This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1883 edition. Excerpt: ...is more in harmony with Nature than all the rest of the poets" clamour against "horrid" darkness and "sullen" night. What, indeed, would larks, or any other little birds, do if the sun lit up the twenty-four consecutive hours, and the miracle of Ahaz" dial were ordained in perpetuity! Yet the poets persist in making the bird delighted at its escape from night. Moreover, it is only with a very moderate degree of ingenuity that the same idea is so often re-feathered. When Shakespeare has said--"Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest, From his moist cabinet mounts up on high, And wakes the morning;" and we remember Milton"s two passages--"Now the herald lark Left his ground nest, high low"ring to descry The Morn"s approach, and greet her with his song," and--"To hear the lark begin his flight, And singing, startle the dull night From his watch-tower in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise "--there is apparently nothing left for a hundred and fifty other poets to say; but the two greater poets" stanzas are shivered up into bits, and (like lizards" tails in the poets) each fragment lives again as the nucleus of another stanza, and "the solid bullion of one sterling line, drawn to French wire, will through whole pages shine." As awakening mankind, the lark is purely poetical; for a very small proportion of men and women, after all, sleep out in the fields, and the idea is only indulged in by those Hurdis-intelligences who respect the proverb--"Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed," but who omit to note the fact that larks often sing late into the night, and get out of bed at two in the morning; or, more usually, go to bed and get up aecording to the state of...