in it, about the size
and color of those of the ground-chirping-bird of New England, which
is nearer the English lark than any other American bird. I bent
down to look at them with an interest an American could only feel.
To him the lark is to the bird-world's companionship and music what
the angels are to the spirit land. He has read and dreamed of both
from his childhood up. He has believed in both poetically and
pleasantly, sometimes almost positively, as real and beautiful
individualities. He almost credits the poet of his own country, who
speaks of hearing "the downward beat of angel wings." In his facile
faith in the substance of picturesque and happy shadows, he
sometimes tries to believe that the phoenix may have been, in some
age and country, a real, living bird, of flesh and blood and genuine
feathers, with long, strong wings, capable of performing the strange
psychological feats ascribed to it in that most edifying picture
emblazoned on the arms of Banking Companies, Insurance Offices, and
Quack Doctors. He is not sure that dying swans have not sung a
mournful hymn over their last moments, under an affecting and human
sense of their mortality. He has believed in the English lark to
the same point of pleasing credulity. Why should he not give its
existence the same faith? The history of its life is as old as the
English alphabet, and older still. It sang over the dark and
hideous lairs of the bloody Druids centuries before Julius Caesar
was born, and they doubtless had a pleasant name for it, unless true
music was hateful to their ears. It sang, without loss or change of
a single note of this morning's song, to the Roman legions as they
marched, or made roads in Britain. It rang the same voluntaries to
the Saxons, Danes, and Normans, through the long ages, and, perhaps,
tended to soften their antagonisms, and hasten their blending into
one great and mighty people. How the name and song of this happiest
of earthly birds run through all the rhyme and romance of English
poetry, of English rural life, ever since there was an England!
Take away its history and its song from her daisy-eyed meadows, and
shaded lanes, and hedges breathing and blooming with sweetbrier
leaves and hawthorn flowers--from her thatched cottages, veiled with
ivy--from the morning tread of the reapers, and the mower's lunch of
bread and cheese under the meadow elm, and you take away a living
and beautiful spirit more charming tha