BIRDS IN TOWN AND VILLAGE 



say, with their shrill piercing cries for liberty, but 

 they " sing me mad/' Just as in some minds this 

 bird's music a sound which above all others 

 typifies the exuberant life and joy of nature to the 

 soul cannot be separated from the cooked and 

 dished-up melodist, so that they turn with horror 

 from such meat, so I cannot separate this bird, nor 

 any bird, from the bird's wild life of liberty, and the 

 marvellous faculty of flight which is the bird's 

 attribute* To see so wild and aerial a creature in a 

 cage jars my whole system, and is a sight hateful 

 and unnatural, an outrage on our universal mother. 

 This feeling about birds in captivity, which I 

 have attempted to describe, and which, I repeat, 

 is not sentimentality, as that word is ordinarily 

 understood, has been so vividly rendered in an ode 

 to " The Skylarks," by Sir Rennell Rodd, that the 

 reader will probably feel grateful to me for quoting 

 a portion of it in this place, especially as the volume 

 in which it appears Feda, with other Poems is, 

 I imagine, not very widely known : 



Oh, the sky, the sky, the open sky, 

 For the home of a song-bird's heart ! 



And why, and why, and for ever why, 

 Do they stifle here in the mart : 



Cages of agony, rows on rows, 

 Torture that only a wild thing knows : 



Is it nothing to you to see 

 That head thrust out through the hopeless wire, 



