Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/116

 To-morrow

VERY day at half-past ten and half-past two I hear the high shrill sweet choric Voices of hundreds of children shaking the thin clear air.

A public school is but a block from here. The children rush out of it, a hilarious noisy crowd, for a few mid-morning and mid-afternoon minutes. So those minutes, from hearing their Voices day after day, and day after day, have become lyric to my inner-listening.

Their Voices stir me, rouse me, speak to me with old very joyous, very woful meanings.

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.