FOOTNOTE:
[48] By John Burroughs.
Expression: Read again the four descriptive selections beginning on page [179]. Observe the wide difference in style of composition. Of the three prose extracts, which is the most interesting to you? Give reasons why this is so. Which passages require the most animation in reading? Read these passages so that those who are listening to you may fully appreciate their meaning.
THE POET AND THE BIRD
I. The Song of the Lark
On a pleasant evening in late summer the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary Shelley, were walking near the city of Leghorn in Italy. The sky was cloudless, the air was soft and balmy, and the earth seemed hushed into a restful stillness. The green lane along which they were walking was bordered by myrtle hedges, where crickets were softly chirping and fireflies were already beginning to light their lamps. From the fields beyond the hedges the grateful smell of new-mown hay was wafted, while in the hazy distance the church towers of the city glowed yellow in the last rays of the sun, and the gray-green sea rippled softly in the fading light of day.
Suddenly, from somewhere above them, a burst of music fell upon their ears. It receded upward, but swelled into an ecstatic harmony, with fluttering intervals and melodious swervings such as no musician's art can imitate.
"What is that?" asked the poet, as the song seemed to die away in the blue vault of heaven.
"It is a skylark," answered his wife.
"Nay," said the poet, his face all aglow with the joy of the moment; "no mere bird ever poured forth such strains of music as that. I think, rather, that it is some blithe spirit embodied as a bird."
"Let us imagine that it is so," said Mary. "But, hearken. It is singing again, and soaring as it sings."
"Yes, and I can see it, too, like a flake of gold against the pale purple of the sky. It is so high that it soars in the bright rays of the sun, while we below are in the twilight shade. And now it is descending again, and the air is filled with its song. Hark to the rain of melody which it showers down upon us."
They listened enraptured, while the bird poured forth its flood of song. When at length it ceased, and the two walked home in the deepening twilight, the poet said:—
"We shall never know just what it was that sang so gloriously. But, Mary, what do you think is most like it?"
"A poet," she answered. "There is nothing so like it as a poet wrapt in his own sweet thoughts and singing till the world is made to sing with him for very joy."
"And I," said he, "would compare it to a beautiful maiden singing for love in some high palace tower, while all who hear her are bewitched by the enchanting melody."
"And I," said she, "would compare it to a red, red rose sitting among its green leaves and giving its sweet perfumes to the summer breezes."
"You speak well, Mary," said he; "but let me make one other comparison. Is it not like a glowworm lying unseen amid the grass and flowers, and all through the night casting a mellow radiance over them and filling them with divine beauty?"
The Song of the Lark.
"I do not like the comparison so well," was the answer. "Yet, after all, there is nothing so like it as a poet—as yourself, for instance."
"No poet ever had its skill, because no poet was ever so free from care," said Shelley, sadly. "It is like an unbodied joy floating unrestrained whithersoever it will. Ah, Mary, if I had but half the gladness that this bird or spirit must know, I would write such poetry as would bewitch the world, and all men would listen, entranced, to my song."
That night the poet could not sleep for thinking of the skylark's song. The next day he sat alone in his study, putting into harmonious words the thoughts that filled his mind. In the evening he read to Mary a new poem, entitled "To a Skylark." It was full of the melody inspired by the song of the bird. Its very meter suggested the joyous flight, the fluttering pauses, the melodious swervings, the heavenward ascent of the bird. No poem has ever been written that is fuller of beautiful images and sweet and joyous harmonies.
Have you ever listened to the song of a bird and tried to attune your own thoughts to its unrestrained and untaught melodies? There are no true skylarks in America, and therefore you may never be able to repeat the experience of the poet or fully to appreciate the "harmonious madness" of his matchless poem; for no other bird is so literally the embodiment of song as the European skylark.
But now let us read Shelley's inimitable poem.
II. To a Skylark
Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven,
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.
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.
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 overflowed.
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.
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 highborn maiden
In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower;
Like a glowworm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aërial hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view;
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Make faint with too much sweet these heavy-wingèd thieves.
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.
Teach us, sprite or bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.
Chorus Hymeneal,
Or triumphal chaunt,
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? What ignorance of pain?
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught:
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From thy lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.
HARK, HARK! THE LARK[49]
Hark, hark! The lark at Heaven's gate sings,
And Phœbus 'gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chaliced flowers that lies;
And winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes;
With everything that pretty is,
My lady sweet, arise;
Arise, arise!