Song Birds and Water Fowl 
certain June morning in Munich, when I went 
through the Brandenburg gate, outside the city 
limits, and explored the surrounding fields. 
For the first time, I then enjoyed the unique 
display of Chaucer’s lark, with its soaring flight 
and rapturous song. It was quite common 
thereabouts, and the morning was one to kindle 
all its musical spirit. Mounting slowly, yet 
airily, and with a rapid fluttering of wings, in 
an absolutely perpendicular ascent, as if scaling 
an invisible ladder, he began, when a short 
distance from the ground, and accompanying 
his upward motion, to pour forth a delicious 
and continuous effervescence of delight, until 
he reached so high a point that he became 
only a throbbing vocal atom in the distant 
blue; where, poised upon the very climax of 
his ecstasy, ensphered in the irradiation of his 
wild and glittering notes, he uttered his im- 
passioned heart in such a thrilling lyric chant 
as could not fail to hold the listener spell- 
bound and amazed. The best that poetry can 
say of the lark has been expressed in Shelley’s 
famous apostrophe, which, in its entirety, is the 
most breathless and delicious of his minor 
poems, a gem among the classics. 
This famous vocalist is an instance, not ex- 
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