But loud or low, it keeps a penetrating quality that is weird . . . Now this tiny song is a song of love, vague love of the unseen and unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or known, in this present existence of his, not even his ancestors, for many generations back, could have known anything of the night-life of the fields, or the amorous value of song. But he sings the song of his race as it was sung a myriad years ago, and as faultlessly as if he understood the exact significance of every note. Of course he did not learn the song.
Human lovers do very much the same thing without knowing it.
The living present has very little to do with it . . . The fault is not altogether mine. I had been warned that if the creature were mated, he would cease to sing and would speedily die. Then I became aware that my grass-lark was silent, contrary to his wont. I went to the silent cage, and found him lying dead beside a dried-up lump of eggplant as gray and hard as a stone.