Meantime, as you go on framing poetic fancies, there is
a school of other poets up above you, and they are composing their
fantasies at a pretty rate. The modest brown lark sits quietly amid the
sheltering grass, and will hardly stir, no matter how near her you may
go; but her mate, the glorious singer, is far away up toward the sun,
and he shouts in his joyous ecstasy until the heaven is full of his
exquisite joyance. Imagine how he puts his heart into his carol! He is
at least a mile above you, and you can hear him over a radius of half a
mile, measured from the place where he will drop. The little poets chant
one against the other, and yet there is no discord, for the magic of
distance seems to harmonize song with song, and the tumult soothes
instead of exciting you. Who is the poet who talks of "drawing a thread
of honey through your heart"? It is a quaint, conceited phrase, and yet
somehow it gives with absurd felicity some idea of the lark's song. They
massacre these innocents of the holy choir by thousands, and put them in
puddings for Cockneys to eat. The mere memory of one of those beatified
mornings makes you want to take the blood of the first poulterer whom
you find exposing a piteous string of the exquisite darlings.
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