30 A Walk from 



an American could only feel. To him the lark is to 

 the bird-world's companionship and music what the 

 angels are to the spirit land. He has read and dreamed 

 of both from his childhood up. He has believed in 

 both poetically and pleasantly, sometimes almost posi- 

 tively, as real and beautiful individualities. He almost 

 credits the poet of his own country, who speaks of hear- 

 ing "the downward beat of angel wings." In his 

 facile faith in the substance of picturesque and happy 

 shadows, he sometimes tries to believe that the phoenix 

 may have been, in some age and country, a real, living 

 bird, of flesh and blood and genuine feathers, with long, 

 strong wings, capable of performing the strange psyco- 

 logical feats ascribed to it in that most edifying picture 

 emblazoned on the arms of Banking Companies, In- 

 surance Offices, and Quack Doctors. He is not sure 

 that dying swans have not sung a mournful hymn over 

 their last moments, under an affecting and human sense 

 of their mortality. He has believed in the English 

 lark to the same point of pleasing credulity. Why 

 should he not give its existence the same faith ? The 

 history of its life is as old as the English alphabet, and 

 older still. It sang over the dark and hideous lairs of 

 the bloody Druids centuries before Julius Csesar was 

 born, and they doubtless had a pleasant name for it, 

 unless true music was hateful to their ears. It sang, 



