Every 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.