176 
BIRDS IN A VILLAGE. 
field. It comes well from the open expanse of 
purpling grass, and reminds me of a favourite 
grasshopper in a distant sunny land. 0 happy 
grasshopper ! singing all day in the trees and 
tall herbage, in a country where every village 
urchin is not sent afield to "study natural 
history " with green net and a good store of pins, 
shall I ever again hear thy breezy music, and see 
thee among the green leaves, beautiful with steel- 
blue and creamy white body, and dim purple over- 
and vivid red under- wings ? 
The bird of the pasture-land is singing still, 
perhaps, but all at once I have ceased to hear him, 
for something has come to lift me above his low 
grassy level, something faint and at first only the 
suspicion of a sound ; then a silvery lisping, far off 
and aerial, touching the sense as lightly as the 
wind-borne down of dandelion. 
If any place for any soul there be 
Disrobed and diseutrammcUed, 
doubtless it is from such a place and such a soul 
that this sublimated music falls. The singer, one 
can imagine, has never known or has forgotten 
earth ; and if it is visible to him, how small it must 
seem from that altitude, "spinning like a fretful 
midge " beneath him in the vast void ! 
It is the lark singing in the blue infinite heaven, 
at this distance with something ethereal and 
