MISSOURI SKYLARK.
(Anthus spragueii.)
“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.”
—Shelley.
When the umber skylark is struck into glory of plume and of song by the rising sun, we can conceive that the song is indeed “the nearest approach, in animal nature, to the ringing of the hydrogen bells in the physics of light,” and that when “the music soars within the little lark and the lark soars,” he is almost an involuntary agent, the song, like the summer, owing its creation, as George MacDonald tells, to
“The sun that rises early,
Shining, shining all day rarely;