Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence; truths that wake
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor man nor boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy.
* * *
Then sing, ye birds, sing out with joyous sound,


as the poet-philosopher bids you. Victorious analysis will neither
abolish you, nor the miraculous and unfathomable in you and in your
song, which has stirred the hearts of poets since first man was man.
And if anyone shall hint to us that we and the birds may have sprung
originally from the same type; that the difference between our
intellect and theirs is one of degree, and not of kind, we may
believe or doubt: but in either case we shall not be greatly moved.
'So much the better for the birds,' we will say, 'and none the worse
for us. You raise the birds towards us: but you do not lower us
towards them. What we are, we are by the grace of God. Our own
powers and the burden of them we know full well. It does not lessen
their dignity or their beauty in our eyes to hear that the birds of
the air partake, even a little, of the same gifts of God as we. Of
old said St. Guthlac in Crowland, as the swallows sat upon his knee,
"He who leads his life according to the will of God, to him the wild
deer and the wild birds draw more near;" and this new theory of yours
may prove St. Guthlac right. St. Francis, too--he called the birds
his brothers. Whether he was correct, either theologically or