BY WAY OF APPENDIX. 
211 
little as I like to see men feeding on larks, rather 
would I see larks killed and eaten than thrust 
into cages. For in captivity they do not 
"sweeten" my life, as the Maidenhead guide-book 
writer would 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 " sentiment " as that word is ordinarily under- 
stood, has been so vividly rendered in an ode to 
" The Skylarks," by 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, vAth 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 : 
