_Hither, my love!
Here I am! Here!
With this just-sustained note I announce myself to you;
This gentle call is for you, my love, for you._

_Do not be decoyed elsewhere!
That is the whistle of the wind--it is not my voice;
That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray;
Those are the shadows of leaves._

_O darkness! Oh in vain!
Oh I am very sick and sorrowful._

. . . . . . . . . . .

The bird that occupies the second place to the nightingale in
British poetical literature is the skylark, a pastoral bird as the
Philomel is an arboreal,-- a creature of light and air and motion,
the companion of the plowman, the shepherd, the harvester,--whose
nest is in the stubble and whose tryst is in the clouds. Its life
affords that kind of contrast which the imagination loves,--one
moment a plain pedestrian bird, hardly distinguishable from the
ground, the next a soaring, untiring songster, reveling in the
upper air, challenging the eye to follow him and the ear to
separate his notes.

The lark's song is not especially melodious, but is blithesome,
sibilant, and unceasing. Its type is the grass, where the bird
makes its home, abounding, multitudinous, the notes nearly all