nd jollity be with us both!

"Alas! my journey, rugged and uneven,
Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind;
But hearing thee, or others of thy kind,
As full of gladness and as free of heaven,
I, with my fate contented, will plod on,
And hope for higher raptures, when life's day is done."

But better than either--better and more than a hundred pages--is
Shakespeare's simple line,--

"Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings,"

or John Lyly's, his contemporary,--

"Who is't now we hear?
None but the lark so shrill and clear;
Now at heaven's gate she claps her wings,
The morn not waking till she sings."

We have no well-known pastoral bird in the Eastern States that answers
to the skylark. The American pipit or titlark and the shore lark, both
birds of the far north, and seen in the States only in fall and winter,
are said to sing on the wing in a similar strain. Common enough in our
woods are two birds that have many of the habits and manners of the
lark--the water-thrush and the golden-crowned thrush, or oven-bird. They
are both walkers, and the latter frequently sings on the wing up aloft
after the manner of the lark. Starting from its low perch, it rises in
a spiral flight far above the tallest trees, and breaks out in a clear,
ringing, ecstatic song, sweeter and more richly modulated than the
skylark's, but brief, ceasing almost before you have noticed it; whereas
the skylark goes singing away after you have forgotten him and returned
to him half a dozen times.

But on the Great Plains, of the West there; is a bird whose song
resembles the skylark's quite closely and is said to be not at all
inferior. This is Sprague's pipit, sometimes called the Missouri
skylark, an excelsior songster, which from far up in the transparent
blue rains down its notes for many minutes together. It is, no doubt,
destined to figure in the future poetical literature of the West.

Throughout the northern and eastern parts of the Union the lark would
find a dangerous rival in the bobolink, a bird that has no European
prototype, and no near relatives anywhere, standing quite alone, unique,
and, in the qualities of hilarity and musical tintinnabulation, with
a song unequaled. He has already a secure place in general literature,
having been laureated by no less a poet than Bryant, and invested with a
lasting human charm in the sunny p