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 : — 
ne t fe S om a a Bs 
=_ f = = at f —j 
eS t 1 1 i L i ii} 
“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 
