He has believed in both poetically and pleasantly, sometimes almost positively, as real and beautiful individualities.

He almost credits the poet of his own country, who speaks of hearing "the downward beat of angel wings." In his facile faith in the substance of picturesque and happy shadows, he sometimes tries to believe that the phoenix may have been, in some age and country, a real, living bird, of flesh and blood and genuine feathers, with long, strong wings, capable of performing the strange psychological feats ascribed to it in that most edifying picture emblazoned on the arms of Banking Companies, Insurance Offices, and Quack Doctors.

He is not sure that dying swans have not sung a mournful hymn over their last moments, under an affecting and human sense of their mortality.

He has believed in the English lark to the same point of pleasing credulity.

Why should he not give its existence the same faith?
The history of its life is as old as the English alphabet, and older still.