THE MARSH WARIM.LR'S MUSIC 213 



written books on some lower forms of life which are 

 classics, has never inchulcd insects in his studies just 

 because he has never been able to free himself from a 

 sense of uncanniness they give him. In me, too, they 

 produce this feeling at times: — these myriads of 

 creatures that float like motes in the sunbeam ; minute, 

 gemlike, winged bodies of strange shapes and gem-like 

 minds to match, they come upon us like a living glitter- 

 ing dust shaken from the tail of some comet in our 

 summer skies — a dust that will settle down by-and-by 

 and vanish when the air grows cool at the approach of 

 winter. 



But little birds — dear little birds or darlings as we 

 may call them without rebuke — are vertebrates and 

 relations, with knowing, emotional, thinking brains like 

 ours in their heads, and with senses like ours, only 

 brighter. Their beauty and grace, so much beyond ours, 

 and their faculty of flight which enables them to return 

 to us eacii year from such remote outlandish places, 

 their winged swift souls in winged bodies, do not make 

 them uncanny but only fairy-like. Thus we love and 

 know them, and our more highly developed minds are 

 capable of bridging the gulf which divides us from 

 them, and divides bird from mammal. Small as they 

 are bodily, in some cases no bigger than one of a man's 

 ten toes, we know they are on the same tree of life as 

 ourselves, grown from the same root, with the same 

 warm red blood in their veins, and red blood is thicker 

 than water — certainly it is thicker than the colourless 

 fluid which is the life of the insect. 



