h thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

Again all the words rise and float. Sing them over: _higher_, _higher_,
_springest_, _fire_, _wingest_, _singing_, _soar_, _soaring_, _singest_.
The reader must feel himself poised for flight in every word of the
first three verses. Why does the poet say cloud of fire? What is the
color of the skylark? And now the tone, which has been of a radiant hue
through these three verses, must soften a little in the first three
lines of the next verse--

The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;--

glow gold again in the last three lines--

Like a star of heaven
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, and yet I hear thy shrill delight--

and become the white of an incandescent light in the next verse--

Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.

Do you not see that the secret of its beauty lies, for vocal
interpretation, in the color of tone and in the inflection of the words?
Say "unseen," dwelling on the second syllable; "shrill delight,"
directing _shrill_ over the head of _delight_; "keen," making it cleave
the air like an arrow; "silver sphere," suggesting a moonlit path across
water; "intense" and "narrows," letting the tone recede into the "white
dawn"; "see," with a vanishing stress; and "feel," with a deepening note
carried to the end. So we might go on through the twenty-one stanzas
which make up the poem.

Please analyze undirected the next two verses.

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflow'd.

What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

In reading the first lines of the next four verses we must avoid
monotony.

Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high-born maiden
In a p