiquity, the swan is said to sing sweetly just before its death, many pretty allusions to which we find scattered here and there throughout Shakespeare's plays. In "Merchant of Venice" (iii. 2), Portia says:
"he makes a swan-like end, Fading in music."
Emilia, too, in "Othello" (v. 2), just before she dies, exclaims:
"I will play the swan, And die in music."
In "King John" (v. 7), Prince Henry, at his father's death-bed, thus pathetically speaks:
"'Tis strange that death should sing. I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan, Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death, And from the organ-pipe of frailty sings His soul and body to their lasting rest."
Again, in "Lucrece" (1611), we have these touching lines:
"And now this pale swan in her watery nest, Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending."
And once more, in "The Phoenix and Turtle:"
"Let the priest in surplice white, That defunctive music can, Be the death-divining swan, Lest the requiem lack his right."
This superstition, says Douce,[329] "was credited by Plato, Chrysippus, Aristotle, Euripides, Philostratus, Cicero, Seneca, and Martial. Pliny, Ælian, and Athenæus, among the ancients, and Sir Thomas More, among the moderns, treat this opinion as a vulgar error. Luther believed in it." This notion probably originated in the swan being identified with Orpheus. Sir Thomas Browne[330] says, we read that, "after his death, Orpheus, the musician, became a swan. Thus was it the bird of Apollo, the bird of music by the Greeks." Alluding to this piece of folk-lore, Carl Engel[331] remarks: "Although our common swan does not produce sounds which might account for this tradition, it is a well-known fact that the wild swan (_Cygnus ferus_), also called the 'whistling swan,' when on the wing emits a shrill tone, which, however harsh it may sound if heard near, produces a pleasant effect when, emanating from a large flock high in the air, it is heard in a variety of pitches of sound, increasing or diminishing in loudness according to the movement of the birds and to the current of the air." Colonel Hawker[332] says, "The only note which I ever heard the wild swan make, in winter, is his well-known 'whoop.'"[333]