Then There
Were Times When These Two Opposite Feelings Mingled And Would Be
Together In My Mind For Hours At
A time, and this occurred oftenest
during the autumnal migration, when the great wave of bird-life set
northwards, and
All through March and April the birds were visible in
flock succeeding flock from dawn to dark, until the summer visitants
were all gone, to be succeeded in May by the birds from the far south,
flying from the Antarctic winter.
This annual spectacle had always been a moving one, but the feeling it
now produced - this mingled feeling - was most powerful on still
moonlight nights, when I would sit or lie on my bed gazing out on the
prospect, earth and sky, in its changed mysterious aspect. And, lying
there, I would listen by the hour to the three-syllable call-note of
the upland or solitary plover, as the birds went past, each bird alone
far up in the dim sky, winging his way to the north. It was a strange
vigil I kept, stirred by strange thoughts and feelings, in that
moonlit earth that was strange too, albeit familiar, for never before
had the sense of the supernatural in Nature been stronger. And the
bird I listened to, that same solitary plover I had known and admired
from my earliest years, the most graceful of birds, beautiful to see
and hear when it would spring up before my horse with its prolonged
wild bubbling cry of alarm and go away with swift, swallow-like
flight - what intensity and gladness of life was in it, what a
wonderful inherited knowledge in its brain, and what an inexhaustible
vigour in its slender frame to enable it to perform that annual double
journey of upwards of ten thousand miles!
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