The children fairly leap out of the school-building through doors and down fire-escape stairways. And their Voices are at once hurled skyward, clamorous and chaotic. The Sound they make is a roundly common sound yet ‘winged.’ It is an untrammeled Sound, uncultivated, only a little civilized. It is world-music. In it is the note beyond culture, higher than civilization, and older. It is brave as voices of the shrilling winds and warmer, viriler. It is liltinger than bird-songs and lustier than roarings of mountain cataracts. Music of the world!-- A little door inside me opens to those Voices. My little door opens at the first shriek of the first child out of doors, and I hear not only the hundreds of vivid piercing Voices but more--their far-off echoes. They are the Voices of children, children light-held in crude cold innocence. The eyes of the children are clear--their impulses and instincts rule their little lives. They are yet untouched by the tiredness and terror and shame and sorrow of being human beings. So the Sound of their Voices sweeps out resistless and regardless as the sea or the sun which makes nothing of its own strength or weakness. And through my little spirit-door I hear them, the poignant common little sweet Voices, echoing, flying away, farther and farther: along the roads: over plains and hills: through valleys long worldly distances from here: through streets: through stone buildings and dingy courts: through big rich houses: through homes of comfort and homes of misery and homes of desolate smugness: into lifeless social foyers: into learned places: into law-courts and cabinet-rooms of nations: into graveyards and churches and down into dead-vaults: into theatres: into clinics: into shops: into factories: into dives and stews and brothels and at lustful doorsteps: into hotels and on sport-courses: into market-places and across battle-fields, round monuments and in towers and in forts and in prisons and in dungeons:--there along fly their Voices. It is a brave, brave Sound, and an insistent: nothing stops it. It is triumph. The noise of the noisiest battle dies away in time. The pounding of ocean-surf on the rocks and of electric thunder in the clouds are lasting only with this earth. But brave wild Voices of children fly on and on, outlasting a million earths, silencing aeons of thunder, floating strongly back of the stars. The voices of men--wizards, monks, artisans, thieves--echo no farther than their talking conceits: even of poets except as they catch up into their sonance something to interpret a cool gay clamor of child-Voices. The voices of women--singing women, lovely women, angelic honest women--die with their bodies: even of mothers of the children except as they follow with their own echo, by dream and shadow, the thronging child-Voices as they go.