A CITY OF BIRDS 77 



life. But this toleration — indifference if you like — is free 

 of that ugly utilitarian spirit which views all life in terms 

 of immediate self-interest, and sacrifices use and beauty to 

 its mean ends. And the birds understand this and forgo 

 part of their fears and gladly avail themselves of man's 

 neutrality, until the hope that neutrality will one day 

 become enlightened sympathy is born. 



One moony night I walked out to where the tower 

 of the cathedral rose out of the night, its stone 

 diaphanous and dim, like the substance of some rare 

 and scarce earthly thought. I turned up a little close, 

 and heard a party of girls singing in one of a set of 

 minute and beautiful houses that stand arm in arm, 

 facing one another across the paved courtyard. The 

 sweet voices of these happy girls flowed out of the 

 house like a perfume into the embalmed air, where 

 the long chimneys, each of a design different from its 

 neighbour's, cut patterns out of the fabric of space. 

 The cygnets slept on the moat, a thickening of the 

 diffused and ghostly light, shapes of mother-of-pearl, 

 from which at times rose gestures of expanded wing 

 and curving neck, uplifted and then sinking back 

 upon the water. One were the works of man and 

 nature ; interchangeable the separate quantities of sight 

 and sound. The one is multiplicity, and every living 

 thing, when passionately and perfectly itself, is fused 

 into the spirit of all things. It was all music and 

 prayej*, and the voices of the singing girls seemed to 

 pass into the religious motions of the cygnets. The 

 world appeared " like the King's daughter, all glorious 

 within " ; only fantasy was real, and the silence was 

 crowded with vanished scenes and dead faces. Suddenly 

 there burst upon this breathless calm a torrent of such 

 unholy shrieks that for the moment I grasped the tree 

 under which I stood in terror. There, three yards 

 above my head, was a white owl screaming at me like 

 the damned. There he perched and screamed at me 

 until I shambled off, realizing in sadness that if we 

 are the only creatures who can see within creation, so 

 we are the only ones who live within it at discord with 

 its mighty hymn. For I was banished. 



