156 
WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. 
we confessed it. All ! how different that mellow rhytlim, 
from tlie harsh, hungry clarion, sounded in its scream? 
Have we not gone aside into those secret places where our 
Primal Mother 
" Plumes her feathers and lets grow her wings, 
That in the various bustle of resort 
Were all too rumpled and sometime impaired." 
Here an awed silent witness have we not listened when her 
solemn moods of worship came upon her ? Think you she 
does not know the Mighty One^ who thought her — Daughter 
of the Sun — into being ? 
Yes ! and she serves an altar to him, in a " house not made 
with hands ;" and thus, for that service — away from the hum 
and dust of bruising cities — from the rock-rude chaos of her 
sterner moods, where Eaglets nestle with her Storms— doth 
she draw apart ; and, gathering about her there her delicate 
thoughts of love and gentlest peace, she lifts them on her 
green bosom to her old Sire to kiss, and resting tranquil in 
his warm light — sings I First, she sings an under prelude 
with the breeze and stream — ^then, soft and clear, a louder 
diapason swelling rings in sweet articulations, warbled out 
or trilling from a thousand living throats ! Must not this 
be her choral incense — ^hymn of praise — the holier strain she 
carries in the anthem of the stars? Every note, too, is 
plumed with wings, and is the living movement of her heart 
towards God. 
Have we not thus seen that she, too — comparatively with 
man — ^has a Poetry, and discourseth " sweet living numbers," 
after the same manner with his rapt inspirations? 
This, her " tuneful choir," is the eldest ; and, as it expresses 
in her the highest yearnings of her purer life, so it stands 
the Anti-type of the spiritual and truest Poetry in Man — 
Man ! her wayward child, half tyrant and half stranger on 
her bosom. 
What recks he, the hard self- worshipper, that the Linnet 
