16 BIRDS AND POETS ~ 
As full of gladness and as free of heaven, 
I, with my fate contented, will plod on, 
And hope for higher raptures, when life’s day is done.” 
But better than either — better and more than a 
hundred pages — is Shakespeare’s simple line, — 
“ Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings,” 
or John Lyly’s, his contemporary, — 
“Who is’t now we hear ? 
None but the lark so shrill and clear ; 
Now at heaven’s gate she claps her wings, 
The morn not waking till she sings.’’ 
We have no well-known pastoral bird in the 
Eastern States that answers to the skylark. The 
American pipit or titlark and the shore lark, both 
birds of the far north, and seen in the States only 
in fall and winter, are said to sing on the wing in 
a similar strain. Common enough in our woods are 
two birds that have many of the habits and manners 
of the lark, —the water-thrush and the golden- 
crowned thrush, or oven-bird. They are both walk- 
ers, and the latter frequently sings on the wing up 
aloft after the manner of thelark. Starting from its 
low perch, it rises in a spiral flight far above the tall- 
est trees, and breaks out in a clear, ringing, ecstatic 
song, sweeter and more richly modulated than the 
skylark’s, but brief, ceasing almost before you have 
noticed it ; whereas the skylark goes singing away 
after you have forgotten him and returned to him 
half a dozen times. 
But on the Great Plains of the West there isa 
bird whose song resembles the skylark’s quite closely 
