4 WOOD NOTES WILD. 



and artistic touches worthy of study and imitation. 

 Awakened by the fierce wind of a winter night, I have 

 heard a common clothes-rack whirl out a wild melody in 

 the purest intervals: 



" No music in Nature " ! Surely the elements have 

 never kept silence since this ball was set swinging 

 through infinite space in tune with the music of the 

 spheres. Their voices were ever sounding in combative 

 strains, through fire and flood, from the equator to the 

 poles, innumerable ages before the monsters of sea and 

 earth added their bellowings to the chorus of the uni- 

 verse. From the hugest beast down to the smallest 

 insect, each creature with its own peculiar power of 

 sound, we come, in their proper place, upon the birds, 

 not in their present dress of dazzling beauty, and singing 

 their matchless songs, but with immense and uncouth 

 bodies perched on two long, striding legs, with voices to 

 match those of many waters and the roar of the tempest. 

 We know that in those monstrous forms were hidden the 

 springs of sweet song and the germs of beautiful plumage; 

 but who can form any idea of the slow processes, of the 

 long, long periods of time that Nature has taken in her 

 progressive work from the first rude effort up to the 

 present perfection ? So far as the song is concerned, the 

 hoarse thunderings of the elements, the bellowings of the 

 monsters of both land and water, the voices of things 

 animate and inanimate, all must be forced, age on to 



