All that ever was

Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass,

Teach no sprite or bird

What sweet thoughts are thine :

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus hymeneal,

Or triumphant chant,

Matched with thine would be all

But an empty vaunt

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves, or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear, keen joyance

Languor can not be:

Shades of annoyance

Never come near thee:

Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking, or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream;

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear;

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound;

Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow,

The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

A LARK SINGING IN A RAINBOW.

Fraught with a transient, frozen shower

If a cloud should haply lower,
Sailing o'er the landscape dark,
Mute, on a sudden, is the lark;
But when gleams the sun again
O'er the pearl-besprinkled plain,
And from behind his watery vail
Looks through the thin descending hail;
She mounts, and, lessening to the sight,
Salutes the blithe return of light,
And high her tuneful track pursues
Through the rainbow's melting hues.

THOMAS WARTON, 1728-1790.

THE SKYLARK.

FROM "THE FARMER'S BOY."

When music waking, speaks the skylark nigh,
Just starting from the corn, he cheerly sings,
And trusts with conscious pride his downy wings;
Still louder breathes, and in the face of day
Mounts up, and calls on Giles to mark his way.
Close to his eyes his hat he instant bends,
And forms a friendly telescope, that lends
Just aid enough to dull the glaring light,
And place the wandering bird before his sight,
That oft beneath a light cloud sweeps along,
Lost for a while, yet pours the varied song.
The eye still follows, and the cloud moves by;
Again he stretches up the clear blue sky.

His form, his motion, undistinguish'd quite,

Save when he wheels direct from shade to light;

E'en then the songster a mere speck become,

Gliding like fancy's bubbles in a dream,

The gazer sees

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD, 1766-1823.

THE MOORS OF JUTLAND.

FROM THE DANISH.

I lay on my heathery hills all alone,

The storm-winds rush'd o'er me in turbulence loud;
My head rested lone on the gray moorland stone,

My eyes wandered starward from cloud unto cloud.

There wandered my eyes, but my thoughts onward passed,
Far, far beyond cloud-track or tempests' career;
At times I hummed songs, and the desolate waste
Was the first the sad chimes of my spirit to hear.

Gloomy and gray are the moorlands, where rest

My fathers, yet there doth the wild heather bloom; And amid the old cairns the lark buildeth her nest, And sings in the desert, o'er hill-top, and tomb! Translation of MRS. HOWITT.

BLICKER.

THE RISING OF THE LARK.

For so have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and, soaring upward, sing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more and more at every breath of the tempest than it could recover by the libration and frequent weighing of his wings; till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was over, and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing, as if it had learned music and motion from an angel, as he passed sometimes through the air about his ministries here below: so is the prayer of a good man.

JEREMY TAYLOR, 1613-1667.

THE LARK.

Bird of the wilderness,

Blithesome and cumberless,

Sweet be thy matins o'er moorland and lea!
Emblem of happiness,

Blest is thy dwelling-place-

O to abide in the desert with thee!
Wild is thy lay, and loud,

Far in the downy cloud;

Love gives it energy-love gave it birth :
Where, on thy dewy wing-

Where art thou journeying?

Thy lay is in heaven-thy love is on earth.

O'er fell and fountain sheen,

O'er moor and mountain green,

O'er the red streamer that heralds the day
Over the cloudlet dim,

Over the rainbow's rim,

Musical cherub, soar, singing, away!
Then, when the gloaming comes,
Low in the heather blooms,

Sweet will thy welcome and bed of love be!
Emblem of happiness,

Blest is thy dwelling-place

O to abide in the desert with thee!

JAMES HOGG.

LARK.

To the last point of vision, and beyond,

Mount, daring warbler! that love-prompted strain ("Twixt thee and thine a never-failing bond)

Thrills not the less the bosom of the plain;

Yet might'st thou seem, proud privilege! to sing
All independent of the leafy spring.

Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;
A privacy of glorious light is thine;
Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with rapture more divine;
Type of the wise who soar but never roam;
Twin to the kindred points of Heaven and home.

WORDSWORTH.

LINES.

So when the lark, poor bird! afar espyeth
Her yet unfeathered children, whom to save
She strives in vain-slain by the fatal scythe,
Which from the meadow her green locks do shave,
That their warm nest is now become their grave.
The woful mother up to heaven springs,
And all about her plaintive notes she flings,
And their untimely fate most pitifully sings.

GILES FLETCHER, 158S-1623.