This, too, will doubtless come in time. Speaking for myself, and going back to the former subject, little as I like to see men feeding on larks, rather would I see larks killed and eaten than thrust into cages. For in captivity they do not "sweeten" my life, as the Maidenhead guidebook writer would say, with their shrill, piercing cries for liberty, but they "sing me mad." Just as in some minds this bird's music--a sound which above all others typifies the exuberant life and joy of nature to the soul--cannot be separated from the cooked and dished-up melodist, so that they turn with horror from such meat, so I cannot separate this bird, nor any bird, from the bird's wild life of liberty, and the marvellous faculty of flight which is the bird's attribute. To see so wild and aerial a creature in a cage jars my whole system, and is a sight hateful and unnatural, an outrage on our universal mother.
This feeling about birds in captivity, which I have attempted to describe, and which, I repeat, is not sentimentality, as that word is ordinarily understood, has been so vividly rendered in an
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ode to "The Skylarks" by Sir Rennell Rodd, that the reader will probably feel grateful to me for quoting a portion of it in this place, especially as the volume in which it appears--Feda, with Other Poems--is, I imagine, not very widely known:
"Oh, the sky, the sky, the open sky,
For the home of a song-bird's heart!
And why, and why, and for ever why,
Do they stifle here in the mart:
Cages of agony, rows on rows,
Torture that only a wild thing knows:
Is it nothing to you to see
That head thrust out through the hopeless wire,
And the tiny life, and the mad desire
To be free, to be free, to be free?
Oh, the sky, the sky, the blue, wide sky,
For the beat of a song-bird's wings!* * *
Straight and close are the cramping bars
From the dawn of mist to the chill of stars,
And yet it must sing or die!
138 BIRDS IN TOWN AND VILLAGE
Will its marred harsh voice in the city street
Make any heart of you glad?
It will only beat with its wings and beat,
It will only sing you mad.* * *
If it does not go to your heart to see
The helpless pity of those bruised wings,
The tireless effort to which it clings
To the strain and the will to be free,
I know not how I shall set in words
The meaning of God in this,
For the loveliest thing in this world of His
Are the ways and the songs of birds.
But the sky, the sky, the wide, free sky,
For the home of the song-bird's heart!"
How falsely does that man see Nature, how grossly ignorant must he be of its most elemental truths, who looks upon it as a chamber of torture, a physiological laboratory on a very vast scale, a scene of endless strife and trepidation, of hunger and cold, and every form of pain and misery--and who, holding this doctrine of