CHAPTER IV.

In his Poem, entitled, "The Omnipresence of the Deity," Mr Robert

Montgomery writes thus,--

"Lo! there, in yonder fancy-haunted room,

What mutter'd curses trembled through the gloom,

When pale, and shiv'ring, and bedew'd with fear,

The dying sceptic felt his hour drew near!

From his parch'd tongue no sainted murmurs fell,

No bright hopes kindled at his faint farewell;

As the last throes of death convulsed his cheek,

He gnash'd, and scowl'd, and raised a hideous shriek,

Rounded his eyes into a ghastly glare,

Lock'd his white lips--and all was mute despair!

Go, child of darkness, see a Christian die;

No horror pales his lip, or rolls his eye;

No dreadful doubts, or dreamy terrors, start

The hope Religion pillows on his heart,

When with a dying hand he waves adieu

To all who love so well, and weep so true:

Meek as an infant to the mother's breast

Turns fondly longing for its wonted rest,

He pants for where congenial spirits stray,

Turns to his God, and sighs his soul away."

First, as to the execution of this passage. "Fancy-haunted" may do, but

it is not a sufficiently strong expression for the occasion. In every

such picture as this, we demand appropriate vigour in every word

intended to be vigorous, and which is important to the effect of the

whole.

"From his parch'd tongue no sainted murmurs fell,

No bright hopes kindled at his faint farewell."

How could they?--The line but one before is,

"What mutter'd curses trembled through the gloom."

This, then, is purely ridiculous, and we cannot doubt that Mr Montgomery

will confess that it is so; but independently of that, he is describing

the deathbed of a person who, _ex hypothesi_, could have no bright

hopes, could breathe no sainted murmurs. He might as well, in a

description of a negress, have told us that she had no long, smooth,

shining, yellow locks--no light-blue eyes--no ruddy and rosy cheeks--nor

yet a bosom white as snow. The execution of the picture of the Christian

is not much better--it is too much to use, in the sense here given to

them, no fewer than three verbs--"pales"--"rolls"--"starts," in four

lines.

"The hope Religion pillows on his heart,"

is not a good line, and it is a borrowed one.

"When with a dying hand he waves adieu,"

conveys an unnatural image. Dying men do not act so. Not thus are taken

eternal farewells. The motion in the sea-song was more natural--

"She waved adieu, and kiss'd her lily hand."

"_Weeps so true_," means nothing, nor is it English. The grammar is not

good of,

"He _pants for where_ congenial spirits"--

Neither is the word _pants_ by any means the right one; and in such an

awful crisis, admire who may the simile of the infant longing for its

mother's breast, we never can in its present shape; while there is the

line,

"Turns to his God, _and sighs his soul away_;"

a prettiness we very much dislike--alter one word, and it would be

voluptuous--nor do we hesitate to call the passage a puling one

altogether, and such as ought to be expunged from all paper.

But that is not all we have to say against it--it is radically and

essentially bad, because it either proves nothing of what it is meant to

prove--or what no human being on earth ever disputed. Be fair--be just

in all that concerns religion. Take the best--the most moral, if the

word can be used--the most enlightened Sceptic, and the true Christian,

and compare their deathbeds. That of the Sceptic will be disturbed or

disconsolate--that of the Christian confiding or blessed. But to

contrast the deathbed of an absolute maniac, muttering curses, gnashing

and scowling, and "raising a hideous shriek," and "rounding his eyes

with a ghastly glare," and convulsed, too, with severe bodily

throes--with that of a convinced, confiding, and conscientious

Christian, a calm, meek, undoubting believer, happy in the "hope

religion pillows on his heart," and enduring no fleshly agonies, can

serve no purpose under the sun. Men who have the misery of being

unbelievers, are at all times to be pitied--most of all in their last

hours; but though theirs be then dim melancholy, or dark despair, they

express neither the one state nor the other by mutterings, curses, and

hideous shrieks. Such a wretch there may sometimes be--like him "who

died and made no sign;" but there is no more sense in seeking to

brighten the character of the Christian by its contrast with that of

such an Atheist, than by contrast with a fiend to brighten the beauty of

an angel.

Finally, are the deathbeds of all good Christians so calm as this--and

do they all thus meekly

"Pant for where congenial spirits stray,"

a line, besides its other vice, most unscriptural? Congenial spirit is

not the language of the New Testament. Alas! for poor weak human nature

at the dying hour! Not even can the Christian always then retain

unquaking trust in his Saviour! "This is the blood that was shed for

thee," are words whose mystery quells not always nature's terror. The

Sacrament of the Lord's Supper is renewed in vain--and he remembers, in

doubt and dismay, words that, if misunderstood, would appal all the

Christian world--"My God--my God--why hast thou forsaken me?" Perhaps,

before the Faith, that has waxed dim and died in his brain distracted by

pain, and disease, and long sleeplessness, and a weight of woe--for he

is a father who strove in vain to burst those silken ties, that winding

all round and about his very soul and his very body, bound him to those

dear little ones, who are of the same spirit and the same flesh,--we

say, before that Faith could, by the prayers of holy men, be restored

and revivified, and the Christian once more comforted by thinking on

Him, who for all human beings did take upon him the rueful burden and

agonies of the Cross--Death may have come for his prey, and left the

chamber, of late so hushed and silent, at full liberty to weep! Enough

to know, that though Christianity be divine, we are human,--that the

vessel is weak in which that glorious light may be enshrined--weak as

the potter's clay--and that though Christ died to save sinners, sinners

who believe in Him, and therefore shall not perish, may yet lose hold of

the belief when their understandings are darkened by the shadow of

death, and, like Peter losing faith and sinking in the sea, feel

themselves descending into some fearful void, and cease here to be, ere

they find voice to call on the name of the Lord--"Help, or I perish!"

What may be the nature of the thoughts and feelings of an Atheist,

either when in great joy or great sorrow, full of life and the spirit of

life, or in mortal malady and environed with the toils of death, it

passes the power of our imagination even dimly to conceive; nor are we

convinced that there ever was an utter Atheist. The thought of a God

will enter in, barred though the doors be both of the understanding and

the heart, and all the windows supposed to be blocked up against the

light. The soul, blind and deaf as it may often be, cannot always resist

the intimations all life long, day and night, forced upon it from the

outer world; its very necessities, nobler far than those of the body,

even when most degraded, importunate when denied their manna, are to it

oftentimes a silent or a loud revelation. Then, not to feel and think as

other beings do with "discourse of reason," is most hard and difficult

indeed, even for a short time, and on occasions of very inferior moment.

Being men, we are carried away, willing or unwilling, and often

unconsciously, by the great common instinct; we keep sailing with the

tide of humanity, whether in flow or ebb--fierce as demons and the sons

of perdition, if that be the temper of the congregating hour--mild and

meek as Pity, or the new-born babe, when the afflatus of some divine

sympathy has breathed through the multitude, nor one creature escaped

its influence, like a spring day that steals through a murmuring forest,

till not a single tree, even in the darkest nook, is without some touch

of the season's sunshine. Think, then, of one who would fain be an

Atheist, conversing with the "sound, healthy children of the God of

heaven!" To his reason, which is his solitary pride, arguments might in

vain be addressed, for he exults in being "an Intellectual All in All,"

and is a bold-browed sophist to daunt even the eyes of Truth--eyes which

can indeed "outstare the eagle" when their ken is directed to heaven,

but which are turned away in aversion from the human countenance that

would dare to deny God. Appeal not to the intellect of such a man, but

to his heart; and let not even that appeal be conveyed in any fixed form

of words--but let it be an appeal of the smiles and tears of

affectionate and loving lips and eyes--of common joys and common griefs,

whose contagion is often felt, beyond prevention or cure, where two or

three are gathered together--among families thinly sprinkled over the

wilderness, where, on God's own day, they repair to God's own house, a

lowly building on the brae, which the Creator of suns and systems

despiseth not, nor yet the beatings of the few contrite hearts therein

assembled to worship Him--in the cathedral's "long-drawn aisles and

fretted vaults"--in mighty multitudes all crowded in silence, as beneath

the shadow of a thunder-cloud, to see some one single human being

die--or swaying and swinging backwards and forwards, and to and fro, to

hail a victorious armament returning from the war of Liberty, with him

who hath "taken the start of this majestic world" conspicuous from afar

in front, encircled with music, and with the standard of his unconquered

country afloat above his head. Thus, and by many thousand other potent

influences for ever at work, and from which the human heart can never

make its safe escape, let it flee to the uttermost parts of the earth,

to the loneliest of the multitude of the isles of the sea, are men, who

vainly dream that they are Atheists, forced to feel God. Nor happens

this but rarely--nor are such "angel-visits few and far between." As the

most cruel have often, very often, thoughts tender as dew, so have the

most dark often, very often, thoughts bright as day. The sun's golden

finger writes the name of God on the clouds, rising or setting, and the

Atheist, falsely so called, starts in wonder and in delight, which his

soul, because it is immortal, cannot resist, to behold that Bible

suddenly opened before his eyes on the sky. Or some old, decrepit,

greyhaired crone, holds out her shrivelled hand, with dim eyes patiently

fixed on his, silently asking charity--silently, but in the holy name of

God; and the Atheist, taken unawares, at the very core of his heart bids

"God bless her," as he relieves her uncomplaining miseries.

If then Atheists do exist, and if their deathbeds may be described for

the awful or melancholy instruction of their fellow-men, let them be

such Atheists as those whom, let us not hesitate to say, we may

blamelessly love with a troubled affection; for our Faith may not have

preserved us from sins from which they are free--and we may give even to

many of the qualities of their most imperfect and unhappy characters

almost the name of virtues. No curses on their deathbeds will they be

heard to utter. No black scowlings--no horrid gnashing of teeth--no

hideous shriekings will there appal the loving ones who watch and weep

by the side of him who is dying disconsolate. He will hope, and he will

fear, now that there is a God indeed everywhere present--visible now in

the tears that fall, audible now in the sighs that breathe for his

sake--in the still small voice. That Being forgets not those by whom he

has been forgotten; least of all, the poor "Fool who has said in his

heart there is no God," and who knows at last that a God there is, not

always in terror and trembling, but as often perhaps in the assurance of

forgiveness, which, undeserved by the best of the good, may not be

withheld even from the worst of the bad, if the thought of a God and a

Saviour pass but for a moment through the darkness of the departing

spirit--like a dove shooting swiftly, with its fair plumage, through the

deep but calm darkness that follows the subsided storm.

So, too, with respect to Deists. Of unbelievers in Christianity there

are many kinds--the reckless, the ignorant, the callous, the confirmed,

the melancholy, the doubting, the despairing--the _good_. At their

deathbeds, too, may the Christian poet, in imagination, take his

stand--and there may he even hear

"The still sad music of humanity,

Not harsh nor grating, but of amplest power

To soften and subdue!"

Oftener all the sounds and sights there will be full of most rueful

anguish; and that anguish will groan in the poet's lays when his human

heart, relieved from its load of painful sympathies, shall long

afterwards be inspired with the pity of poetry, and sing in elegies,

sublime in their pathos, the sore sufferings and the dim distress that

clouded and tore the dying spirit, longing, but all unable--profound

though its longings be--as life's daylight is about to close upon that

awful gloaming, and the night of death to descend in oblivion--to

believe in the Redeemer.

Why then turn but to such deathbed, if indeed religion, and not

superstition, described that scene--as that of Voltaire? Or even of

Rousseau, whose dying eyes sought, in the last passion, the sight of the

green earth, and the blue skies, and the sun shining so brightly, when

all within the brain of his worshipper was fast growing dimmer and more

dim--when all the unsatisfied spirit, that scarcely hoped a future life,

knew not how it could ever take farewell of the present with tenderness

enough, and enough of yearning and craving after its disappearing

beauty, and when as if the whole earth were at that moment beloved even

as his small peculiar birthplace--

"Et dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos."

The Christian poet, in his humane wisdom, will, for instruction's sake

of his fellow-men, and for the discovery and the revealment of

ever-sacred truth, keep aloof from such death-beds as these, or take his

awful stand beside them to drop the perplexed and pensive tear. For we

know not what it is that we either hear or see; and holy Conscience,

hearing through a confused sound, and seeing through an obscure light,

fears to condemn, when perhaps she ought only to pity--to judge another,

when perhaps it is her duty but to use that inward eye for her own

delinquencies. He, then, who designs to benefit his kind by strains of

high instruction, will turn from the deathbed of the famous Wit, whose

brilliant fancy hath waxed dim as that of the clown--whose malignant

heart is quaking beneath the Power it had so long derided, with terrors

over which his hated Christian triumphs--and whose intellect, once so

perspicacious that it could see but too well the motes that are in the

sun, the specks and stains that are in the flowing robe of nature

herself--prone, in miserable contradiction to its better being, to turn

them as proofs against the power and goodness of the Holy One who

inhabiteth eternity--is now palsy-stricken as that of an idiot, and

knows not even the sound of the name of its once vain and proud

possessor--when crowded theatres had risen up with one rustle to honour,

and then, with deafening acclamations,

"Raised a mortal to the skies!"

There he is--it matters not now whether on down or straw--stretched,

already a skeleton, and gnashing--may it be in senselessness, for

otherwise what pangs are these!--gnashing his teeth, within lips once so

eloquent, now white with foam and slaver; and the whole mouth, of yore

so musical, grinning ghastly like the fleshless face of fear-painted

death! Is that Voltaire? He who, with wit, thought to shear the Son of

God of all His beams?--with wit, to loosen the dreadful fastenings of

the Cross?--with wit, to scoff at Him who hung thereon, while the blood

and water came from the wound in His blessed side?--with wit, to drive

away those Shadows of Angels, that were said to have rolled off the

stone from the mouth of the sepulchre of the resurrection?--with wit, to

deride the ineffable glory of transfigured Godhead on the Mount, and the

sweet and solemn semblance of the Man Jesus in the garden?--with wit, to

darken all the decrees of Providence?--and with wit,

"To shut the gates of Mercy on mankind?"

Nor yet will the Christian poet long dwell in his religious strains,

though awhile he may linger there, "and from his eyelids wipe the tears

that sacred pity hath engendered," beside the dying couch of Jean Jaques

Rousseau--a couch of turf beneath trees--for he was ever a lover of

Nature, though he loved all things living or dead as madmen love. His

soul, while most spiritual, was sensual still, and with tendrils of

flesh and blood embraced--even as it did embrace the balm-breathing form

of voluptuous woman--the very phantoms of his most etherealised

imagination. Vice stained all his virtues--as roses are seen, in some

certain soils, and beneath some certain skies, always to be blighted,

and their fairest petals to bear on them something like blots of blood.

Over the surface of the mirror of his mind, which reflected so much of

the imagery of man and nature, there was still, here and there, on the

centre or round the edges, rust-spots, that gave back no image, and

marred the proportions of the beauty and the grandeur that yet shone

over the rest of the circle set in the rich carved gold. His disturbed,

and distracted, and defeated friendships, that all vanished in insane

suspicions, and seemed to leave his soul as well satisfied in its fierce

or gloomy void, as when it was filled with airy and glittering visions,

are all gone for ever now. Those many thoughts and feelings--so

melancholy, yet still fair, and lovely, and beautiful--which, like

bright birds encaged, with ruffled and drooping wings, once so apt to

soar, and their music mute, that used to make the wide woods to wring,

were confined within the wires of his jealous heart--have now all flown

away, and are at rest! Who sits beside the wild and wondrous genius,

whose ravings entrance the world? Who wipes the death-sweat from that

capacious forehead, once filled with such a multitude of disordered but

aspiring fancies? Who, that his beloved air of heaven may kiss and cool

it for the last time, lays open the covering that hides the marble

sallowness of Rousseau's sin-and-sorrow-haunted breast? One of Nature's

least-gifted children--to whose eyes nor earth nor heaven ever beamed

with beauty--to whose heart were known but the meanest charities of

nature; yet mean as they were, how much better in such an hour than all

his imaginings most magnificent! For had he not suffered his own

offspring to pass away from his eyes, even like the wood-shadows, only

less beloved and less regretted? And in the very midst of the

prodigality of love and passion, which he had poured out over the

creations of his ever-distempered fancy, let his living children, his

own flesh and blood, disappear as paupers in a chance-governed world? A

world in which neither parental nor filial love were more than the names

of nonentities--Father, Son, Daughter, Child, but empty syllables, which

philosophy heeded not--or rather loved them in their emptiness, but

despised, hated, or feared them, when for a moment they seemed pregnant

with a meaning from heaven, and each in its holy utterance signifying

God!

No great moral or religious lesson can well be drawn, or say rather so

well, from such anomalous deathbeds, as from those of common

unbelievers. To show, in all its divine power, the blessedness of the

Christian's faith, it must be compared, rather than contrasted, with the

faith of the best and wisest of Deists. The ascendancy of the heavenly

over the earthly will then be apparent--as apparent as the superior

lustre of a star to that of a lighted-up window in the night. For above

all other things in which the Christian is happier than the Deist--with

the latter, the life beyond the grave is but a dark hope--to the former,

"immortality has been brought to light by the Gospel." That difference

embraces the whole spirit. It may be less felt--less seen when life is

quick and strong; for this earth alone has much and many things to

embrace and enchain our being--but in death the difference is as between

night and day.

* * * * *

NOTE.--In the later editions of "The Omnipresence of the Deity," the

passage animadverted on in the preceding chapter has been altered as

follows:--

"Lo! there, in yonder spectre-haunted room,

What sightless demons horrified the gloom,

When pale and shivering, and bedew'd with fear,

The dying Sceptic felt his hour draw near!

Ere the last throes with anguish lined his cheek,

He yell'd for mercy with a hollow shriek,

Mutter'd some accents of unmeaning prayer,

Lock'd his white lips--let God the rest declare.

Go, child of Darkness! see a Christian die;

No horror pales his lip, or dims his eye;

No fiend-shaped phantoms of destruction start

The hope Religion pillows on his heart,

When with a falt'ring hand he waves adieu

To hearts as tender as their tears are true;

Meek as an infant to the mother's breast

Turns, fondly longing for its wonted rest,

So to our God the yielding soul retires,

And in one sigh of sainted peace expires."

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.

FIRST CANTICLE.

The present Age, which, after all, is a very pretty and pleasant one, is

feelingly alive and widely awake to the manifold delights and advantages

with which the study of Natural History swarms, and especially that

branch of it which unfolds the character and habits, physical, moral,

and intellectual, of those most interesting and admirable

creatures--Birds. It is familiar not only with the shape and colour of

beak, bill, claw, talon, and plume, but with the purposes for which they

are designed, and with the instincts which guide their use in the

beautiful economy of all-gracious Nature. We remember the time when the

very word Ornithology would have required interpretation in mixed

company; when a naturalist was looked on as a sort of out-of-the-way but

amiable monster. Now, one seldom meets with man, woman, or child, who

does not know a hawk from a handsaw, or even, to adopt the more learned

reading, from a heron-shew; a black swan is no longer erroneously

considered a _rara avis_ any more than a black sheep; while the Glasgow

Gander himself, no longer apocryphal, has taken his place in the

national creed, belief in his existence being merely blended with wonder

at his magnitude, and some surprise perhaps among the scientific that he

should be as yet the sole specimen of that enormous Anser.

The chief cause of this advancement of knowledge in one of its most

delightful departments, has been the gradual extension of its study from

stale books written by men, to that book ever fresh from the hand of

God. And the second--another yet the same--has been the gradual change

wrought by a philosophical spirit in the observation, delineation, and

arrangement of the facts and laws with which the science is conversant,

and which it exhibits in the most perfect harmony and order. Neophytes

now range for themselves, according to their capacities and

opportunities, the fields, woods, rivers, lakes, and seas; and

proficients, no longer confining themselves to mere nomenclature, enrich

their works with anecdotes and traits of character, which, without

departure from truth, have imbued bird-biography with the double charm

of reality and romance.

Compare the intensity and truth of any natural knowledge insensibly

acquired by observation in very early youth, with that corresponding to

it picked up in later life from books! In fact, the habit of

distinguishing between things as different, or of similar forms,

colours, and characters, formed in infancy, and childhood, and boyhood,

in a free intercourse and communion with Nature, while we are merely

seeking and finding the divine joy of novelty and beauty, perpetually

occurring before our eyes in all her haunts, may be made the foundation

of an accuracy of judgment of inappreciable value as an intellectual

endowment. So entirely is this true, that we know many observant

persons--that is, observant in all things intimately related with their

own pursuits, and with the experience of their own early education--who,

with all the pains they could take in after life, have never been able

to distinguish by name, when they saw them, above half-a-dozen, if so

many, of our British singing-birds; while as to knowing them by their

song, that is wholly beyond the reach of their uninstructed ear, and a

shilfa chants to them like a yellow yoldrin. On seeing a small bird

peeping out of a hole in the eaves, and especially on hearing him

chatter, they shrewdly suspect him to be a sparrow, though it does not

by any means follow that their suspicions are always verified; and

though, when sitting with her white breast so lovely out of the "auld

clay bigging" in the window-corner, he cannot mistake Mistress Swallow,

yet when flitting in fly-search over the stream, and ever and anon

dipping her wing-tips in the lucid coolness, 'tis an equal chance that

he misnames her Miss Marten.

What constant caution is necessary during the naturalist's perusal even

of the very best books! From the very best we can only obtain knowledge

at second-hand, and this, like a story circulated among village gossips,

is more apt to gain in falsehood than in truth, as it passes from one to

another; but in field-study we go at once to the fountain-head, and

obtain our facts pure and unalloyed by the theories and opinions of

previous observers. Hence it is that the utility of books becomes

obvious. You witness with your own eyes some puzzling, perplexing,

strange, and unaccountable--fact; twenty different statements of it have

been given by twenty different ornithologists; you consult them all, and

getting a hint from one, and a hint from another, here a glimmer of

light to be followed, and there a gloom of darkness to be avoided--why,

who knows but that in the end you do yourself solve the mystery, and

absolutely become not only happy but illustrious? People sitting in

their own parlour with their feet on the fender, or in the sanctum of

some museum, staring at stuffed specimens, imagine themselves

naturalists; and in their presumptuous and insolent ignorance, which is

often total, scorn the wisdom of the wanderers of the woods, who have

for many studious and solitary years been making themselves familiar

with all the beautiful mysteries of instinctive life. Take two boys, and

set them respectively to pursue the two plans of study. How puzzled and

perplexed will be the one who pores over the "interminable terms" of a

system in books, having meanwhile no access to, or communion with

nature! The poor wretch is to be pitied--nor is he anything else than a

slave. But the young naturalist who takes his first lessons in the

fields, observing the unrivalled scene which creation everywhere

displays, is perpetually studying in the power of delight and wonder,

and laying up knowledge which can be derived from no other source. The

rich boy is to be envied, nor is he anything else than a king. The one

sits bewildered among words, the other walks enlightened among things;

the one has not even the shadow, the other more than the substance--the

very essence and life of knowledge; and at twelve years old he may be a

better naturalist than ever the mere bookworm will be, were he to

outlive old Tommy Balmer.

In education--late or early--for heaven's sake let us never separate

things and words! They are married in nature; and what God hath put

together let no man put asunder--'tis a fatal divorce. Without things,

words accumulated by misery in the memory, had far better die than drag

out an useless existence in the dark; without words, their stay and

support, things unaccountably disappear out of the store-house, and may

be for ever lost. But bind a thing with a word, a strange link, stronger

than any steel, and softer than any silk, and the captive remains for

ever happy in its bright prison-house. On this principle, it is indeed

surprising at how early an age children can be instructed in the most

interesting parts of natural history--ay, even a babe in arms. Remember

Coleridge's beautiful lines to the Nightingale:--

"That strain again!

Full fain it would delay me! My dear babe,

Who, capable of no articulate sound,

Mars all things with his imitative lisp,

How he would place his hand beside his ear,

His little hand, the small forefinger up,

And bid us listen! _and I deem it wise

To make him Nature's child_."

How we come to love the Birds of Bewick, and White, and the two Wilsons,

and Montague, and Mudie, and Knapp, and Selby, and Swainson, and

Audubon, and many others familiar with their haunts and habits, their

affections and their passions, till we feel that they are indeed our

fellow-creatures, and part of one wise and wonderful system! If there be

sermons in stones, what think ye of the hymns and psalms, matin and

vesper, of the lark, who at heaven's gate sings--of the wren, who pipes

her thanksgivings as the slant sunbeam shoots athwart the mossy portal

of the cave, in whose fretted roof she builds her nest above the

waterfall! In cave-roof? Yea--we have seen it so--just beneath the

cornice. But most frequently we have detected her procreant cradle on

old mossy stump, mouldering walls or living rock--sometimes in cleft of

yew-tree or hawthorn--for hang the globe with its imperceptible orifice

in the sunshine or the storm, and St. Catharine sits within heedless of

the outer world, counting her beads with her sensitive breast that

broods in bliss over the priceless pearls.

Ay, the men we have named, and many other blameless idolaters of Nature,

have worshipped her in a truly religious spirit, and have taught us

their religion. All our great poets have loved the _Minnesingers_ of the

woods--Thomson, and Cowper, and Wordsworth, as dearly as Spenser, and

Shakespeare, and Milton. From the inarticulate language of the groves,

they have inhaled the enthusiasm that inspired some of the finest of

their own immortal strains. "Lonely wanderer of Nature" must every poet

be--and though often self-wrapt his wanderings through a spiritual world

of his own, yet as some fair flower silently asks his eye to look on it,

some glad bird his ear solicits with a song, how intense is then his

perception--his emotion how profound--while his spirit is thus appealed

to, through all its human sensibilities, by the beauty and the joy

perpetual even in the most solitary places!

Our moral being owes deep obligation to all who assist us to study

nature aright; for believe us, it is high and rare knowledge to know and

to have the true and full use of our eyes. Millions go to the grave in

old age without ever having learned it; they were just beginning,

perhaps, to acquire it when they sighed to think that "they who look out

of the windows were darkened;" and that, while they had been instructed

how to look, sad shadows had fallen on the whole face of Nature, and

that the time for those intuitions was gone for ever. But the science of

seeing has now found favour in our eyes; and blessings be with them who

can discover, discern, and describe the least as the greatest of

Nature's works--who can see as distinctly the finger of God in the

lustre of the humming-bird murmuring round a rose-bush, as in that of

the star of Jove shining sole in heaven.

Take up now almost any book you may on any branch of Natural History,

and instead of the endless, dry details of imaginary systems and

classifications, in which the ludicrous littlenesses of man's vain

ingenuity used to be set up as a sort of symbolical scheme of revelation

of the sublime varieties of the inferior--as we choose to call

it--creation of God, you find high attempts in an humble spirit rather

to illustrate tendencies, and uses, and harmonies, and order, and

design. With some glorious exceptions, indeed, the naturalists of the

day gone by showed us a science that was but a skeleton--little but dry

bones; with some inglorious exceptions, indeed, the naturalists of the

day that is now, have been desirous to show us a living, breathing, and

moving body--to explain, as far as they might, its mechanism and its

spirit. Ere another century elapse, how familiar may men be with all the

families of the flowers of the field, and the birds of the air, with

all the interdependencies of their characters and their kindreds,

perhaps even with the mystery of that instinct which now is seen working

wonders, not only beyond the power of reason to comprehend, but of

imagination to conceive!

How deeply enshrouded are felt to be the mysteries of Nature, when,

thousands of years after Aristotle, we hear Audubon confess his utter

ignorance of what migrations and non-migrations mean--that 'tis hard to

understand why such general laws as these should be--though their benign

operation is beautifully seen in the happiness provided alike for

all--whether they reside in their own comparatively small localities,

nor ever wish to leave them--or at stated seasons instinctively fly away

over thousands of miles, to drop down and settle for a while on some

spot adapted to their necessities, of which they had prescience afar

off, though seemingly wafted thither like leaves upon the wind! Verily,

as great a mystery is that Natural Religion by the theist studied in

woods and on mountains and by sea-shores, as that Revelation which

philosophers will not believe because they do not understand--"the

blinded bigot's scorn" deriding man's highest and holiest

happiness--Faith!

We must not now go a bird-nesting, but first time we do we shall put

Bishop Mant's "Months" in our pocket. The good Bishop--who must have

been an indefatigable bird-nester in his boyhood--though we answer for

him that he never stole but one egg out of four, and left undisturbed

the callow young--treats of those beauteous and wondrous structures in a

style that might make Professor Rennie jealous, who has written like a

Vitruvius on the architecture of birds. He expatiates with uncontrolled

delight on the unwearied activity of the architects, who, without any

apprenticeship to the trade, are journeymen, nay, master-builders, the

first spring of their full-fledged lives; with no other tools but a

bill, unless we count their claws, which however seem, and that only in

some kinds, to be used but in carrying materials. With their breasts and

whole bodies, indeed, most of them round off the soft insides of their

procreant cradles, till they fit each brooding bunch of feathers to a

hairbreadth, as it sits close and low on eggs or eyeless young, a

_leetle_ higher raised up above their gaping babies, as they wax from

downy infancy into plumier childhood, which they do how swiftly! and

how soon have they flown! You look some sunny morning into the bush, and

the abode in which they seemed so _cosy_ the day before is utterly

forsaken by the joyous ingrates--now feebly fluttering in the narrow

grove, to them a wide world teeming with delight and wonder--to be

thought of never more. With all the various materials used by them in

building their different domiciles, the Bishop is as familiar as with

the sole material of his own wig--though, by the by, last time we had

the pleasure of seeing and sitting by him, he wore his own hair--"but

that not much;" for, like our own, his sconce was bald, and, like it,

showed the organ of constructiveness as fully developed as Christopher

or a Chaffinch. He is perfectly well acquainted, too, with all the

diversities of their modes of building--their orders of

architecture--and eke with all those of situation chosen by the

kinds--whether seemingly simple, in cunning that deceives by a show of

carelessness and heedlessness of notice, or with craft of concealment

that baffles the most searching eye--hanging their beloved secret in

gloom not impervious to sun and air--or, trustful in man's love of his

own home, affixing the nest beneath the eaves, or in the flowers of the

lattice, kept shut for their sakes, or half-opened by fair hands of

virgins whose eyes gladden with heart-born brightness as each morning

they mark the growing beauty of the brood, till they smile to see one

almost as large as its parent sitting on the rim of the nest, when all

at once it hops over, and, as it flutters away like a leaf, seems

surprised that it can fly!

Yet there are still a few wretched quacks among us whom we may some day

perhaps drive down into the dirt. There are idiots who will not even

suffer sheep, cows, horses, and dogs, to escape the disgusting

perversions of their anile anecdotage--who, by all manner of drivelling

lies, libel even the common domestic fowl, and impair the reputation of

the bantam. Newspapers are sometimes so infested by the trivial trash,

that in the nostrils of a naturalist they smell on the breakfast-table

like rotten eggs; and there are absolutely volumes of the slaver bound

in linen, and lettered with the names of the expectorators on the

outside, resembling annuals--we almost fear with prints. In such hands,

the ass loses his natural attributes, and takes the character of his

owner; and as the anecdote-monger is seen astride on his cuddy, you

wonder what may be the meaning of the apparition, for we defy you to

distinguish the one donk from the other, the rider from the ridden,

except by the more inexpressive countenance of the one, and the ears of

the other in uncomputed longitude dangling or erect.

We can bear this libellous gossip least patiently of all with birds. If

a ninny have some stories about a wonderful goose, let him out with

them, and then waddle away with his fat friend into the stackyard--where

they may take sweet counsel together in the "fause-house." Let him, with

open mouth and grozet eyes, say what he chooses of "Pretty Poll," as she

clings in her cage, by beak or claws, to stick or wire, and in her

naughty vocabulary let him hear the impassioned eloquence of an Aspasia

inspiring a Pericles. But, unless his crown itch for the Crutch, let him

spare the linnet on the briery bush among the broom--the laverock on the

dewy braird or in the rosy cloud--the swan on her shadow--the eagle in

his eyrie, in the sun, or at sea.

The great ornithologists and the true are the authorities that are

constantly correcting those errors of popular opinion about the fowls of

the air, which in every country, contrary to the evidence of the senses,

and in spite of observations that may be familiar to all, gain credence

with the weak and ignorant, and in process of time compose even a sort

of system of the vilest superstition. It would be a very curious inquiry

to trace the operation of the causes that, in different lands, have

produced with respect to birds national prejudices of admiration or

contempt, love or even hatred; and in doing so, we should have to open

up some strange views of the influence of imagination on the head and

heart. It may be remarked that an excuse will be generally found for

such fallacies in the very sources from which they spring; but no excuse

can be found--on the contrary, in every sentence the fool scribbles, a

glaring argument is shown in favour of his being put to a lingering and

cruel death--the fool who keeps gossiping every week in the year,

penny-a-line-wise, with a gawky face and a mawkish mind, about God's

creatures to whom reason has been denied, but instinct given, in order

that they may be happy on moor and mountain, in the hedge-roots and on

the tops of heaven-kissing trees--by the side of rills whose sweet low

voice gives no echo in the wild, and on the hollow thunder of seas on

which they sit in safety around the sinking ship, or from all her

shrieks flee away to some island and are at rest.

Turn to the true Ornithologist, and how beautiful, each in the

adaptation of its own structure to its own life, every bird that walks

the land, wades the water, or skims the air! In his pages, pictured by

pen or pencil, all is wondrous--as nature ever is to

"The quiet eye

That broods and sleeps on its own heart,"

even while gazing on the inferior creatures of that creation to which we

belong, and are linked in being's mysterious chain--till our breath,

like theirs, expire. All is wondrous--but nothing monstrous in his

delineations--for the more we know of nature in her infinite varieties,

her laws reveal themselves to us in more majestic simplicity, and we are

inspired with awe, solemn but sweet, by the incomprehensible, yet in

part comprehended, magnificence of Truth. The writings of such men are

the gospel of nature--and if the apocrypha be bound up along with

it--'tis well; for in it, too, there is felt to be inspiration--and

when, in good time, purified from error, the leaves all make but one

Bible.

Hark to the loud, clear, mellow, bold song of the BLACKBIRD. There he

flits along upon a strong wing, with his yellow bill visible in

distance, and disappears in the silent wood. Not long silent. It is a

spring-day in our imagination--his clay-wall nest holds his mate at the

foot of the Silver-fir, and he is now perched on its pinnacle. That

thrilling hymn will go vibrating down the stem till it reaches her

brooding breast. The whole vernal air is filled with the murmur and the

glitter of insects; but the blackbird's song is over all other symptoms

of love and life, and seems to call upon the leaves to unfold into

happiness. It is on that one Tree-top, conspicuous among many thousands

on the fine breast of wood--here and there, a pine mingling not unmeetly

with the prevailing oak--that the forest-minstrel sits in his

inspirations. The rock above is one which we have often climbed. There

lies the glorious Loch and all its islands--one dearer than the rest to

eye and imagination, with its old Religious House--year after year

crumbling away unheeded into more entire ruin. Far away, a sea of

mountains, with all their billowing summits distinct in the sky, and now

uncertain and changeful as the clouds. Yonder Castle stands well on the

peninsula among the trees which the herons inhabit. Those coppice-woods

on the other shore, stealing up to the heathery rocks and sprinkled

birches, are the haunts of the roe. That great glen, that stretches

sullenly away into the distant darkness, has been for ages the birth and

the death-place of the red-deer. The cry of an Eagle! There he hangs

poised in the sunlight, and now he flies off towards the sea. But again

the song of our BLACKBIRD rises like "a steam of rich distilled

perfumes," and our heart comes back to him upon the pinnacle of his own

Home-tree. The source of song is yet in the happy creature's heart--but

the song itself has subsided, like a rivulet that has been rejoicing in

a sudden shower among the hills; the bird drops down among the balmy

branches, and the other faint songs which that bold anthem had drowned,

are heard at a distance, and seem to encroach every moment on the

silence.

You say you greatly prefer the song of the THRUSH. Pray, why set such

delightful singers by the ears? We dislike the habit that very many

people have of trying everything by a scale. Nothing seems to them to be

good positively--only relatively. Now, it is true wisdom to be charmed

with what is charming, to live in it for the time being, and compare the

emotion with no former emotion whatever--unless it be unconsciously in

the working of an imagination set agoing by delight. Although,

therefore, we cannot say that we prefer the Thrush to the Blackbird, yet

we agree with you in thinking him a most delightful bird. Where a Thrush

is, we defy you to anticipate his song in the morning. He is indeed an

early riser. By the way, Chanticleer is far from being so. You hear him

crowing away from shortly after midnight, and, in your simplicity, may

suppose him to be up and strutting about the premises. Far from it;--he

is at that very moment perched in his polygamy, between two of his

fattest wives. The sultan will perhaps not stir a foot for several hours

to come; while all the time the Thrush, having long ago rubbed his eyes,

is on his topmost twig, broad awake, and charming the ear of dawn with

his beautiful vociferation. During mid-day he disappears, and is mute;

but again, at dewy even, as at dewy morn, he pours his pipe like a

prodigal, nor ceases sometimes when night has brought the moon and

stars.

Best beloved, and most beautiful of all Thrushes that ever broke from

the blue-spotted shell!--thou who, for five springs, hast "hung thy

procreant cradle" among the roses, and honeysuckles, and ivy, and

clematis that embower in bloom the lattice of our Cottage-study--how

farest thou now in the snow? Consider the whole place as your own, my

dear bird; and remember, that when the gardener's children sprinkle food

for you and yours all along your favourite haunts, that it is done by

our orders. And when all the earth is green again, and all the sky blue,

you will welcome us to our rural domicile, with light feet running

before us among the winter leaves, and then skim away to your new nest

in the old spot, then about to be somewhat more cheerful in the

undisturbing din of the human life within the flowery walls.

Nay--how can we forget what is for ever before our eyes! Blessed be

Thou--on thy shadowy bed, belonging equally to earth and heaven--O Isle!

who art called the Beautiful! and who of thyself canst make all the Lake

one floating Paradise--even were her shore-hills sylvan no

more--groveless the bases of all her remoter mountains--effaced that

loveliest splendour, sun-painted on their sky-piercing cliffs. And can

it be that we have forsaken Thee! Fairy-land and Love-land of our youth!

Hath imagination left our brain, and passion our heart, so that we can

bear banishment from Thee and yet endure life! Such loss not yet is

ours--witness these gushing tears. But Duty, "stern daughter of the

voice of God," dooms us to breathe our morning and evening orisons far

from hearing and sight of Thee, whose music and whose light continue

gladdening other ears and other eyes--as if ours had there never

listened--and never gazed. As if thy worshipper--and sun! moon! and

stars! he asks ye if he loved not you and your images--as if thy

worshipper--O Windermere! were--dead! And does duty dispense no reward

to them who sacrifice at her bidding what was once the very soul of

life? Yes! an exceeding great reward--ample as the heart's desire--for

contentment is borne of obedience--where no repinings are, the wings of

thought are imped beyond the power of the eagle's plumes; and happy are

we now--with the human smiles and voices we love even more than thine,

thou fairest region of nature! happier than when we rippled in our

pinnace through the billowy moonlight--than when we sat alone on the

mountain within the thunder-cloud.

Why do the songs of the Blackbird and Thrush make us think of the

songless STARLING? It matters not. We do think of him, and see him

too--a lovable bird, and his abode is majestic. What an object of wonder

and awe is an old Castle to a boyish imagination! Its height how

dreadful! up to whose mouldering edges his fear carries him, and hangs

him over the battlements! What beauty in those unapproachable wall

flowers, that cast a brightness on the old brown stones of the edifice,

and make the horror pleasing! That sound so far below, is the sound of a

stream the eye cannot reach--of a waterfall echoing for ever among the

black rocks and pools. The schoolboy knows but little of the history of

the old Castle--but that little is of war, and witchcraft, and

imprisonment, and bloodshed. The ghostly glimmer of antiquity appals

him--he visits the ruin only with a companion, and at midday. There and

then it was that we first saw a Starling. We heard something wild and

wonderful in their harsh scream, as they sat upon the edge of the

battlements, or flew out of the chinks and crannies. There were Martens

too, so different in their looks from the pretty

House-Swallows--Jack-daws clamouring afresh at every time we waved our

caps, or vainly slung a pebble towards their nests--and one grove of

elms, to whose top, much lower than the castle, came, ever and anon,

some noiseless Heron from the Muirs.

Ruins! Among all the external objects of imagination, surely they are

most affecting! Some sumptuous edifice of a former age, still standing

in its undecayed strength, has undoubtedly a great command over us, from

the ages that have flowed over it; but the mouldering edifice which

Nature has begun to win to herself, and to dissolve into her own bosom,

is far more touching to the heart, and more awakening to the spirit. It

is beautiful in its decay--not merely because green leaves, and wild

flowers, and creeping mosses soften its rugged frowns, but because they

have sown themselves on the decay of greatness; they are monitors to our

fancy, like the flowers on a grave, of the untroubled rest of the dead.

Battlements riven by the hand of time, and cloistered arches reft and

rent, speak to us of the warfare and of the piety of our ancestors, of

the pride of their might, and the consolations of their sorrow: they

revive dim shadows of departed life, evoked from the land of

forgetfulness; but they touch us more deeply when the brightness which

the sun flings on the broken arches, and the warbling of birds that are

nestled in the chambers of princes, and the moaning of winds through the

crevices of towers, round which the surges of war were shattered and

driven back, lay those phantoms again to rest in their silent bed, and

show us, in the monuments of human life and power, the visible footsteps

of Time and Oblivion coming on in their everlasting and irresistible

career, to sweep down our perishable race, and to reduce all the forms

of our momentary being into the undistinguishable elements of their

original nothing.

What is there below the skies like the place of mighty and departed

cities? the vanishing or vanished capitals of renowned empires? There is

no other such desolation. The solitudes of nature may be wild and drear,

but they are not like the solitude from which human glory is swept away.

The overthrow or decay of mighty human power is, of all thoughts that

can enter the mind, the most overwhelming. The whole imagination is at

once stirred by the prostration of that, round which so many high

associations have been collected for so many ages. Beauty seems born but

to perish, and its fragility is seen and felt to be inherent in it by a

law of its being. But power gives stability, as it were, to human

thought, and we forget our own perishable nature in the spectacle of

some abiding and enduring greatness. Our own little span of years--our

own confined region of space--are lost in the endurance and far-spread

dominion of some mighty state, and we feel as if we partook of its

deep-set and triumphant strength. When, therefore, a great and ancient

empire falls into pieces, or when fragments of its power are heard rent

asunder, like column after column disparting from some noble edifice, in

sad conviction, we feel as if all the cities of men were built on

foundations beneath which the earthquake sleeps. The same doom seems to

be imminent over all the other kingdoms that still stand; and in the

midst of such changes, and decays, and overthrows--or as we read of

them of old--we look, under such emotions, on all power as

foundationless, and in our wide imagination embrace empires covered only

with the ruins of their desolation. Yet such is the pride of the human

spirit, that it often unconsciously, under the influence of such

imagination, strives to hide from itself the utter nothingness of its

mightiest works. And when all its glories are visibly crumbling into

dust, it creates some imaginary power to overthrow the fabrics of human

greatness--and thus attempts to derive a kind of mournful triumph even

in its very fall. Thus, when nations have faded away in their sins and

vices, rotten at the heart and palsied in all their limbs, we strive not

to think of that sad internal decay, but imagine some mighty power

smiting empires and cutting short the records of mortal magnificence.

Thus Fate and Destiny are said in our imagination to lay our glories

low. Thus, even, the calm and silent air of Oblivion has been thought of

as an unsparing Power. Time, too, though in moral sadness wisely called

a shadow, has been clothed with terrific attributes, and the sweep of

his scythe has shorn the towery diadem of cities. Thus the mere sigh in

which we expire, has been changed into active power--and all the nations

have with one voice called out "Death!" And while mankind have sunk, and

fallen, and disappeared in the helplessness of their own mortal being,

we have still spoken of powers arrayed against them--powers that are in

good truth only another name for their own weaknesses. Thus imagination

is for ever fighting against truth--and even when humbled, her visions

are sublime--conscious even amongst saddest ruin of her own immortality.

Higher and higher than ever rose the tower of Belus, uplifted by

ecstasy, soars the LARK, the lyrical poet of the sky. Listen, listen!

and the more remote the bird the louder seems his hymn in heaven. He

seems, in such altitude, to have left the earth for ever, and to have

forgotten his lowly nest. The primroses and the daisies, and all the

sweet hill-flowers, must be unremembered in that lofty region of light.

But just as the Lark is lost--he and his song together--as if his

orisons had been accepted--both are seen and heard fondly wavering

earthwards, and in a little while he is walking with his graceful crest

contented along the furrows of the brairded corn, or on the clover lea

that in man's memory has not felt the ploughshare; or after a pause, in

which he seems dallying with a home-sick passion, drooping down like one

dead, beside his mate in her shallow nest.

Of all birds to whom is given dominion over the air, the Lark alone lets

loose the power that is in his wings only for the expression of love and

gratitude. The eagle sweeps in passion of hunger--poised in the sky his

ken is searching for prey on sea or sward--his flight is ever animated

by destruction. The dove seems still to be escaping from something that

pursues--afraid of enemies even in the dangerless solitudes where the

old forests repose in primeval peace. The heron, high over houseless

moors, seems at dusk fearful in her laborious flight, and weariedly

gathers her long wings on the tree-top, as if thankful that day is done,

and night again ready with its rest. "The blackening trains o' craws to

their repose" is an image that affects the heart of "mortal man who

liveth here by toil," through sympathy with creatures partaking with him

a common lot. The swallow, for ever on the wing, and wheeling fitfully

before fancy's eyes in element adapted for perpetual pastime, is flying

but to feed--for lack of insects prepares to forsake the land of its

nativity, and yearns for the blast to bear it across the sea. Thou

alone, O Lark! hast wings given thee that thou mayest be perfectly

happy--none other bird but thou can at once soar and sing--and

heavenward thou seemest to be borne, not more by those twinkling pinions

than by the ever-varying, ever-deepening melody effusing from thy heart.

How imagination unifies! then most intensive when working with and in

the heart. Who thinks, when profoundly listening with his eyes shut to

the warbling air, that there is another lark in creation? _The_

lark--sole as the season--or the rainbow. We can fancy he sings to charm

our own particular ear--to please us descends into silence--for our

sakes erects his crest as he walks confidingly near our feet. Not till

the dream-circle, of which ourselves are the centre, dissolves or

subsides, do the fairest sights and sweetest sounds in nature lose their

relationship to us the beholder and hearer, and relapse into the common

property of all our kind. To self appertains the whole sensuous as well

as the whole spiritual world. Egoism is the creator of all beauty and

all bliss, of all hope and of all faith. Even thus doth imagination

unify Sabbath worship. All our beloved Scotland is to the devout breast

on that day one House of God. Each congregation--however far

apart--hears but one hymn--sympathy with all is an all-comprehensive

self--and Christian love of our brethren is evolved from the conviction

that we have ourselves a soul to be saved or lost.

Yet, methinks, imagination loveth just as well to pursue an opposite

process, and to furnish food to the heart in separate picture after

separate picture, one and all imbued not with the same but congenial

sentiment, and therefore succeeding one another at her will, be her will

intimated by mild bidding or imperial command. In such mood imagination,

in still series, visions a thousand parish-kirks, each with its own

characteristic localities, Sabbath-sanctified; distributes the beauty of

that hallowed day in allotments all over the happy land--so that in one

Sabbath there are a thousand Sabbaths.

Keep carolling, then, all together, ye countless Larks, till heaven is

one hymn! Imagination thinks she sees each particular field that sends

up its own singer to the sky--the spot of each particular nest. And of

the many hearts all over loveliest Scotland in the sweet vernal season

a-listening your lays, she is with the quiet beatings of the happy, with

the tumult in them that would wish to break! The little maiden by the

well in the brae-side above the cottage, with the Bible on her knees,

left in tendance of an infant--the palsied crone placed safely in the

sunshine till after service--the sickly student meditating in the shade,

and somewhat sadly thinking that these spring flowers are the last his

eyes may see--lovers walking together on the Sabbath before their

marriage to the house of God--life-wearied wanderers without a

home--remorseful men touched by the innocent happiness they cannot help

hearing in heaven--the sceptic--the unbeliever--the atheist to whom

"hope comes not that comes to all." What different meanings to such

different auditors hath the same music at the same moment filling the

same sky!

Does the Lark ever sing in winter? Ay, sometimes January is visited with

a May-day hour; and in the genial glimpse, though the earth be yet barer

than the sky, the Lark, mute for months, feels called on by the sun to

sing, not so near to heaven's gate, and a shorter than vernal lyric, or

during that sweetest season when neither he nor you can say whether it

is summer or but spring. Unmated yet, nor of mate solicitous, in pure

joy of heart he cannot refrain from ascent and song; but the snow-clouds

look cold, and ere he has mounted as high again as the church-spire, the

aimless impulse dies, and he comes wavering down silently to the yet

unprimrosed brae.

In our boyish days, we never felt that the Spring had really come till

the clear-singing Lark went careering before our gladdened eyes away up

to heaven. Then all the earth wore a vernal look, and the ringing sky

said, "Winter is over and gone." As we roamed, on a holiday, over the

wide pastoral moors, to angle in the lochs and pools, unless the day

were very cloudy the song of some lark or other was still warbling

aloft, and made a part of our happiness. The creature could not have

been more joyful in the skies than we were on the greensward. We, too,

had our wings, and flew through our holiday. Thou soul of glee! who

still leddest our flight in all our pastimes--representative child of

Erin!--wildest of the wild--brightest of the bright--boldest of the

bold!--the lark-loved vales in their stillness were no home for thee.

The green glens of ocean, created by swelling and subsiding storms, or

by calms around thy ship transformed into immeasurable plains, they

filled thy fancy with images dominant over the memories of the steadfast

earth. The petterel and the halcyon were the birds the sailor loved, and

he forgot the songs of the inland woods in the moanings that haunt the

very heart of the tumultuous sea. Of that ship nothing was ever known

but that she perished. He, too, the grave and thoughtful English boy,

whose exquisite scholarship we all so enthusiastically admired, without

one single particle of hopeless envy--and who accompanied us on all our

wildest expeditions, rather from affection to his playmates than any

love of their sports--he who, timid and unadventurous as he seemed to

be, yet rescued little Marian of the Brae from a drowning death when so

many grown-up men stood aloof in selfish fear--gone, too, for ever art

thou, our beloved Edward Harrington! and, after a few brilliant years in

the Oriental clime,

----"on Hoogley's banks afar,

Looks down on thy lone tomb the Evening Star."

How genius shone o'er thy fine features, yet how pale thou ever wast;

thou who sat'st then by the Sailor's side, and listened to his sallies

with a mournful smile--friend! dearest to our soul! loving us far better

than we deserved; for though faultless thou, yet tolerant of all our

frailties--and in those days of hope from thy lips how elevating was

praise! Yet how seldom do we think of thee! For months--years--not at

all--not once--sometimes not even when by some chance we hear your name!

It meets our eyes written on books that once belonged to you and that

you gave us--and yet of yourself it recalls no image. Yet we sank down

to the floor on hearing thou wast dead--ungrateful to thy memory for

many years we were not--but it faded away till we forgot thee utterly,

except when sleep showed thy grave!

Methinks we hear the song of the GREY LINTIE, the darling bird of

Scotland. None other is more tenderly sung of in our old ballads. When

the simple and fervent love-poets of our pastoral times first applied to

the maiden the words, "my bonnie burdie," they must have been thinking

of the Grey Lintie--its plumage ungaudy and soberly pure--its shape

elegant yet unobtrusive--and its song various without any effort--now

rich, gay, sprightly, but never rude nor riotous--now tender, almost

mournful, but never gloomy or desponding. So, too, are all its habits,

endearing and delightful. It is social, yet not averse to solitude,

singing often in groups, and as often by itself in the furze brake, or

on the briery knoll. You often find the lintie's nest in the most

solitary places--in some small self-sown clump of trees by the brink of

a wild hill-stream, or on the tangled edge of a forest; and just as

often you find it in the hedgerow of the cottage garden, or in a bower

within, or even in an old gooseberry bush that has grown into a sort of

tree.

One wild and beautiful place we well remember--ay, the very bush, in

which we first found a grey lintie's nest--for in our parish, from some

cause or other, it was rather a rarish bird. That far-away day is as

distinct as the present NOW. Imagine, friend, first, a little well

surrounded with wild cresses on the moor; something like a rivulet flows

from it, or rather you see a deep tinge of verdure, the line of which,

you believe, must be produced by the oozing moisture--you follow it, and

by-and-by there is a descent palpable to your feet--then you find

yourself between low broomy knolls, that, heightening every step, become

ere long banks, and braes, and hills. You are surprised now to see a

stream, and look round for its source--and there seem now to be a

hundred small sources in fissures and springs on every side--you hear

the murmurs of its course over beds of sand and gravel--and hark, a

waterfall! A tree or two begins to shake its tresses on the horizon--a

birch or a rowan. You get ready your angle--and by the time you have

panniered three dozen, you are at a wooden bridge--you fish the pool

above it with the delicate dexterity of a Boaz, capture the monarch of

the flood, and on lifting your eyes from his starry side as he gasps his

last on the silvery shore, you behold a Cottage, at one gable-end an

ash, at the other a sycamore, and standing perhaps at the lonely door, a

maiden like a fairy or an angel.

This is the Age of Confessions; and why, therefore, may we not make a

confession of first-love? We had finished our sixteenth year--and we

were almost as tall as we are now; for our figure was then straight as

an arrow, and almost like an arrow in its flight. We had given over

bird-nesting--but we had not ceased to visit the dell where first we

found the Grey Lintie's brood. Tale-writers are told by critics to

remember that the young shepherdesses of Scotland are not beautiful as

the fictions of a poet's dream. But SHE was beautiful beyond poetry. She

was so then, when passion and imagination were young--and her image, her

undying, unfading image, is so now, when passion and imagination are

old, and when from eye and soul have disappeared much of the beauty and

glory both of nature and life. We loved her from the first moment that

our eyes met--and we see their light at this moment--the same soft,

burning light, that set body and soul on fire. She was but a poor

shepherd's daughter; but what was that to us, when we heard her voice

singing one of her old plaintive ballads among the braes?--When we sat

down beside her--when the same plaid was drawn over our shoulders in the

rain-storm--when we asked her for a kiss, and was not refused--for what

had she to fear in her beauty, and her innocence, and her filial

piety?--and were we not a mere boy, in the bliss of passion, ignorant of

deceit or dishonour, and with a heart open to the eyes of all as to the

gates of heaven? What music was in that stream! Could "Sabean odours

from the spicy shores of Araby the Blest" so penetrate our soul, as that

breath, balmier than the broom on which we sat, forgetful of all other

human life! Father, mother, brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts, and

cousins, and all the tribe of friends that would throw us off--if we

should be so base and mad as to marry a low-born, low-bred, ignorant,

uneducated, crafty, ay, crafty and designing beggar--were all forgotten

in our delirium--if indeed it were delirium--and not an

everlastingly-sacred devotion to nature and to truth. For in what were

we deluded? A voice--a faint and dewy voice--deadened by the earth that

fills up her grave, and by the turf that, at this very hour, is

expanding its primroses to the dew of heaven--answers, "In nothing!"

"Ha! ha! ha!" exclaims some reader in derision. "Here's an attempt at

the pathetic!--a miserable attempt indeed; for who cares about the death

of a mean hut girl?--we are sick of low life." Why, as to that matter,

who cares for the death of any one mortal being? Who weeps for the death

of the late Emperor of all the Russias? Who wept over Napoleon the

Great? When Chatham or Burke, Pitt or Fox died--don't pretend to tell

lies about a nation's tears. And if yourself, who, perhaps, are not in

low life, were to die in half an hour (don't be alarmed), all who knew

you--except two or three of your bosom friends, who, partly from being

somewhat dull, and partly from wishing to be decent, might whine--would

walk along George Street, at the fashionable hour of three, the very day

after your funeral. Nor would it ever enter their heads to abstain from

a dinner at the Club, ordered perhaps by yourself a fortnight ago, at

which time you were in rude health, merely because you had foolishly

allowed a cold to fasten upon your lungs, and carry you off in the prime

and promise of your professional life. In spite of all your critical

slang, therefore, Mr Editor, or Master Contributor to some Literary

Journal, SHE, though a poor _Scottish Herd_, was most beautiful; and

when, but a week after taking farewell of her, we went, according to our

tryst, to fold her in our arms, and was told by her father that she was

dead,--ay, dead--that she had no existence--that she was in a

coffin,--when we awoke from the dead-fit in which we had lain on the

floor of that cottage, and saw her in her grave-clothes within an hour

to be buried--when we stood at her burial--and knew that never more were

we or the day to behold her presence--we learned then how immeasurably

misery can surpass happiness--that the soul is ignorant of its own

being, till all at once a thunder-stone plunges down its depths, and

groans gurgle upwards upbraiding heaven.

How easily can the heart change its mood from the awful to the

solemn--from the solemn to the sweet--and from the sweet to the

gay--while the mirth of this careless moment is unconsciously tempered

by the influence of that holy hour that has subsided but not died, and

continues to colour the most ordinary emotion, as the common things of

earth look all lovelier in imbibed light, even after the serene moon

that had yielded it is no more visible in her place! Most gentle are

such transitions in the calm of nature and of the heart; all true poetry

is full of them; and in music how pleasant are they, or how affecting!

Those alternations of tears and smiles, of fervent aspirations and of

quiet thoughts! The organ and the Æolian harp! As the one has ceased

pealing praise, we can list the other whispering it--nor feels the soul

any loss of emotion in the change--still true to itself and its wondrous

nature--just as it is so when from the sunset clouds it turns its eyes

to admire the beauty of a dewdrop or an insect's wing.

Now, we hear many of our readers crying out against the barbarity of

confining the free denizens of the air in wire or wicker Cages. Gentle

readers, do, we pray, keep your compassion for other objects. Or, if you

are disposed to be argumentative with us, let us just walk down stairs

to the larder, and tell the public truly what we there behold--three

brace of partridges, two ditto of moorfowl, a cock pheasant, poor

fellow,--a man and his wife of the aquatic or duck kind, and a woodcock,

vainly presenting his long Christmas bill,--

"Some sleeping kill'd--

All murder'd."

Why, you are indeed a most logical reasoner, and a most considerate

Christian, when you launch out into an invective against the cruelty

exhibited in our Cages. Let us leave this den of murder, and have a

glass of our home-made frontignac in our own Sanctum. Come, come,

sir,--look on this newly-married couple of CANARIES.--The architecture

of their nest is certainly not of the florid order, but my Lady

Yellowlees sits on it a well-satisfied bride. Come back in a day or two,

and you will see her nursing triplets. Meanwhile, hear the ear-piercing

fife of the bridegroom!--Where will you find a set of happier people,

unless perhaps it be in our parlour, or our library, or our nursery?

For, to tell you the truth, there is a cage or two in almost every room

of the house. Where is the cruelty--here, or in your blood-stained

larder? But you must eat, you reply. We answer--not necessarily birds.

The question is about birds--cruelty to birds; and were that sagacious

old wild-goose, whom one single moment of heedlessness brought last

Wednesday to your hospitable board, at this moment alive, to bear a part

in our conversation, can you dream that, with all your ingenuity and

eloquence, you could persuade him--the now defunct and disjected--that

you had been under the painful necessity of eating him with stuffing and

apple-sauce?

It is not in nature that an ornithologist should be cruel--he is most

humane. Mere skin-stuffers are not ornithologists--and we have known

more than one of that tribe who would have had no scruple in strangling

their own mothers, or reputed fathers. Yet if your true ornithologist

cannot catch a poor dear bird alive, he must kill it--and leave you to

weep for its death. There must be a few victims out of myriads of

millions--and thousands and tens of thousands are few; but the

ornithologist knows the seasons when death is least afflictive--he is

merciful in his wisdom--for the spirit of knowledge is gentle--and

"thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," reconcile him to the

fluttering and ruffled plumage blood-stained by death. 'Tis hard, for

example, to be obliged to shoot a Zenaida dove! Yet a Zenaida dove must

die for Audubon's Illustrations. How many has he loved in life, and

tenderly preserved! And how many more pigeons of all sorts, cooked in

all styles, have you devoured--ay, twenty for his one--you being a

glutton and epicure in the same inhuman form, and he being contented at

all times with the plainest fare--a salad perhaps of water-cresses

plucked from a spring in the forest glade, or a bit of pemmican, or a

wafer of portable soup melted in the pot of some squatter--and shared

with the admiring children before a drop has been permitted to touch his

own abstemious lips.

The intelligent author of the "Treatise on British Birds" does not

condescend to justify the right we claim to encage them; but he shows

his genuine humanity in instructing us how to render happy and

healthful their imprisonment. He says very prettily, "What are town

gardens and shrubberies in squares, but an attempt to ruralise the city?

So strong is the desire in man to participate in country pleasures, that

he tries to bring some of them even to his room. Plants and birds are

sought after with avidity, and cherished with delight. With flowers he

endeavours to make his apartments resemble a garden; and thinks of

groves and fields, as he listens to the wild sweet melody of his little

captives. Those who keep and take an interest in song-birds, are often

at a loss how to treat their little warblers during illness, or to

prepare the proper food best suited to their various constitutions; but

that knowledge is absolutely necessary to preserve these little

creatures in health: for want of it, young amateurs and bird-fanciers

have often seen, with regret, many of their favourite birds perish."

Now, here we confess is a good physician. In Edinburgh we understand

there are about five hundred medical practitioners on the human

race--and we have dog-doctors, and horse-doctors, who come out in

numbers--but we have no bird-doctors. Yet often, too often, when the

whole house rings, from garret to cellar, with the cries of children

teething, or in the hooping-cough, the little linnet sits silent on his

perch, a moping bunch of feathers, and then falls down dead, when his

lilting life might have been saved by the simplest medicinal food

skilfully administered. Surely if we have physicians to attend our

treadmills, and regulate the diet and day's work of merciless ruffians,

we should not suffer our innocent and useful prisoners thus to die

unattended. Why do not the ladies of Edinburgh form themselves into a

Society for this purpose?

Not one of all the philosophers in the world has been able to tell us

what is happiness. Sterne's Starling is weakly supposed to have been

miserable. Probably he was one of the most contented birds in the

universe. Does confinement--the closest, most uncompanioned

confinement--make one of ourselves unhappy? Is the shoemaker, sitting

with his head on his knees, in a hole in the wall from morning to night,

in any respect to be pitied? Is the solitary orphan, that sits all day

sewing in a garret, while the old woman for whom she works is out

washing, an object of compassion? or the widow of fourscore, hurkling

over the embers, with the stump of a pipe in her toothless mouth? Is it

so sad a thing indeed to be alone? or to have one's motions

circumscribed within the narrowest imaginable limits? Nonsense all!

Then, gentle reader, were you ever in a Highland shieling? Often since

you read our Recreations. It is built of turf, and is literally alive;

for the beautiful heather is blooming, wildflowers and walls and roof

are one sound of bees. The industrious little creatures must have come

several long miles for their balmy spoil. There is but one human

creature in that shieling, but he is not at all solitary. He no more

wearies of that lonesome place than do the sunbeams or the shadows. To

himself alone he chants his old Gaelic songs, or frames wild ditties of

his own to the raven or red-deer. Months thus pass on; and he descends

again to the lower country. Perhaps he goes to the

wars--fights--bleeds--and returns to Badenoch or Lochaber; and once

more, blending in his imagination the battles of his own regiment, in

Egypt, Spain, or Flanders, with the deeds done of yore by Ossian sung,

sits contented by the door of the same shieling, restored and

beautified, in which he had dreamt away the summers of his youth.

What has become--we wonder--of Dartmoor Prison? During that long war its

huge and hideous bulk was filled with Frenchmen--ay,

"Men of all climes--attach'd to none--were there;"

--a desperate race--robbers and reavers, and ruffians and rapers, and

pirates and murderers--mingled with the heroes who, fired by freedom,

had fought for the land of lilies, with its vine-vales and "hills of

sweet myrtle"--doomed to die in captivity, immured in that doleful

mansion on the sullen moor. There thousands pined and wore away and

wasted--and when not another groan remained within the bones of their

breasts, they gave up the ghost. Young heroes prematurely old in baffled

passions--life's best and strongest passions, that scorned to go to

sleep but in the sleep of death. These died in their golden prime. With

them went down into unpitied and unhonoured graves--for pity and honour

dwell not in houses so haunted--veterans in their iron age--some

self-smitten with ghastly wounds that let life finally bubble out of

sinewy neck or shaggy bosom--or the poison-bowl convulsed their giant

limbs unto unquivering rest. Yet there you saw a wild strange tumult of

troubled happiness--which, as you looked into its heart, was

transfigured into misery. There volatile spirits fluttered in their

cage, like birds that seem not to hate nor to be unhappy in confinement,

but, hanging by beak or claws, to be often playing with the glittering

wires--to be amusing themselves, so it seems, with drawing up, by small

enginery, their food and drink, which soon sickens, however, on their

stomachs, till, with ruffled plumage, they are often found in the

morning lying on their backs, with clenched feet, and neck bent as if

twisted, on the scribbled sand, stone-dead. There you saw pale

youths--boys almost like girls, so delicate looked they in that hot

infected air which, ventilate it as you will, is never felt to breathe

on the face like the fresh air of liberty--once bold and bright

midshipmen in frigate or first-rater, and saved by being picked up by

the boats of the ship that had sunk her by one double-shotted broadside,

or sent her in one explosion splintering into the sky, and splashing

into the sea, in less than a minute the thunder silent, and the fiery

shower over and gone--there you saw such lads as these, who used almost

to weep if they got not duly the dear-desired letter from sister or

sweetheart, and when they did duly get it, opened it with trembling

fingers, and even then let drop some natural tears--there we saw them

leaping and dancing, with gross gesticulations and horrid oaths obscene,

with grim outcasts from nature, whose mustached mouths were rank with

sin and pollution--monsters for whom hell was yawning--their mortal mire

already possessed with a demon. There, wretched, woe-begone, and wearied

out with recklessness and desperation, many wooed Chance and Fortune,

who they hoped might yet listen to their prayers--and kept rattling the

dice--cursing them that gave the indulgence--even in their cells of

punishment for disobedience or mutiny. There you saw some, who in the

crowded courts "sat apart retired,"--bringing the practised skill that

once supported, or the native genius that once adorned life, to bear on

beautiful contrivances and fancies elaborately executed with meanest

instruments, till they rivalled or outdid the work of art assisted by

all the ministries of science. And thus won they a poor pittance

wherewithal to purchase some little comfort or luxury, or ornament to

their persons; for vanity had not forsaken some in their rusty squalor,

and they sought to please her, their mistress or their bride. There you

saw accomplished men conjuring before their eyes, on the paper or the

canvass, to feed the longings of their souls, the lights and the shadows

of the dear days that far away were beautifying some sacred spot of "_la

belle France_"--perhaps some festal scene, for love in sorrow is still

true to remembered joy, where once with youths and maidens

"They led the dance beside the murmuring Loire."

There you heard--and hushed then was all the hubbub--some clear silver

voice, sweet almost as woman's, yet full of manhood in its depths,

singing to the gay guitar, touched, though the musician was of the best

and noblest blood of France, with a master's hand, "La belle Gabrielle!"

And there might be seen, in the solitude of their own abstractions, men

with minds that had sounded the profounds of science, and, seemingly

undisturbed by all that clamour, pursuing the mysteries of lines and

numbers--conversing with the harmonies and lofty stars of heaven, deaf

to all the discord and despair of earth. Or religious still even more

than they--for those were mental, these spiritual--you beheld there men,

whose heads before their time were becoming grey, meditating on their

own souls, and in holy hope and humble trust in their Redeemer, if not

yet prepared, perpetually preparing themselves for the world to come!

To return to Birds in Cages;--they are, when well, uniformly as happy as

the day is long. What else could oblige them, whether they will or no,

to burst out into song--to hop about so pleased and pert--to play such

fantastic tricks, like so many whirligigs--to sleep so soundly, and to

awake into a small, shrill, compressed twitter of joy at the dawn of

light? So utterly mistaken was Sterne, and all the other

sentimentalists, that his Starling, who he absurdly opined was wishing

to get out, would not have stirred a peg had the door of his cage been

flung wide open, but would have pecked like a very game-cock at the hand

inserted to give him his liberty. Depend upon it, that Starling had not

the slightest idea of what he was saying; and had he been up to the

meaning of his words, would have been shocked at his ungrateful folly.

Look at Canaries, and Chaffinches, and Bullfinches, and "the rest," how

they amuse themselves for a while flitting about the room, and then,

finding how dull a thing it is to be citizens of the world, bounce up to

their cages, and shut the door from the inside, glad to be once more at

home. Begin to whistle or sing yourself, and forthwith you have a duet

or a trio. We can imagine no more perfectly tranquil and cheerful life

than that of a Goldfinch in a cage in spring, with his wife and his

children. All his social affections are cultivated to the utmost. He

possesses many accomplishments unknown to his brethren among the

trees;--he has never known what it is to want a meal in times of the

greatest scarcity; and he admires the beautiful frostwork on the

windows, when thousands of his feathered friends are buried in the snow,

or, what is almost as bad, baked up into pies, and devoured by a large

supper-party of both sexes, who fortify their flummery and flirtation by

such viands, and, remorseless, swallow dozens upon dozens of the

warblers of the woods.

Ay, ay, Mr Goldy! you are wondering what we are now doing, and

speculating upon the scribbler with arch eyes and elevated crest, as if

you would know the subject of his lucubrations. What the wiser or better

wouldst thou be of human knowledge? Sometimes that little heart of thine

goes pit-a-pat, when a great, ugly, staring contributor thrusts his

inquisitive nose within the wires--or when a strange cat glides round

and round the room, fascinating thee with the glare of his fierce fixed

eyes;--but what is all that to the woes of an Editor?--Yes, sweet

simpleton! do you not know that we are the editor of _Blackwood's

Magazine_--Christopher North! Yes, indeed, we are that very man--that

self-same much-calumniated man-monster and Ogre. There, there!--perch on

our shoulder, and let us laugh together at the whole world.

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.

SECOND CANTICLE.

The golden eagle leads the van of our Birds of Prey--and there she sits

in her usual carriage when in a state of rest. Her hunger and her thirst

have been appeased--her wings are folded up in a dignified

tranquillity--her talons, grasping a leafless branch, are almost hidden

by the feathers of her breast--her sleepless eye has lost something of

its ferocity--and the Royal Bird is almost serene in her solitary state

in the cliff. The gorcock unalarmed crows among the moors and

mosses--the blackbird whistles in the birken shaw--and the cony erects

his ears at the mouth of his burrow, and whisks away frolicsome among

the whins or heather.

There is no index to the hour--neither light nor shadow--no cloud. But

from the composed aspect of the Bird, we may suppose it to be the hush

of evening after a day of successful foray. The imps in the eyrie have

been fed, and their hungry cry will not be heard till the dawn. The

mother has there taken up her watchful rest, till in darkness she may

glide up to her brood--the sire is somewhere sitting within her view

among the rocks--a sentinel whose eye, and ear, and nostril are true, in

exquisite fineness of sense, to their trust, and on whom rarely, and as

if by a miracle, can steal the adventurous shepherd or huntsman, to

wreak vengeance with his rifle on the spoiler of sheep-walk and

forest-chase.

Yet sometimes it chanceth that the yellow lustre of her keen, wild,

fierce eye is veiled, even in daylight, by the film of sleep. Perhaps

sickness has been at the heart of the dejected bird, or fever wasted her

wing. The sun may have smitten her, or the storm driven her against a

rock. Then hunger and thirst--which in pride of plumage she scorned, and

which only made her fiercer on the edge of her unfed eyrie, as she

whetted her beak on the flint-stone, and clutched the strong

heather-stalks in her talons, as if she were anticipating prey--quell

her courage, and in famine she eyes afar off the fowls she is unable to

pursue, and with one stroke strike to earth. Her flight is heavier and

heavier each succeeding day--she ventures not to cross the great glens

with or without lochs--but flaps her way from rock to rock, lower and

lower down along the same mountain-side--and finally, drawn by her

weakness into dangerous descent, she is discovered at grey dawn far

below the region of snow, assailed and insulted by the meanest carrion;

till a bullet whizzing through her heart, down she topples, and soon is

despatched by blows from the rifle-butt, the shepherd stretching out his

foe's carcass on the sward, eight feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, with

leg thick as his own wrist, and foot broad as his own hand.

But behold the Golden Eagle, as she has pounced, and is exulting over

her prey! With her head drawn back between the crescent of her uplifted

wings, which she will not fold till that prey be devoured, eye glaring

cruel joy, neck-plumage bristling, tail-feathers fan-spread, and talons

driven through the victim's entrails and heart--there she is new lighted

on the ledge of a precipice, and fancy hears her yell and its echo. Beak

and talons, all her life long, have had a stain of blood, for the

murderess observes no Sabbath, and seldom dips them in loch or sea,

except when dashing down suddenly among the terrified water-fowl from

her watch-tower in the sky. The week-old fawn had left the doe's side

but for a momentary race along the edge of the coppice; a rustle and a

shadow--and the burden is borne off to the cliffs of Benevis. In an

instant the small animal is dead--after a short exultation torn into

pieces, and by eagles and eaglets devoured, its unswallowed or

undigested bones mingle with those of many other creatures, encumbering

the eyrie, and strewed around it over the bloody platform on which the

young demons crawl forth to enjoy the sunshine.

Oh for the life of an eagle written by himself! It would outsell the

Confessions even of the English Opium-Eater. Proudly would he, or she,

write of birth and parentage. On the rock of ages he first opened his

eyes to the sun, in noble instinct affronting and outstaring the light.

The Great Glen of Scotland--hath it not been the inheritance of his

ancestors for many thousand years? No polluting mixture of ignoble

blood, from intermarriages of necessity or convenience with kite,

buzzard, hawk, or falcon. No, the Golden Eagles of Glen-Falloch,

surnamed the Sun-starers, have formed alliances with the Golden Eagles

of Cruachan, Benlawers, Shehallion, and Lochnagair--the

Lightning-Glints, the Flood-fallers, the Storm-wheelers, the

Cloud-cleavers, ever since the deluge. The education of the

autobiographer had not been intrusted to a private tutor. Parental eyes,

beaks, and talons, provided sustenance for his infant frame; and in that

capacious eyrie, year after year repaired by dry branches from the

desert, parental advice was yelled into him, meet for the expansion of

his instinct, as wide and wonderful as the reason of earth-crawling man.

What a noble naturalist did he, in a single session at the College of

the Cliff, become! Of the customs, and habits, and haunts of all

inferior creatures, he speedily made himself master--ours included. Nor

was his knowledge confined to theory, but reduced to daily practice. He

kept himself in constant training--taking a flight of a couple of

hundred miles before breakfast--paying a forenoon visit to the farthest

of the Hebride Isles, and returning to dinner in Glenco. In one day he

has flown to Norway on a visit to his uncle by the mother's side, and

returned the next to comfort his paternal uncle, lying sick at the Head

of the Cambrian Dee. He soon learned to despise himself for having once

yelled for food, when food was none; and to sit or sail, on rock or

through ether, athirst and an hungered, but mute. The virtues of

patience, endurance, and fortitude, have become with him, in strict

accordance with the Aristotelian Moral Philosophy--habits. A Peripatetic

Philosopher he could hardly be called--properly speaking, he belongs to

the Solar School--an airy sect, who take very high ground, indulge in

lofty flights, and are often lost in the clouds. Now and then a light

chapter might be introduced, setting forth how he and other youngsters

of the Blood Royal were wont to take an occasional game at High-Jinks,

or tourney in air lists, the champions on opposite sides flying from the

Perthshire and from the Argyllshire mountains, and encountering with a

clash in the azure common, six thousand feet high. But the fever of love

burned in his blood, and flying to the mountains of another continent,

in obedience to the yell of an old oral tradition, he wooed and won his

virgin bride--a monstrous beauty, wider-winged than himself, to kill or

caress, and bearing the proof of her noble nativity in the radiant Iris

that belongs in perfection of fierceness but to the Sun-starers, and in

them is found, unimpaired by cloudiest clime, over the uttermost parts

of the earth. The bridegroom and his bride, during the honey-moon, slept

on the naked rock--till they had built their eyrie beneath its

cliff-canopy on the mountain-brow. When the bride was "as Eagles wish to

be who love their lords"--devoted unto her was the bridegroom, even as

the cushat murmuring to his brooding mate in the central pine-grove of a

forest. Tenderly did he drop from his talons, close beside her beak, the

delicate spring lamb, or the too early leveret, owing to the hurried and

imprudent marriage of its parents before March, buried in a living tomb

on April's closing day. Through all thy glens, Albyn! hadst thou reason

to mourn, at the bursting of the shells that Queen-bird had been

cherishing beneath her bosom. Aloft in heaven wheeled the Royal Pair,

from rising to setting sun. Among the bright-blooming heather they

espied the tartan'd shepherd, or hunter creeping like a lizard, and from

behind the vain shadow of a rock watching with his rifle the flight he

would fain see shorn of its beams. The flocks were thinned--and the

bleating of desolate dams among the woolly people heard from many a

brae. Poison was strewn over the glens for their destruction, but the

Eagle, like the lion, preys not on carcasses; and the shepherd dogs

howled in agony over the carrion in which they devoured death. Ha! was

not that a day of triumph to the Sun-starers of Cruachan, when

sky-hunting in couples, far down on the greensward before the ruined

gateway of Kilchurn Castle, they saw, left all to himself in the

sunshine, the infant heir of the Campbell of Breadalbane, the child of

the Lord of Glenorchy and all its streams! Four talons in an instant

were in his heart. Too late were the outcries from all the turrets; for

ere the castle-gates were flung open, the golden head of the royal babe

was lying in gore, in the Eyrie on the iron ramparts of Ben-Slarive--his

blue eyes dug out--his rosy cheeks torn--and his brains dropping from

beaks that revelled yelling within the skull!--Such are a few hints for

"Some Passages in the Life of the Golden Eagle, written by

Himself,"--in one volume crown octavo--Blackwoods, Edinburgh and

London.

O heavens and earth!--forests and barn-yards! what a difference with a

distinction between a GOLDEN EAGLE and a GREEN GOOSE! There, all neck

and bottom, splay-footed, and hissing in miserable imitation of a

serpent, lolling from side to side, up and down like an ill-trimmed

punt, the downy gosling waddles through the green mire, and, imagining

that King George the Fourth is meditating mischief against him, cackles

angrily as he plunges into the pond. No swan that "on still St Mary's

lake floats double, swan and shadow," so proud as he! He prides himself

on being a gander, and never forgets the lesson instilled into him by

his parents, soon as he chipt the shell in the nest among the nettles,

that his ancestors saved the Roman Capitol. In process of time, in

company with swine, he grazes on the common, and insults the Egyptians

in their roving camp. Then comes the season of plucking--and this very

pen bears testimony to his tortures. Out into the houseless winter is he

driven--and, if he escapes being frozen into a lump of fat ice, he is

crammed till his liver swells into a four-pounder--his cerebellum is cut

by the cruel knife of a phrenological cook, and his remains buried with

a cerement of apple sauce in the paunches of apoplectic aldermen, eating

against each other at a civic feast! Such are a few hints for "Some

Passages in the Life of a Green Goose," written by himself--in foolscap

octavo--published by Quack and Co., Ludgate Lane, and sold by all

booksellers in town and country.

Poor poets must not meddle with eagles. In the "Fall of Nineveh," Mr

Atherstone describes a grand review of his army by Sardanapalus. Two

million men are put into motion by the moving of the Assyrian flag-staff

in the hand of the king, who takes his station on a mount conspicuous to

all the army. This flag-staff, though "tall as a mast"--Mr Atherstone

does not venture to go on to say with Milton, "hewn on Norwegian hills,"

or "of some tall ammiral," though the readers' minds supply the

deficiency--this mast was, we are told, for "_two strong men_ a task;"

but it must have been so for twenty. To have had the least chance of

being all at once seen by two million of men, it could not have been

less than fifty feet high--and if Sardanapalus waved the royal standard

of Assyria round his head, Samson or O'Doherty must have been a joke to

him. However, we shall suppose he did; and what was the result? Such

shouts arose that the solid walls of Nineveh were shook, "and the firm

ground made tremble." But this was not all.

"At his height,

A speck scarce visible, the eagle heard,

And felt his strong wing falter: terror-struck,

Fluttering and wildly screaming, down he sank--

Down through the quivering air: another shout,--

His talons droop--his sunny eye grows dark--

His strengthless pennons fail--plump down he falls,

Even like a stone. Amid the far-off hills,

With eye of fire, and shaggy mane uprear'd,

The sleeping lion in his den sprang up;

Listen'd awhile--then laid his monstrous mouth

Close to the floor, and breathed hot roarings out

In fierce reply."

What think ye of that, John Audubon, Charles Buonaparte, J. Prideaux

Selby, James Wilson, Sir William Jardine, and ye other European and

American ornithologists? Pray, Mr Atherstone, did you ever see an

eagle--a speck in the sky? Never again suffer yourself, oh, dear sir! to

believe old women's tales of men on earth shooting eagles with their

mouths; because the thing is impossible, even had their mouthpieces had

percussion-locks--had they been crammed with ammunition to the muzzle.

Had a stray sparrow been fluttering in the air, he would certainly have

got a fright, and probably a fall--nor would there have been any hope

for a tom-tit. But an eagle--an eagle ever so many thousand feet

aloft--poo, poo!--he would merely have muted on the roaring multitude,

and given Sardanapalus an additional epaulette. Why, had a string of

wild-geese at the time been warping their way on the wind, they would

merely have shot the wedge firmer and sharper into the air, and answered

the earth-born shout with an air-born gabble--clangour to clangour.

Where were Mr Atherstone's powers of ratiocination, and all his

acoustics? Two shouts slew an eagle. What became of all the other

denizens of air--especially crows, ravens, and vultures, who, seeing two

millions of men, must have come flocking against a day of battle? Every

mother's son of them must have gone to pot. Then what scrambling among

the allied troops! And what was one eagle doing by himself "up-by

yonder?" Was he the only eagle in Assyria--the secular bird of ages? Who

was looking at him, first a speck--then faltering--then fluttering and

wildly screaming--then plump down like a stone? Mr Atherstone talks as

if he saw it. In the circumstances he had no business with his "sunny

eye growing dark." That is entering too much into the medical, or rather

anatomical symptoms of his apoplexy, and would be better for a medical

journal than an epic poem. But to be done with it--two shouts that slew

an eagle a mile up the sky, must have cracked all the tympana of the two

million shouters. The entire army must have become as deaf as a post.

Nay, Sardanapalus himself, on the mount, must have been blown into the

air as by the explosion of a range of gunpowder-mills; the campaign

taken a new turn; and a revolution been brought about, of which, at this

distance of place and time, it is not easy for us to conjecture what

might have been the fundamental features on which it would have

hinged--and thus an entirely new aspect given to all the histories of

the world.

What is said about the lion, is to our minds equally picturesque and

absurd. He was among the "far-off hills." How far, pray? Twenty miles?

If so, then without a silver ear-trumpet he could not have heard the

huzzas. If the far-off hills were so near Nineveh as to allow the lion

to hear the huzzas even in his sleep, the epithet "far-off" should be

altered, and the lion himself brought from the interior. But we cannot

believe that lions were permitted to live in dens within ear-shot of

Nineveh. Nimrod had taught them "never to come there no more"--and

Semiramis looked sharp after the suburbs. But, not to insist unduly upon

a mere matter of police, is it the nature of lions, lying in their dens

among far-off hills, to start up from their sleep, and "breathe hot

roarings out" in fierce reply to the shouts of armies? All stuff! Mr

Atherstone shows off his knowledge of natural history, in telling us

that the said lion, in roaring, "laid his monstrous mouth close to the

floor." We believe he does so; but did Mr Atherstone learn the fact from

Cuvier or from Wombwell? It is always dangerous to a poet to be too

picturesque; and in this case, you are made, whether you will or no, to

see an old, red, lean, mangy monster, called a lion, in his unhappy den

in a menagerie, bathing his beard in the sawdust, and from his toothless

jaws "breathing hot roarings out," to the terror of servant-girls and

children, in fierce reply to a man in a hairy cap and full suit of

velveteen, stirring him up with a long pole, and denominating him by the

sacred name of the great asserter of Scottish independence.

Sir Humphry Davy--in his own science the first man of his age--does not

shine in his "Salmonia"--pleasant volume though it be--as an

ornithologist. Let us see.

"POIET.--The scenery improves as we advance nearer the lower parts of

the lake. The mountains become higher, and that small island or

peninsula presents a bold craggy outline; and the birch-wood below it,

and the pines above, make a scene somewhat Alpine in character. But what

is that large bird soaring above the pointed rock, towards the end of

the lake? Surely it is an eagle!

"HAL.--You are right; it is an eagle, and of a rare and peculiar

species--the grey or silver eagle, a noble bird! From the size of the

animal, it must be the female; and her eyrie is in that high rock. I

dare say the male is not far off."

Sir Humphry speaks in his introductory pages of Mr Wordsworth as a lover

of fishing and fishermen; and we cannot help thinking and feeling that

he intends Poietes as an image of that great Poet. What! William

Wordsworth, the very high-priest of nature, represented to have seen an

eagle for the first time of his life only then, and to have boldly

ventured on a conjecture that such was the name and nature of the bird!

"But what is that large bird soaring above the pointed rock, towards the

end of the lake? Surely it is an eagle!" "Yes, you are right--it is an

eagle." Ha--ha--ha--ha--ha--ha! Sir Humphry--Sir Humphry--that guffaw

was not ours--it came from the Bard of Rydal--albeit unused to the

laughing mood--in the haunted twilight of that beautiful--that solemn

Terrace.

Poietes having been confirmed, by the authority of Halieus, in his

belief that the bird is an eagle, exclaims, agreeably to the part he

plays, "Look at the bird! She dashes into the water, _falling like a

rock_ and raising a column of spray--she has _fallen from a great

height_. And now she rises again into the air--_what an extraordinary

sight_!" Nothing is so annoying as to be ordered to look at a sight

which, unless you shut your eyes, it is impossible for you not to see. A

person behaving in a boat like Poietes, deserved being flung overboard.

"Look at the bird!" Why, every eye was already upon her; and if Poietes

had had a single spark of poetry in his composition, he would have been

struck mute by such a sight, instead of bawling out, open-mouthed and

goggle-eyed, like a Cockney to a rocket at Vauxhall. Besides, an eagle

does not, when descending on her prey, fall like a rock. There is

nothing like the "_vis inertiæ_" in her precipitation. You still see the

self-willed energy of the ravenous bird, as the mass of plumes flashes

in the spray--of which, by the by, there never was, nor will be, a

column so raised. She is as much the queen of birds as she sinks as when

she soars--her trust and her power are still seen and felt to be in her

pinions, whether she shoots to or from the zenith--to a falling star she

might be likened--just as any other devil--either by Milton or

Wordsworth--for such a star seems to our eye and our imagination ever

instinct with spirit, not to be impelled by exterior force, but to be

self-shot from heaven.

Upon our word, we begin to believe that we ourselves deserve the name of

Poietes much better than the gentleman who at threescore had never seen

an eagle. "She has fallen from a great height," quoth the

gentleman--"What an extraordinary sight!" he continueth--while we are

mute as the oar suspended by the up-gazing Celt, whose quiet eye

brightens as it pursues the Bird to her eyrie in the cliff over the cove

where the red-deer feed.

Poietes having given vent to his emotions in such sublime

exclamations--"Look at the bird!" "What an extraordinary sight!" might

have thenceforth held his tongue, and said no more about eagles. But

Halieus cries, "There! you see her rise with a fish in her talons"--and

Poietes, very simply, or rather like a simpleton, returns for answer,

"She _gives an interest which I hardly expected to have found in this

scene_. Pray, are there _many of these animals_ in this country?" A poet

hardly expecting to find interest in such a scene as a great Highland

loch--Loch Maree! "Pray, are there many _of these hanimals in this

country_?" Loud cries of Oh! oh! oh! No doubt an eagle is an animal;

like Mr Cobbett or Mr O'Connell--"a very fine animal;" but we

particularly, and earnestly, and anxiously, request Sir Humphry Davy

not to call her so again--but to use the term bird, or any other term he

chooses, except animal. Animal, a living creature, is too general, too

vague by far; and somehow or other it offends our ear shockingly when

applied to an eagle. We may be wrong, but in a trifling matter of this

kind Sir Humphry surely will not refuse our supplication. Let him call a

horse an animal, if he chooses--or an ass--or a cow--but not an

eagle--as he loves us, not an eagle; let him call it a bird--the Bird of

Jove--the Queen or King of the Sky--or anything else he chooses--but not

an animal--no--no--no--not an animal, as he hopes to prosper, to be

praised in Maga, embalmed and immortalised.

Neither ought Poietes to have asked if there were "_many_ of these

animals" in this country. He ought to have known that there are not

_many_ of these animals in any country. Eagles are proud--apt to hold

their heads very high--and to make themselves scarce. A great many

eagles all flying about together would look most absurd. They are aware

of that, and fly in "ones and twos"--a couple perhaps to a county.

Poietes might as well have asked Mungo Park if there were a great many

lions in Africa. Mungo, we think, saw but one; and that was one too

much. There were probably a few more between Sego and Timbuctoo--but

there are not a "great many of those animals in that country"--though

quite sufficient for the purpose. How the Romans contrived to get at

hundreds for a single show, perplexes our power of conjecture.

Halieus says--with a smile on his lip surely--in answer to the query of

Poietes--"Of this species I have seen but these two; and, I believe, the

young ones migrate as soon as they can provide for themselves; for this

solitary bird requires a large space to move and feed in, and does not

allow its offspring to partake its reign, or to live near it." This is

all pretty true, and known to every child rising or risen six, except

poor Poietes. He had imagined that there were "many of these animals in

this country," that they all went a-fishing together as amicably as five

hundred sail of Manksmen among a shoal of herrings.

Throughout these Dialogues we have observed that Ornither rarely opens

his mouth. Why so taciturn? On the subject of birds he ought, from his

name, to be well informed; and how could he let slip an opportunity,

such as will probably never be afforded him again in this life, of being

eloquent on the Silver Eagle? Ornithology is surely the department of

Ornither. Yet there is evidently something odd and peculiar in his

idiosyncrasy; for we observe that he never once alludes to "these

animals," birds, during the whole excursion. He has not taken his gun

with him into the Highlands, a sad oversight indeed in a gentleman who

"is to be regarded as generally fond of the sports of the field."

Flappers are plentiful over all the moors about the middle of July; and

hoodies, owls, hawks, ravens, make all first-rate shooting to sportsmen

not over anxious about the pot. It is to be presumed, too, that he can

stuff birds. What noble specimens might he not have shot for Mr Selby!

On one occasion, "the SILVER EAGLE" is preying in a pool within slug

range, and there is some talk of shooting him--we suppose with an oar,

or the butt of a fishing-rod, for the party have no firearms--but

Poietes insists on sparing his life, because "these animals" are a

picturesque accompaniment to the scenery, and "give it an interest which

he had not expected to find" in mere rivers, lochs, moors, and

mountains. Genus Falco must all the while have been laughing in his

sleeve at the whole party--particularly at Ornither--who, to judge from

his general demeanour, may be a fair shot with number five at an old

newspaper expanded on a barn-door twenty yards off, but never could have

had the audacity to think in his most ambitious mood of letting off his

gun at an Eagle.

But further, Halieus, before he took upon him to speak so

authoritatively about eagles, should have made himself master of their

names and natures. He is manifestly no scientific ornithologist. We are.

The general question concerning Eagles in Scotland may now be squeezed

into very small compass. Exclusive of the true Osprey (Falco Haliætus),

which is rather a larger fishing-hawk than an eagle, there are two

kinds, viz.--the GOLDEN EAGLE (F. Chrysaëtos), and the WHITE-TAILED or

CINEROUS EAGLE (F. Albicilla). The other two _nominal_ species are

disposed of in the following manner:--First, the RING-TAILED EAGLE (F.

Fulvus) is the young of the Golden Eagle, being distinguished in early

life by having the basal and central portion of the tail white, which

colour disappears as the bird attains the adult state. Second, the SEA

EAGLE (F. Ossifragus), commonly so called, is the young of the

White-tailed Eagle above named, from which it differs in having a brown

tail; for in this species the white of the tail becomes every year more

apparent as the bird increases in age, whereas, in the Golden Eagle, the

white altogether disappears in the adult.

It is to the RING-TAILED EAGLE, and, by consequence, to the GOLDEN

EAGLE, that the name of BLACK EAGLE is applied in the Highlands.

The White-tailed or Sea Eagle, as it becomes old, attains, in addition

to the pure tail, a pale or bleached appearance, from which it may merit

and obtain the name of Grey or SILVER EAGLE, as Sir Humphry Davy chooses

to call it; but it is not known among naturalists by that name. There is

no other species, however, to which the name can apply; and, therefore,

Sir Humphry has committed the very gross mistake of calling the Grey or

Silver Eagle (to use his own nomenclature) a very rare Eagle, since it

is the most common of all the Scots, and also--_a fortiori_--of all the

English Eagles--being in fact the SEA EAGLE of the Highlands.

It preys often on fish dead or alive; but not exclusively, as it also

attacks young lambs, and drives off the ravens from carrion prey, being

less fastidious in its diet than the GOLDEN EAGLE, which probably kills

its own meat--and has been known to carry off children; for a striking

account of one of which hay-field robberies you have but a few minutes

to wait.