113 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 sentimentahty, 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. 



