Now Playing: Bach, Mass in B minor, "Gloria/Quoniam to solus sanctus."

Up early this morning, I'm working on poetry for a project for my Writing from the Earth class. I randomly stumbled across an online edition of The owl and the nightingale, a 13th-century Middle English poem, with this lovely paragraph in the introduction:

Despite their worth, her activity and her personality contained elements repellent to all well-balanced beings…. Mere seriousness or usefulness, even the happiness that comes of serious living and practical service, was not enough. The right life was made up of these and something more. The life of the owl needed as its complement the life of the nightingale, the joy of being and doing for the sake of being and doing. God made the world not merely for lamenting and for consoling distress, but as well for rejoicing and for sympathy with joy. Life was serious if rightly led, and it demanded the utmost of all who partook in it: yet that very seriousness could not exist healthily and healthfully in its common, less in its highest, aspirations and endeavors, without joyousness. – Introduction to The owl and the nightingale ed. John Edwin Wells (1907).