As long, however, as we impose our own needs and our own desires on the indifferent tribes of the earth and air, so long shall we take this or that comrade of the elements and say it is the voice of Peace, or War, or Love, or Joy. March, we say, is the month of gladness. A new spirit is awake, is abroad. The thrush and the blackbird are _our_ clarions of rejoicing. The lark, supremely, is _our_ lyric of joy. Joy, the poet tells us, is the Mother of Spring, and of Joy has it not been said that there is no more ancient God? What fitter symbol for this divine uplift of the year than this bird whose ecstasy in song makes the very word Spring an intoxication in our ears? We have a Gaelic legend that the first word of God spoken to the world became a lark ... the eternal joy translated into a moment’s ecstasy. But further back has not Aristophanes told us that the lark existed, not only before the green grass where it nests or the blue lift into which it soars, but before Zeus and Kronos themselves, before the Creation, before Time. It is but a symbol of the divine Joy which is Life: that most ancient Breath, that Spirit whose least thought is Creation, whose least motion is Beauty, whose least glance is that eternal miracle which we, seeing dimly and in the rhythmic rise of the long cadence of the hours, call by a word of out-welling, of measureless effluence, the Spring. THE TRIBE OF THE PLOVER In the preceding paper I alluded to a Galloway rhyme-- “Whaup, Whimbrel, an’ Plover, Whan these whustle the worst o’t ’s over.”