Jenny Lind, Grisi, Patti, and other celebrated European singers,
some of them from very warm climates, are transported to America to
delight our Upper-Tendom, that there should be no persistent and
successful effort to introduce the English lark into our out-door
orchestra of singing-birds. No European voice would be more welcome
to the American million. It would be a great gain to the nation,
and be helpful to our religious devotions, as well as to our secular
satisfactions. In several of our Sabbath hymns there is poetical
reference to the lark and its song. For instance, that favorite
psalm of gratitude for returning Spring opens with these lines:--

"The winter is over and gone,
The thrush whistles sweet on the spray,
The turtle breathes forth her soft moan,
The _lark_ mounts on high and warbles away."

Now, not one American man, woman, or child in a thousand ever heard
or saw an English lark, and how is he, she, or it to sing the last
line of the foregoing verse with the spirit and understanding due to
an exercise of devotion? The American lark never mounts higher than
the top of a meadow elm, on which it see-saws, and screams, or
quacks, till it is tired; then draws a bee-line for another tree, or
a fence-post, never even undulating on the voyage. It may be said,
truly enough, that the hymn was written in England. Still, if sung
in America from generation to generation, we ought to have the
English lark with us, for our children to see and hear, lest they
may be tempted to believe that other and more serious similes in our
Sabbath hymns are founded on fancy instead of fact.

Nor would it be straining the point, nor be dealing in poetical