our clarions of rejoicing. The lark, supremely, 

 is our lyric of joy. 



Joy, the poet tells us, is the Mother of 

 Spring, and of Joy has it not been said that 

 there is no more ancient God ? What fitter 

 symbol for this divine uplift of the year than 

 this bird whose ecstasy in song makes the very 

 word Spring an intoxication in our ears ? We 

 have a Gaelic legend that the first word of 

 God spoken to the world became a lark . . . 

 the eternal joy translated into a moment's 

 ecstasy. But further back has not Aristo- 

 phanes told us that the lark existed, not only 

 before the green grass where it nests or the 

 blue lift into which it soars, but before Zeus 

 and Kronos themselves, before the Creation, 

 before Time. It is but a symbol of the divine 

 Joy which is Life : that most ancient Breath, 

 that Spirit whose least thought is Creation, 

 whose least motion is Beauty, whose least 

 glance is that eternal miracle which we, seeing 

 dimly and in the rhythmic rise of the long 

 cadence of the hours, call by a word of out- 

 welling, of measureless effluence, the Spring. 



98 



