As to its driving off its young, its habits are probably similar in this

respect to other birds of prey, none of which appear to keep together in

families after the young can shift for themselves; but we have never met

with any one who has seen them in the act of driving. It is stated

vaguely, in all books, of all eagles.

As to its requiring a large range to feed in--we have only to remark

that, from the powerful flight of these birds, and the wild and barren

nature of the countries which they inhabit, there can be no doubt that

they fly far, and "prey in distant isles"--as Thomson has it; but

Halieus needed not have stated this circumstance as a character of this

peculiar eagle--for an eagle with a small range does not exist; and

therefore it is to be presumed that they require a large one.

Further, all this being the case, there seems to be no necessity for the

old eagles giving themselves the trouble to drive off the young ones,

who by natural instinct will fly off of their own accord, as soon as

their wings can bear them over the sea. If an eagle were so partial to

his native vale, as never on any account, hungry or thirsty, drunk or

sober, to venture into the next parish, why then the old people would be

forced, on the old principle of self-preservation, to pack off their

progeny to bed and board beyond Benevis. But an Eagle is a Citizen of

the World. He is friendly to the views of Mr Huskisson on the Wool

Trade, the Fisheries, and the Colonies--and acts upon the old adage,

"Every bird for himself, and God for us all!"

To conclude, for the present, this branch of our subject, we beg leave

humbly to express our belief, that Sir Humphry Davy never saw the Eagle,

by him called the Grey or Silver, hunting for fish in the style

described in "Salmonia." It does not dislike fish--but it is not its

nature to keep hunting for them so, not in the Highlands at least,

whatever it may do on American continent or isles. Sir Humphry talks of

the bird dashing down repeatedly upon a pool within shot of the anglers.

We have angled fifty times in the Highlands for Sir Humphry's once, but

never saw nor heard of such a sight. He has read of such things, and

introduced them into this dialogue for the sake of effect--all quite

right to do--had his reading lain among trustworthy Ornithologists. The

common Eagle--which he ignorantly, as we have seen, calls so rare--is a

shy bird, as all shepherds know--and is seldom within range of the

rifle. Gorged with blood, they are sometimes run in upon and felled with

a staff or club. So perished, in the flower of his age, that Eagle whose

feet now form handles to the bell-ropes of our Sanctum at Buchanan

Lodge--and are the subject of a clever copy of verses by Mullion,

entitled "All the Talons."

We said in "The Moors," that we envied not the eagle or any other bird

his wings, and showed cause why we preferred our own feet. Had Puck

wings? If he had, we retract, and would sport Puck.

_Oberon._

"Fetch me this herb--and be thou here again,

Ere the Leviathan can swim a league."

_Puck._

"I'll put a girdle round about the earth

In forty minutes."

How infinitely more poetical are wings like these than seven-league

boots! We declare, on our conscience, that we would not accept the

present of a pair of seven-league boots to-morrow--or, if we did, it

would be out of mere politeness to the genie who might press them on us,

and the wisest thing we could do would be to lock them up in a drawer

out of the reach of the servants. Suppose that we wished to walk from

Clovenford to Innerleithen--why, with seven-league boots on, one single

step would take us up to Posso, seven miles above Peebles! That would

never do. By mincing one's steps, indeed, one might contrive to stop at

Innerleithen; but suppose a gad-fly were to sting one's hip at the

Pirn--one unintentional stride would deposit Christopher at Drummelzier,

and another over the Cruik, and far away down Annan water! Therefore,

there is nothing like wings. On wings you can flutter--and glide--and

float and soar--now like a humming-bird among the flowers--now like a

swan, half rowing, half sailing, and half flying adown a river--now like

an eagle afloat in the blue ocean of heaven, or shooting sunwards,

invisible in excess of light--and bidding farewell to earth and its

humble shadows. "O that I had the wings of a dove, that I might flee

away and be at rest!" Who hath not, in some heavy hour or other, from

the depth of his very soul, devoutly--passionately--hopelessly--breathed

that wish to escape beyond the limits of woe and sin--not into the world

of dreamless death; for weary though the immortal pilgrim may have been,

never desired he the doom of annihilation, untroubled although it be,

shorn of all the attributes of being--but he has prayed for the wings of

the dove, because that fair creature, as she wheeled herself away from

the sight of human dwellings, has seemed to disappear to his imagination

among old glimmering forests, wherein she foldeth her wing and falleth

gladly asleep--and therefore, in those agitated times when the spirits

of men acknowledge kindred with the inferior creatures, and would fain

interchange with them powers and qualities, they are willing even to lay

down their intelligence, their reason, their conscience itself, so that

they could but be blessed with the faculty of escaping from all the

agonies that intelligence, and reason, and conscience alone can know,

and beyond the reach of this world's horizon to flee away and be at

rest!

Puck says he will put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.

At what rate is that per second, taking the circumference of the earth

at 27,000 miles, more or less? There is a question for the mechanics,

somewhat about as difficult of solution as Lord Brougham's celebrated

one of the Smuggler and the Revenue Cutter--for the solution of which he

recommended the aid of algebra. It is not so quick as you would imagine.

We forget the usual rate of a cannon-ball in good condition, when he is

in training--and before he is at all blown. So do we forget, we are

sorry to confess, the number of centuries that it would take a good,

stout, well-made, able-bodied cannon-ball, to accomplish a journey to

our planet from one of the fixed stars. The great difficulty, we

confess, would be to get him safely conveyed thither. If that could be

done, we should have no fear of his finding his way back, if not in our

time, in that of our posterity. However red-hot he might have been on

starting, he would be cool enough, no doubt, on his arrival at the goal;

yet we should have no objection to back him against Time for a

trifle--Time, we observe, in almost all matches being beat, often indeed

by the most miserable hacks, that can with difficulty raise a gallop.

Time, however, possibly runs booty; for when he does make play, it must

be confessed that he is a spanker, and that nothing has been seen with

such a stride since Eclipse.

O beautiful and beloved Highland Parish! in whose dashing glens our

beating heart first felt the awe of solitude, and learned to commune

(alas! to what purpose?) with the tumult of its own thoughts! The

circuit of thy skies was indeed a glorious arena spread over the

mountain-tops for the combats of the great birds of prey! One wild cry

or another was in the lift--of the hawk, or the glead, or the raven, or

the eagle--or when those fiends slept, of the peaceful heron, and

sea-bird by wandering boys pursued in its easy flight, till the

snow-white child of ocean wavered away far inland, as if in search of a

steadfast happiness unknown on the restless waves. Seldom did the eagle

stoop to the challenge of the inferior fowl; but when he did, it was

like a mailed knight treading down unknown men in battle. The hawks, and

the gleads, and the ravens, and the carrion-crows, and the hooded-crows,

and the rooks, and the magpies, and all the rest of the rural militia,

forgetting their own feuds, sometimes came sallying from all quarters,

with even a few facetious jackdaws from the old castle, to show fight

with the monarch of the air. Amidst all that multitude of wings

winnowing the wind, was heard the sough and whizz of those mighty vans,

as the Royal Bird, himself an army, performed his majestic evolutions

with all the calm confidence of a master in the art of aerial war, now

shooting up half-a-thousand feet perpendicular, and now suddenly

plump-down into the rear of the croaking, cawing, and chattering

battalions, cutting off their retreat to the earth. Then the rout became

general, the missing, however, far outnumbering the dead. Keeping

possession of the field of battle, hung the eagle for a short while

motionless--till with one fierce yell of triumph he seemed to seek the

sun, and disappear like a speck in the light, surveying half of Scotland

at a glance, and a thousand of her isles.

Some people have a trick of describing incidents as having happened

within their own observation, when in fact they were at the time lying

asleep in bed, and disturbing the whole house with the snore of their

dormitory. Such is too often the character of the eyewitnesses of the

present age. Now, we would not claim personal acquaintance with an

incident we had not seen--no, not for a hundred guineas per sheet; and,

therefore, we warn the reader not to believe the following little story

about an eagle and child (by the way, that is the Derby crest, and a

favourite sign of inns in the north of England) on our authority. "I

tell the tale as 'twas told to me," by the schoolmaster of Naemanslaws,

in the shire of Ayr; and if the incident never occurred, then must he

have been one of the greatest liars that ever taught the young idea how

to shoot. For our single selves, we are by nature credulous. Many

extraordinary things happen in this life, and though "seeing is

believing," so likewise "believing is seeing," as every one must allow

who reads these our Recreations.

Almost all the people in the parish were leading in their meadow-hay

(there were not in all its ten miles square twenty acres of ryegrass)

on the same day of midsummer, so drying was the sunshine and the

wind,--and huge heaped-up wains, that almost hid from view the horses

that drew them along the sward, beginning to get green with second

growth, were moving in all directions towards the snug farmyards. Never

had the parish seemed before so populous. Jocund was the balmy air with

laughter, whistle, and song. But the Tree-gnomons threw the shadow of

"one o'clock" on the green dial-face of the earth--the horses were

unyoked, and took instantly to grazing--groups of men, women, lads,

lasses, and children collected under grove, and bush, and

hedgerow--graces were pronounced, some of them rather too tedious in

presence of the mantling milk-cans, bullion-bars of butter, and

crackling cakes; and the great Being who gave them that day their daily

bread, looked down from his Eternal Throne, well pleased with the piety

of his thankful creatures.

The great Golden Eagle, the pride and the pest of the parish, stooped

down, and away with something in his talons. One single sudden female

shriek--and then shouts and outcries as if a church spire had tumbled

down on a congregation at a sacrament. "Hannah Lamond's bairn! Hannah

Lamond's bairn!" was the loud fast-spreading cry. "The Eagle's taen aff

Hannah Lamond's bairn!" and many hundred feet were in another instant

hurrying towards the mountain. Two miles of hill and dale, and copse and

shingle, and many intersecting brooks, lay between; but in an incredibly

short time the foot of the mountain was alive with people. The eyrie was

well known, and both old birds were visible on the rock-ledge. But who

shall scale that dizzy cliff, which Mark Steuart the sailor, who had

been at the storming of many a fort, once attempted in vain? All kept

gazing, or weeping, or wringing of hands, rooted to the ground, or

running back and forwards, like so many ants, essaying their new wings,

in discomfiture. "What's the use--what's the use o' ony puir human

means? We have nae power but in prayer!" And many knelt down--fathers

and mothers thinking of their own babies--as if they would force the

deaf heavens to hear.

Hannah Lamond had been all this while sitting on a stone, with a face

perfectly white, and eyes like those of a mad person, fixed on the

eyrie. Nobody noticed her; for strong as all sympathies with her had

been at the swoop of the Eagle, they were now swallowed up in the agony

of eyesight. "Only last Sabbath was my sweet wee wean baptised in the

name o' the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost!" and on uttering

these words, she flew off through the brakes and over the huge stones,

up--up--up--faster than ever huntsman ran in to the death--fearless as a

goat playing among the precipices. No one doubted, no one could doubt,

that she would soon be dashed to pieces. But have not people who walk in

their sleep, obedient to the mysterious guidance of dreams, clomb the

walls of old ruins, and found footing, even in decrepitude, along the

edge of unguarded battlements, and down dilapidated stair-cases deep as

draw-wells or coal-pits, and returned with open, fixed, and unseeing

eyes, unharmed, to their beds at midnight? It is all the work of the

soul, to whom the body is a slave; and shall not the agony of a mother's

passion--who sees her baby, whose warm mouth had just left her breast,

hurried off by a demon to a hideous death--bear her limbs aloft wherever

there is dust to dust, till she reach that devouring den, and fiercer

and more furious than any bird of prey that ever bathed its beak in

blood, throttle the fiends that with their heavy wing would fain flap

her down the cliffs, and hold up her child in deliverance?

No stop--no stay--she knew not that she drew her breath. Beneath her

feet Providence fastened every loose stone, and to her hands

strengthened every root. How was she ever to descend? That fear, then,

but once crossed her heart, as up--up--up--to the little image made of

her own flesh and blood. "The God who holds me now from perishing--will

not the same God save me when my child is at my breast?" Down came the

fierce rushing of the Eagle's wings--each savage bird dashing close to

her head, so that she saw the yellow of their wrathful eyes. All at once

they quailed, and were cowed. Yelling, they flew off to the stump of an

ash jutting out of a cliff, a thousand feet above the cataract; and the

Christian mother, falling across the eyrie, in the midst of bones and

blood, clasped her child--dead--dead--no doubt--but unmangled and

untorn, and swaddled up just as it was when she laid it down asleep

among the fresh hay in a nook of the harvest-field. Oh! what pang of

perfect blessedness transfixed her heart from that faint, feeble

cry--"It lives! it lives! it lives!" and baring her bosom, with loud

laughter, and eyes dry as stones, she felt the lips of the unconscious

innocent once more murmuring at the fount of life and love. "O, thou

great and thou dreadful God! whither hast thou brought me--one of the

most sinful of thy creatures? Oh! save me lest I perish, even for thy

own name's sake! O Thou, who died to save sinners, have mercy upon me!"

Cliffs, chasms, blocks of stone, and the skeletons of old

trees--far--far down--and dwindled into specks a thousand creatures of

her own kind, stationary, or running to and fro! Was that the sound of

the waterfall, or the faint roar of voices? Is that her native

strath?--and that tuft of trees, does it contain the hut in which stands

the cradle of her child? Never more shall it be rocked by her foot! Here

must she die--and when her breast is exhausted--her baby too. And those

horrid beaks, and eyes, and talons, and wings will return, and her child

will be devoured at last, even within the dead arms that can protect it

no more.

Where, all this while, was Mark Steuart, the sailor? Half-way up the

cliffs. But his eyes had got dim, and his head dizzy, and his heart

sick--and he who had so often reefed the topgallant-sail, when at

midnight the coming of the gale was heard afar, covered his face with

his hands, and dared look no longer on the swimming heights. "And who

will take care of my poor bedridden mother?" thought Hannah, who,

through exhaustion of so many passions, could no more retain in her

grasp the hope she had clutched in despair. A voice whispered, "God."

She looked round expecting to see a spirit; but nothing moved except a

rotten branch, that, under its own weight, broke off from the crumbling

rock. Her eye--by some secret sympathy with the inanimate

object--watched its fall; and it seemed to stop, not far off, on a small

platform. Her child was bound upon her shoulders--she knew not how or

when--but it was safe--and scarcely daring to open her eyes, she slid

down the shelving rocks, and found herself on a small piece of firm

root-bound soil, with the tops of bushes appearing below. With fingers

suddenly strengthened into the power of iron, she swung herself down by

brier, and broom, and heather, and dwarf-birch. There, a loosened stone

leapt over a ledge and no sound was heard, so profound was its fall.

There, the shingle rattled down the screes, and she hesitated not to

follow. Her feet bounded against the huge stone that stopped them; but

she felt no pain. Her body was callous as the cliff. Steep as the wall

of a house was now the side of the precipice. But it was matted with ivy

centuries old--long ago dead, and without a single green leaf--but with

thousands of arm-thick stems petrified into the rock, and covering it as

with a trellice. She felt her baby on her neck--and with hands and feet

clung to that fearful ladder. Turning round her head, and looking down,

she saw the whole population of the parish--so great was the

multitude--on their knees. She heard the voice of psalms--a hymn

breathing the spirit of one united prayer. Sad and solemn was the

strain--but nothing dirge-like--sounding not of death, but deliverance.

Often had she sung that tune--perhaps the very words--but them she heard

not--in her own hut, she and her mother--or in the kirk, along with all

the congregation. An unseen hand seemed fastening her fingers to the

ribs of ivy, and in sudden inspiration, believing that her life was to

be saved, she became almost as fearless as if she had been changed into

a winged creature. Again her feet touched stones and earth--the psalm

was hushed--but a tremulous sobbing voice was close beside her, and a

she-goat, with two little kids at her feet. "Wild heights," thought she,

"do these creatures climb--but the dam will lead down her kids by the

easiest paths; for in the brute creatures holy is the power of a

mother's love!" and turning round her head, she kissed her sleeping

baby, and for the first time she wept.

Overhead frowned the front of the precipice, never touched before by

human hand or foot. No one had ever dreamt of scaling it, and the Golden

Eagles knew that well in their instinct, as, before they built their

eyrie, they had brushed it with their wings. But the downwards part of

the mountain-side, though scarred, and seamed, and chasmed, was yet

accessible--and more than one person in the parish had reached the

bottom of the Glead's Cliff. Many were now attempting it--and ere the

cautious mother had followed her dumb guides a hundred yards, through

among dangers that, although enough to terrify the stoutest heart, were

traversed by her without a shudder, the head of one man appeared, and

then the head of another, and she knew that God had delivered her and

her child into the care of their fellow-creatures. Not a word was

spoken--she hushed her friends with her hands--and with uplifted eyes

pointed to the guides sent to her by Heaven. Small green plats, where

those creatures nibble the wildflowers, became now more

frequent--trodden lines, almost as plain as sheep-paths, showed that the

dam had not led her young into danger; and now the brushwood dwindled

away into straggling shrubs, and the party stood on a little eminence

above the stream, and forming part of the strath.

There had been trouble and agitation, much sobbing and many tears, among

the multitude, while the mother was scaling the cliffs--sublime was the

shout that echoed afar the moment she reached the eyrie--then had

succeeded a silence deep as death--in a little while arose that hymning

prayer, succeeded by mute supplication--the wildness of thankful and

congratulatory joy had next its sway--and now that her salvation was

sure, the great crowd rustled like a wind-swept wood. And for whose sake

was all this alternation of agony? A poor humble creature, unknown to

many even by name--one who had had but few friends, nor wished for

more--contented to work all day, here--there--anywhere--that she might

be able to support her aged mother and her child--and who on Sabbath

took her seat in an obscure pew, set apart for paupers, in the kirk.

"Fall back, and give her fresh air," said the old minister of the

parish; and the ring of close faces widened round her lying as in death.

"Gie me the bonny bit bairn into my arms," cried first one mother and

then another, and it was tenderly handed round the circle of kisses,

many of the snooded maidens bathing its face in tears. "There's no a

single scratch about the puir innocent, for the Eagle, you see, maun hae

stuck its talons into the lang claes and the shawl. Blin', blin' maun

they be who see not the finger o' God in this thing!"

Hannah started up from her swoon--and, looking wildly round, cried, "Oh!

the Bird--the Bird!--the Eagle--the Eagle!--the Eagle has carried off my

bonny wee Walter--is there nane to pursue?" A neighbour put her baby

into her breast; and shutting her eyes, and smiting her forehead, the

sorely bewildered creature said in a low voice, "Am I wauken--oh! tell

me if I'm wauken--or if a' this be but the wark o' a fever."

Hannah Lamond was not yet twenty years old, and although she was a

mother--and you may guess what a mother--yet--frown not, fair and gentle

reader--frown not, pure and stainless as thou art--to her belonged not

the sacred name of wife--and that baby was the child of sin and of

shame--yes--"the child of misery, baptised in tears!" She had

loved--trusted--been betrayed--and deserted. In sorrow and

solitude--uncomforted and despised--she bore her burden. Dismal had been

the hour of travail--and she feared her mother's heart would have

broken, even when her own was cleft in twain. But how healing is

forgiveness--alike to the wounds of the forgiving and the forgiven! And

then Hannah knew that, although guilty before God, her guilt was not

such as her fellow-creatures deemed it--for there were dreadful secrets

which should never pass her lips against the father of her child. So she

bowed down her young head, and soiled it with the ashes of

repentance--walking with her eyes on the ground as she again entered the

kirk--yet not fearing to lift them up to heaven during the prayer. Her

sadness inspired a general pity--she was excluded from no house she had

heart to visit--no coarse comment, no ribald jest accompanied the notice

people took of her baby--no licentious rustic presumed on her frailty;

for the pale, melancholy face of the nursing mother, weeping as she sung

the lullaby, forbade all such approach--and an universal sentiment of

indignation drove from the parish the heartless and unprincipled

seducer--if all had been known, too weak word for his crime--who left

thus to pine in sorrow, and in shame far worse than sorrow, one who till

her unhappy fall had been held up by every mother as an example to her

daughters.

Never had she striven to cease to love her betrayer--but she had

striven--and an appeased conscience had enabled her to do so--to think

not of him now that he had deserted her for ever. Sometimes his image,

as well in love as in wrath, passed before the eye of her heart--but she

closed it in tears of blood, and the phantom disappeared. Thus all the

love towards him that slept--but was not dead--arose in yearnings of

still more exceeding love towards his child. Round its head was gathered

all hope of comfort--of peace--of reward of her repentance. One of its

smiles was enough to brighten up the darkness of a whole day. In her

breast--on her knee--in its cradle, she regarded it with a perpetual

prayer. And this feeling it was, with all the overwhelming tenderness of

affection, all the invigorating power of passion, that, under the hand

of God, bore her up and down that fearful mountain's brow, and after the

hour of rescue and deliverance, stretched her on the greensward like a

corpse.

The rumour of the miracle circled the mountain's base, and a strange

story without names had been told to the Wood-ranger of the

Cairn-Forest, by a wayfaring man. Anxious to know what truth there was

in it, he crossed the hill, and making his way through the sullen crowd,

went up to the eminence, and beheld her whom he had so wickedly ruined,

and so basely deserted. Hisses, and groans, and hootings, and fierce

eyes, and clenched hands assailed and threatened him on every side.

His heart died within him, not in fear, but in remorse. What a worm he

felt himself to be! And fain would he have become a worm, that, to

escape all that united human scorn, he might have wriggled away in slime

into some hole of the earth. But the meek eye of Hannah met his in

forgiveness--an un-upbraiding tear--a faint smile of love. All his

better nature rose within him, all his worse nature was quelled. "Yes,

good people, you do right to cover me with your scorn. But what is your

scorn to the wrath of God? The Evil One has often been with me in the

woods; the same voice that once whispered me to murder her--but here I

am--not to offer retribution--for that may not--will not--must not

be--guilt must not mate with innocence. But here I proclaim that

innocence. I deserve death, and I am willing here, on this spot, to

deliver myself into the hands of justice. Allan Calder--I call on you to

seize your prisoner."

The moral sense of the people, when instructed by knowledge and

enlightened by religion, what else is it but the voice of God! Their

anger subsided into a stern satisfaction--and that soon softened, in

sight of her who alone aggrieved alone felt nothing but forgiveness,

into a confused compassion for the man who, bold and bad as he had been,

had undergone many solitary torments, and nearly fallen in his

uncompanioned misery into the power of the Prince of Darkness. The old

clergyman, whom all reverenced, put the contrite man's hand in hers,

whom he swore to love and cherish all his days. And, ere summer was

over, Hannah was the mistress of a family, in a house not much inferior

to a Manse. Her mother, now that not only her daughter's reputation was

freed from stain, but her innocence also proved, renewed her youth. And

although the worthy schoolmaster, who told us the tale so much better

than we have been able to repeat it, confessed that the wood-ranger

never became altogether a saint--nor acquired the edifying habit of

pulling down the corners of his mouth, and turning up the whites of his

eyes--yet he assured us that he never afterwards heard anything very

serious laid to his prejudice--that he became in due time an elder of

the Kirk--gave his children a religious education--erring only in making

rather too much of a pet of his eldest born, whom, even when grown up to

manhood, he never called by any other name than the Eaglet.

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.

THIRD CANTICLE.

The Raven! In a solitary glen sits down on a stone the roaming

pedestrian, beneath the hush and gloom of a thundery sky that has not

yet begun to growl, and hears no sounds but that of an occasional big

rain-drop, plashing on the bare bent; the crag high overhead sometimes

utters a sullen groan--the pilgrim, starting, listens, and the noise is

repeated, but instead of a groan, a croak--croak--croak! manifestly from

a thing with life. A pause of silence! and hollower and hoarser the

croak is heard from the opposite side of the glen. Eyeing the black

sultry heaven, he feels the warm plash on his face, but sees no bird on

the wing. By-and-by something black lifts itself slowly and heavily up

from a precipice, in deep shadow; and before it has cleared the

rock-range, and entered the upper region of air, he knows it to be a

Raven. The creature seems wroth to be disturbed in his solitude, and in

his strong straight-forward flight aims at the head of another glen; but

he wheels round at the iron barrier, and, alighting among the heather,

folds his huge massy wings, and leaps about as if in anger, with the

same savage croak--croak--croak! No other bird so like a demon--and

should you chance to break a leg in the desert, and be unable to crawl

to a hut, your life is not worth twenty-four hours' purchase. Never was

there a single hound in Lord Darlington's packs, since his lordship

became a mighty hunter, with nostrils so fine as those of that feathered

fiend, covered though they be with strong hairs or bristles, that grimly

adorn a bill of formidable dimensions, and apt for digging out

eye-socket and splitting skull-structure of dying man or beast. That

bill cannot tear in pieces like the eagle's beak, nor are its talons so

powerful to smite as to compress--but a better bill for

cut-and-thrust--- push, carte, and tierce--the dig dismal and the plunge

profound--belongs to no other bird. It inflicts great gashes; nor needs

the wound to be repeated on the same spot. Feeder foul and obscene! to

thy nostril upturned "into the murky air, sagacious of thy quarry from

afar," sweeter is the scent of carrion, than to the panting lover's

sense and soul the fragrance of his own virgin's breath and bosom, when,

lying in her innocence in his arms, her dishevelled tresses seem laden

with something more ethereally pure than "Sabean odours from the spicy

shores of Araby the Blest."

The Raven dislikes all animal food that has not a deathy smack. It

cannot be thought that he has any reverence or awe of the mystery of

life. Neither is he a coward; at least, not such a coward as to fear the

dying kick of a lamb or sheep. Yet so long as his victim can stand, or

sit, or lie in a strong struggle, the raven keeps aloof--hopping in a

circle that narrows and narrows as the sick animal's nostrils keep

dilating in convulsions, and its eyes grow dimmer and more dim. When the

prey is in the last agonies, croaking, he leaps upon the breathing

carcass, and whets his bill upon his own blue-ringed legs, steadied by

claws in the fleece, yet not so fiercely inserted as to get entangled

and fast. With his large level-crowned head bobbing up and down, and

turned a little first to one side and then to another, all the while a

self-congratulatory leer in his eye, he unfolds his wings, and then

folds them again, twenty or thirty times, as if dubious how to begin to

gratify his lust of blood; and frequently, when just on the brink of

consummation, jumps off side, back, or throat, and goes dallying about,

round and round, and off to a small safe distance, scenting, almost

snorting, the smell of the blood running cold, colder, and more cold. At

last the poor wretch is still; and then, without waiting till it is

stiff, he goes to work earnestly and passionately, and taught by horrid

instinct how to reach the entrails, revels in obscene gluttony, and

preserves, it may be, eye, lip, palate, and brain, for the last course

of his meal, gorged to the throat, incapacitated to return thanks, and

with difficulty able either to croak or to fly.

The Raven, it is thought, is in the habit of living upwards of a hundred

years, perhaps a couple of centuries. Children grow into girls, girls

into maidens, maidens into wives, wives into widows, widows into old

decrepit crones, and crones into dust; and the Raven who wons at the

head of the glen, is aware of all the births, baptisms, marriages,

deathbeds, and funerals. Certain it is--at least so men say--that he is

aware of the deathbeds and the funerals. Often does he flap his wings

against door and window of hut, when the wretch within is in extremity,

or, sitting on the heather-roof, croaks horror into the dying dream. As

the funeral winds its way towards the mountain cemetery he hovers aloft

in the air--or, swooping down nearer to the bier, precedes the corpse

like a sable saulie. While the party of friends are carousing in the

house of death, he too, scorning funeral-baked meats, croaks hoarse

hymns and dismal dirges as he is devouring the pet-lamb of the little

grandchild of the deceased. The shepherds maintain that the Raven is

sometimes heard to laugh. Why not, as well as the hyena? Then it is that

he is most diabolical, for he knows that his laughter is prophetic of

human death. True it is, and it would be injustice to conceal the fact,

much more to deny it, that Ravens of old fed Elijah; but that was the

punishment of some old sin committed by Two who before the Flood bore

the human shape, and who, soon as the Ark rested on Mount Ararat, flew

off to the desolation of swamped forests and the disfigured solitude of

the drowned glens. Dying Ravens hide themselves from daylight in

burial-places among the rocks, and are seen hobbling into their tombs,

as if driven thither by a flock of fears, and crouching under a remorse

that disturbs instinct, even as if it were conscience. So sings and says

the Celtic superstition--muttered to us in a dream--adding that there

are Raven ghosts, great black bundles of feathers, for ever in the

forest, night-hunting in famine for prey, emitting a last feeble croak

at the blush of dawn, and then all at once invisible.

There can be no doubt that that foolish Quaker, who some twenty years

ago perished at the foot of a crag near Red Tarn, "far in the bosom of

Helvyllyn," was devoured by ravens. We call him foolish, because no

adherent of that sect was ever qualified to find his way among mountains

when the day was shortish, and the snow, if not very deep, yet wreathed

and pit-falled. In such season and weather, no place so fit for a Quaker

as the fireside. Not to insist, however, on that point, with what glee

the few hungry and thirsty old Ravens belonging to the Red Tarn Club

must have flocked to the Ordinary! Without asking each other to which

part this, that, or the other croaker chose to be helped, the maxim

which regulated their behaviour at table was doubtless, "First come,

first served." Forthwith each bill was busy, and the scene became

animated in the extreme. There must have been great difficulty to the

most accomplished of the carrion in stripping the Quaker of his drab.

The broad-brim had probably escaped with the first intention, and after

going before the wind half across the unfrozen Tarn, capsized, filled,

and sunk. Picture to yourself so many devils, all in glossy black

feather coats and dark breeches, with waistcoats inclining to blue,

pully-hawlying away at the unresisting figure of the follower of Fox,

and getting first vexed and then irritated with the pieces of choking

soft armour in which, five or six ply thick, his inviting carcass was so

provokingly insheathed! First a drab duffle cloak--then a drab

wraprascal--then a drab broadcloth coat, made in the oldest

fashion--then a drab waistcoat of the same--then a drab under-waistcoat

of thinner mould--then a linen-shirt, somewhat drabbish--then a

flannel-shirt, entirely so, and most odorous to the nostrils of the

members of the Red Tarn Club. All this must have taken a couple of days

at the least; so, supposing the majority of members assembled about

eight A.M. on the Sabbath morning, it must have been well on to twelve

o'clock on Monday night before the club could have comfortably sat down

to supper. During these two denuding days, we can well believe that the

President must have been hard put to it to keep the secretary,

treasurer, chaplain, and other office-bearers, ordinary and

extraordinary members, from giving a sly dig at Obadiah's face, so

tempting in the sallow hue and rank smell of first corruption. Dead

bodies keep well in frost; but the subject had in this case probably

fallen from a great height, had his bones broken to smash, his flesh

bruised and mangled. The President, therefore, we repeat it, even

although a raven of great age and authority, must have had inconceivable

difficulty in controlling the Club. The croak of

"Order!--order!--Chair!--chair!"--must have been frequent; and had the

office not been hereditary, the old gentleman would no doubt have thrown

it up, and declared the chair vacant. All obstacles and obstructions

having been by indefatigable activity removed, no attempt, we may well

believe, was made by the seneschal to place the guests according to

their rank, above or below the salt, and the party sat promiscuously

down to a late supper. Not a word was tittered during the first

half-hour, till a queer-looking mortal, who had spent several years of

his prime of birdhood at old Calgarth, and picked up a tolerable command

of the Westmoreland dialect by means of the Hamiltonian system,

exclaimed, "I'se weel nee brussen--there be's Mister Wudsworth--Ho, ho,

ho!" It was indeed the bard, benighted in the Excursion from Patterdale

to Jobson's Cherry-Tree; and the Red Tarn Club, afraid of having their

orgies put into blank verse, sailed away in floating fragments beneath

the moon and stars.

But over the doom of one true Lover of Nature let us shed a flood of

rueful tears; for at what tale shall mortal man weep, if not at the tale

of youthful genius and virtue shrouded suddenly in a winding-sheet

wreathed of snow by the pitiless tempest! Elate in the joy of solitude,

he hurried like a fast-travelling shadow into the silence of the frozen

mountains, all beautifully encrusted with pearls, and jewels, and

diamonds, beneath the resplendent night-heavens. The din of populous

cities had long stunned his brain, and his soul had sickened in the

presence of the money-hunting eyes of selfish men, all madly pursuing

their multifarious machinations in the great mart of commerce. The very

sheeted masts of ships, bearing the flags of foreign countries, in all

their pomp and beauty sailing homeward or outward-bound, had become

hateful to his spirit--for what were they but the floating enginery of

Mammon? Truth, integrity, honour, were all recklessly sacrificed to gain

by the friends he loved and had respected most--sacrificed without shame

and without remorse--repentance being with them a repentance only over

ill-laid schemes of villany--plans for the ruination of widows and

orphans, blasted in the bud of their iniquity. The brother of his bosom

made him a bankrupt--and for a year the jointure of his widow-mother was

unpaid. But she died before the second Christmas--and he was left alone

in the world. Poor indeed he was, but not a beggar. A legacy came to him

from a distant relation--almost the only one of his name--who died

abroad. Small as it was, it was enough to live on--and his enthusiastic

spirit gathering joy from distress, vowed to dedicate itself in some

profound solitude to the love of Nature, and the study of her Great

Laws. He bade an eternal farewell to cities at the dead of midnight,

beside his mother's grave, scarcely distinguishable among the thousand

flat stones, sunk, or sinking into the wide churchyard, along which a

great thoroughfare of life roared like the sea. And now, for the first

time, his sorrow flung from him like a useless garment, he found himself

alone among the Cumbrian mountains, and impelled in strong idolatry

almost to kneel down and worship the divine beauty of the moon, and

"stars that are the poetry of heaven."

Not uninstructed was the wanderer in the lore that links the human heart

to the gracious form and aspects of the Mighty Mother. In early youth he

had been intended for the Church, and subsequent years of ungrateful and

ungenial toils had not extinguished the fine scholarship that native

aptitude for learning had acquired in the humble school of the village

in which he was born. He had been ripe for College when the sudden death

of his father, who had long been at the head of a great mercantile

concern, imposed it upon him, as a sacred duty owed to his mother and

his sisters, to embark in trade. Not otherwise could he hope ever to

retrieve their fortunes--and for ten years for their sake he was a

slave, till ruin set him free. Now he was master of his own destiny--and

sought some humble hut in that magnificent scenery, where he might pass

a blameless life, and among earth's purest joys prepare his soul for

heaven. Many such humble huts had he seen during that one bold, bright,

beautiful spring winter-day. Each wreath of smoke from the breathing

chimneys, while the huts themselves seemed hardly awakened from sleep in

the morning-calm, led his imagination up into the profound peace of the

sky. In any one of those dwellings, peeping from sheltered dells, or

perched on wind-swept eminences, could he have taken up his abode, and

sat down contented at the board of their simple inmates. But in the very

delirium of a new bliss, the day faded before him--twilight looked

lovelier than dream-land in the reflected glimmer of the snow--and thus

had midnight found him, in a place so utterly lonesome in its remoteness

from all habitations, that even in summer no stranger sought it without

the guidance of some shepherd familiar with the many bewildering passes

that stretched away in all directions through among the mountains to

distant vales. No more fear or thought had he of being lost in the

wilderness, than the ring-dove that flies from forest to forest in the

winter season, and, without the aid even of vision, trusts to the

instinctive wafting of her wings through the paths of ether.

As he continued gazing on the heavens, the moon all at once lost

something of her brightness--the stars seemed fewer in number--and the

lustre of the rest as by mist obscured. The blue ethereal frame grew

discoloured with streaks of red and yellow--and a sort of dim darkness

deepened and deepened on the air, while the mountains appeared higher,

and at the same time further off, as if he had been transported in a

dream to another region of the earth. A sound was heard, made up of

far-mustering winds, echoes from caves, swinging of trees, and the

murmur as of a great lake or sea beginning to break on the shore. A few

flakes of snow touched his face, and the air grew cold. A clear tarn had

a few minutes before glittered with moonbeams, but now it had

disappeared. Sleet came thicker and faster, and ere long it was a storm

of snow. "O God! my last hour is come!" and scarcely did he hear his own

voice in the roaring tempest.

Men have died in dungeons--and their skeletons been found long years

afterwards lying on the stone floor, in postures that told through what

hideous agonies they had passed into the world of spirits. But no eye

saw, no ear heard, and the prison-visitor gathers up, as he shudders,

but a dim conviction of some long horror from the bones. One day in

spring--long after the snows were melted--except here and there a patch

like a flock of sheep on some sunless exposure--a huge Raven rose

heavily, as if gorged with prey, before the feet of a shepherd, who,

going forward to the spot where the bird had been feeding, beheld a

rotting corpse! A dog, itself almost a skeleton, was lying near, and

began to whine at his approach. On its collar was the name of its

master--a name unknown in that part of the country--and weeks elapsed

before any person could be heard of that could tell the history of the

sufferer. A stranger came and went--taking the faithful creature with

him that had so long watched by the dead--but long before his arrival

the remains had been interred; and you may see the grave, a little way

on from the south gate, on your right hand as you enter, not many yards

from the Great Yew-Tree in the churchyard of----, not far from the foot

of Ullswater.

Gentle reader! we have given you two versions of the same story--and

pray, which do you like the best? The first is the most funny, the

second the most affecting. We have observed that the critics are not

decided on the question of our merits as a writer; some maintaining that

we are strongest in humour--others, that our power is in pathos. The

judicious declare that our forte lies in both--in the two united, or

alternating with each other. "But is it not quite shocking," exclaims

some scribbler who has been knouted in Ebony, "to hear so very serious

an affair as the death of a Quaker in the snow among mountains, treated

with such heartless levity? The man who wrote that description, sir, of

the Ordinary of the Red Tarn Club, would not scruple to commit murder!"

Why, if killing a scribbler be murder, the writer of that--this--article

confesses that he has more than once committed that capital crime. But

no intelligent jury, taking into consideration the law as well as the

fact--and it is often their duty to do so, let high authorities say what

they will--would for a moment hesitate, in any of the cases alluded to,

to bring in a verdict of "Justifiable homicide." The gentleman or lady

who has honoured us so far with perusal, knows enough of human life, and

of their own hearts, to know also that there is no other subject which

men of genius--and who ever denied that we are men of genius?--have been

accustomed to view in so many ludicrous lights as this same subject of

death; and the reason is at once obvious--yet _recherché_--videlicet,

Death is, in itself and all that belongs to it, such a sad, cold, wild,

dreary, dismal, distracting, and dreadful thing, that at times men

talking about it cannot choose but laugh!

Too-hoo--too-hoo--too-whit-too-hoo!--we have got among the OWLS.

Venerable personages, in truth, they are--perfect Solomons! The

spectator, as in most cases of very solemn characters, feels himself at

first strongly disposed to commit the gross indecorum of bursting out

a-laughing in their face. One does not see the absolute necessity either

of man or bird looking at all times so unaccountably wise. Why will an

Owl persist in his stare? Why will a Bishop never lay aside his wig?

People ignorant of Ornithology will stare like the Bird of Wisdom

himself on being told that an OWL is an Eagle. Yet, bating a little

inaccuracy, it is so. Eagles, kites, hawks, and owls, all belong to the

genus Falco. We hear a great deal too much in poetry of the moping Owl,

the melancholy Owl, the boding Owl, whereas he neither mopes nor bodes,

and is no more melancholy than becomes a gentleman. We also hear of the

Owl being addicted to spirituous liquors; and hence the expression, as

drunk as an Owl. All this is mere Whig personality, the Owl being a Tory

of the old school, and a friend of the ancient establishments of church

and state. Nay, the same political party, although certainly the most

shortsighted of God's creatures, taunt the Owl with being blind. As

blind as an Owl, is a libel in frequent use out of ornithological

society. Shut up Lord Jeffrey himself in a hay-barn with a well-built

mow, and ask him in the darkness to catch you a few mice, and he will

tell you whether or not the Owl be blind. This would be just as fair as

to expect the Owl to see, like Lord Jeffrey, through a case in the

Parliament House during daylight. Nay, we once heard a writer in Taylor

and Hessey call the Owl stupid, he himself having longer ears than any

species of Owl extant. What is the positive character of the Owl may

perhaps appear by-and-by; but we have seen that, describing his

character by negations, we may say that he resembles Napoleon Buonaparte

much more than Joseph Hume or Alderman Wood. He is not moping--not

boding--not melancholy--not a drunkard--not blind--not stupid; as much

as it would be prudent to say of any man, whether editor or contributor,

in her Majesty's dominions.

We really have no patience with people who persist in all manner of

misconceptions regarding the character of birds. Birds often appear to

such persons, judging from, of, and by themselves, to be in mind and

manners the reverse of their real character. They judge the inner bird

by outward circumstances inaccurately observed. There is the owl. How

little do the people of England know of him--even of him the barn-door

and domestic owl--yea, even at this day--we had almost said the Poets!

Shakespeare, of course, and his freres, knew him to be a merry

fellow--quite a madcap--and so do now all the Lakers. But Cowper had his

doubts about it; and Gray, as every schoolboy knows, speaks of him like

an old wife. The force of folly can go no further, than to imagine an

owl complaining to the moon of being disturbed by people walking in a

country churchyard. And among all our present bardlings, the owl is

supposed to be constantly on the eve of suicide. If it were really so,

he ought in a Christian country to be pitied, not pelted, as he is sure

to be when accidentally seen in sunlight--for melancholy is a

misfortune, especially when hereditary and constitutional, as it is

popularly believed to be in the Black-billed Bubo, and certainly was in

Dr Johnson. In young masters and misses we can pardon any childishness;

but we cannot pardon the antipathy to the owl entertained by the manly

minds of grown-up English clodhoppers, ploughmen, and threshers. They

keep terriers to kill rats and mice in barns, and they shoot the owls,

any one of whom we would cheerfully back against the famous Billy. "The

very commonest observation teaches us," says the author of the "Gardens

of the Menagerie," "that they are in reality the best and most efficient

protectors of our cornfields and granaries from the devastating pillage

of the swarms of mice and other small _rodents_." Nay, by their constant

destruction of these petty but dangerous enemies, the owls, he says,

"earn an unquestionable title to be regarded as among the _most active

of the friends of man_; a title which only one or two among them

occasionally forfeit by their aggressions on the defenceless poultry."

Roger or Dolly beholds him in the act of murdering a duckling, and, like

other light-headed, giddy, unthinking creatures, they forget all the

service he has done the farm, the parish, and the state; he is shot _in

the act_, and nailed, wide-extended in cruel spread-eagle, on the

barn-door. Others again call him dull and shortsighted--nay, go the

length of asserting that he is stupid--as stupid as an owl. Why, our

excellent fellow, when you have the tithe of the talent of the common

owl, and know half as well how to use it, you may claim the medal.

The eagles, kites, and hawks, hunt by day. The Owl is the Nimrod of the

Night. Then, like one who shall be nameless, he sails about seeking

those whom he may devour. To do him justice, he has a truly ghost-like

head and shoulders of his own. What horror to the "small birds rejoicing

in spring's leafy bowers," fast-locked we were going to say in each

other's arms, but sitting side by side in the same cosy nuptial nest, to

be startled out of their love-dreams by the great lamp-eyed, beaked face

of a horrible monster with horns, picked out of feathered bed, and

wafted off in one bunch, within talons, to pacify a set of hissing, and

snappish, and shapeless powder-puffs, in the loophole of a barn? In a

house where a cat is kept, mice are much to be pitied. They are so

infatuated with the smell of a respectable larder, that to leave the

premises, they confess, is impossible. Yet every hour--nay, every minute

of their lives--must they be in the fear of being leaped out upon by

four velvet paws--and devoured with kisses from a whiskered mouth, and a

throat full of that incomprehensible music--a purr. Life, on such terms,

seems to us anything but desirable. But the truth is, that mice in the

fields are not a whit better off. Owls are cats with wings. Skimming

along the grass tops, they stop in a momentary hover, let drop a talon,

and away with Mus, his wife, and small family of blind children. It is

the white, or yellow, or barn, or church, or Screech-Owl, or

Gilley-Owlet, that behaves in this way; and he makes no bones of a

mouse, uniformly swallowing him alive. Our friend, we suspect, though no

drunkard, is somewhat of a glutton. In one thing we agree with him, that

there is no sort of harm in a heavy supper. There, however, we are

guilty of some confusion of ideas; for what to us, who rise in the

morning, seems a supper, is to him who gets up at evening twilight, a

breakfast. We therefore agree with him in thinking that there is no sort

of harm in a heavy breakfast. After having passed a pleasant night in

eating and flirting, he goes to bed betimes about four o'clock in the

morning; and, as Bewick observes, makes a blowing hissing noise,

resembling the snoring of a man. Indeed nothing can be more diverting to

a person annoyed by blue devils, than to look at a white Owl and his

wife asleep. With their heads gently inclined towards each other, there

they keep snoring away like any Christian couple. Should the one make a

pause, the other that instant awakes, and, fearing something may be

wrong with his spouse, opens a pair of glimmering winking eyes, and

inspects the adjacent physiognomy with the scrutinising stare of a

village apothecary. If all be right, the concert is resumed, the snore

sometimes degenerating into a sort of snivel, and the snivel into a

blowing hiss. First time we heard this noise was in a churchyard when we

were mere boys, having ventured in after dark to catch the minister's

colt for a gallop over to the parish capital, where there was a

dancing-school ball. There had been a nest of Owls in some hole in the

spire; but we never doubted for a moment that the noise of snoring,

blowing, hissing, and snapping proceeded from a testy old gentleman that

had been buried that forenoon, and had come alive again a day after the

fair. Had we reasoned the matter a little, we must soon have convinced

ourselves that there was no ground for alarm to us at least; for the

noise was like that of some one half stifled, and little likely to heave

up from above him a six-feet-deep load of earth--to say nothing of the

improbability of his being able to unscrew the coffin from the inside.

Be that as it may, we cleared about a dozen of decent tombstones at

three jumps--the fourth took us over a wall five feet high within and

about fifteen without, and landed us, with a squash, in a

cabbage-garden, enclosed on the other three sides by a house and a

holly-hedge. The house was the sexton's, who, apprehending the stramash

to proceed from a resurrectionary surgeon mistaken in his latitude,

thrust out a long duck-gun from a window in the thatch, and swore to

blow out our brains if we did not instantly surrender ourselves, and

deliver up the corpse. It was in vain to cry out our name, which he knew

as well as his own. He was deaf to reason, and would not withdraw his

patterero till we had laid down the corpse. He swore that he saw the

sack in the moonlight. This was a horse-cloth with which we had intended

to saddle the "cowt," and that had remained, during the supernatural

agency under which we laboured, clutched unconsciously and convulsively

in our grasp. Long was it ere Davie Donald would see us in our true

light--but at length he drew on his Kilmarnock nightcap, and coming out

with a bouet, let us through the trance and out of the front door,

thoroughly convinced, till we read Bewick, that old Southfield was not

dead, although in a very bad way indeed. Let this be a lesson to

schoolboys not to neglect the science of natural history, and to study

the character of the White Owl.

OWLS--both White and common Brown, are not only useful in a mountainous

country, but highly ornamental. How serenely beautiful their noiseless

flight; a flake of snow is not winnowed through the air more

softly-silent! Gliding along the dark shadows of a wood, how spiritual

the motion--how like the thought of a dream! And then, during the hushed

midnight hours, how jocund the whoop and hollo from the heart of a

sycamore--grey rock, or ivied Tower! How the Owls of Windermere must

laugh at the silly Lakers, that under the garish eye of day, enveloped

in clouds of dust, whirl along in rattling post-shays in pursuit of the

picturesque! Why, the least imaginative Owl that ever hunted mice by

moonlight on the banks of Windermere, must know the character of its

scenery better than any poetaster that ever dined on char at Bowness or

Lowood. The long quivering lines of light illumining some sylvan

isle--the evening-star shining from the water to its counterpart in the

sky--the glorious phenomenon of the double moon--the night-colours of

the woods--and, once in the three years perhaps, that loveliest and most

lustrous of celestial forms, the lunar rainbow--all these and many more

beauteous and magnificent sights are familiar to the Owls of Windermere.

And who know half so well as they do the echoes of Furness, and

Applethwaite, and Loughrigg, and Landale, all the way on to Dungeon-Gill

and Pavey-Ark, Scawfell and the Great Gable, and that sea of mountains,

of which every wave has a name? Midnight--when asleep so still and

silent--seems inspired with the joyous spirit of the Owls in their

revelry--and answers to their mirth and merriment through all her

clouds. The Moping Owl, indeed!--the Boding Owl, forsooth!--the

Melancholy Owl, you blockhead!--why, they are the most

cheerful--joy-portending--and exulting of God's creatures! Their flow of

animal spirits is incessant--crowing-cocks are a joke to them--blue

devils are to them unknown--not one hypochondriac in a thousand

barns--and the Man-in-the-Moon acknowledges that he never heard one of

them utter a complaint.

But what say ye to an Owl, not only like an eagle in plumage, but equal

to the largest eagle in size--and therefore named, from the King of

Birds, the EAGLE OWL. Mr Selby! you have done justice to the monarch of

the Bubos. We hold ourselves to be persons of tolerable courage, as the

world goes--but we could not answer for ourselves showing fight with

such a customer, were he to waylay us by night in a wood. In comparison,

Jack Thurtell looked harmless. No--that bold, bright-eyed murderer, with

Horns on his head like those on Michael Angelo's statue of Moses, would

never have had the cruel cowardice to cut the weasand, and smash out the

brains of such a miserable wretch as Weare! True, he is fond of

blood--and where's the harm in that? It is his nature. But if there be

any truth in the science of Physiognomy--and be that of Phrenology what

it will, most assuredly there is truth in it--the original of that Owl,

for whose portrait the world is indebted to Mr Selby, and Sir Thomas

Lawrence never painted a finer one of Prince or Potentate of any Holy or

Unholy Alliance, must have despised Probert from the very bottom of his

heart. No prudent Eagle but would be exceedingly desirous of keeping on

good terms with him--devilish shy, i' faith, of giving him any offence

by the least hauteur of manner, or the slightest violation of etiquette.

An Owl of this character and calibre is not afraid to show his horns at

mid-day on the mountain. The Fox is not over and above fond of him--and

his claws can kill a cub at a blow. The Doe sees the monster sitting on

the back of her fawn, and, maternal instinct overcome by horror, bounds

into the brake, and leaves the pretty creature to its fate. Thank

Heaven, he is, in Great Britain, a rare bird! Tempest-driven across the

Northern Ocean from his native forests in Russia, an occasional visitant

he "frightens this isle from its propriety," and causes a hideous

screaming through every wood he haunts. Some years ago, one was killed

in the upland moors in the county of Durham--and, of course, paid a

visit to Mr Bullock's Museum. Eagle-like in all its habits, it builds

its nest on high rocks--sometimes on the loftiest trees--and seldom lays

more than two eggs. One is one more than enough--and we who fly by night

trust never to fall in with a live specimen of the Strix-Bubo of

Linnæus.

But largest and loveliest of all the silent night-gliders--the SNOWY

OWL! Gentle reader--if you long to see his picture, we have told you

where it may be found;--and in the College Museum, within a glass vase

on the central table in the Palace of Stuffed Birds, you may admire his

outward very self--the semblance of the Owl he was when he used to eye

the moon shining over the Northern Sea:--but if you would see the noble

and beautiful Creature himself, in all his living glory, you must seek

him through the long summer twilight among the Orkney or the Shetland

Isles. The Snowy Owl dearly loves the snow--and there is, we believe, a

tradition among them, that their first ancestor and ancestress rose up

together from a melting snow-wreath on the very last day of a Greenland

winter, when all at once the bright fields reappear. The race still

inhabits that frozen coast--being common, indeed, through all the

regions of the Arctic Circle. It is numerous on the shores of Hudson's

Bay, in Norway, Sweden, and Lapland--but in the temperate parts of

Europe and America "rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno."

We defy all the tailors on the face of the habitable globe; and what

countless cross-legged fractional parts of men--who, like the beings of

whom they are constituents, are thought to double their numbers every

thirty years--must not the four quarters of the earth, in their present

advanced state of civilisation, contain!--we defy, we say, all the

tailors on the face of the habitable globe to construct such a surtout

as that of the Snowy Owl, covering him, with equal luxury and comfort,

in summer's heat and winter's cold. The elements, in all their freezing

fury, cannot reach the body of the bird through that beautiful

down-mail. Well guarded are the opening of those great eyes. Neither the

driving dust, nor the searching sleet, nor the sharp frozen snow-stour,

give him the ophthalmia. Gutta Serena is to him unknown--no Snowy Owl

was ever couched for cataract--no need has he for an oculist, should he

live an hundred years; and were they to attempt any operation on his

lens or iris, how he would hoot at Alexander and Wardrope!

Night, doubtless, is the usual season of his prey; but he does not shun

the day, and is sometimes seen hovering unhurt in the sunshine. The red

or black grouse flies as if pursued by a ghost; but the Snowy Owl,

little slower than the eagle, in dreadful silence overtakes his flight,

and then death is sudden and sure. Hawking is, or was, a noble

pastime--and we have now prevented our eyes from glancing at

Jer-falcon, Peregrine, or Goshawk; but Owling, we do not doubt, would be

noways inferior sport; and were it to become prevalent in modern times,

as Hawking was in times of old, why, each lady, as Venus already fair,

with an Owl on her wrist, would look as wise as Minerva.

But our soul sickens at all those dreams of blood! and fain would turn

away from fierce eye, cruel beak, and tearing talon--war-weapons of them

that delight in wounds and death--to the contemplation of creatures

whose characteristics are the love of solitude--shy gentleness of

manner--the tender devotion of mutual attachment--and, in field or

forest, a lifelong passion for peace.

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.

FOURTH CANTICLE.

Welcome then the RING-DOVE--the QUEST--or CUSHAT, for that is the very

bird we have had in our imagination. There is his full-length portrait,

stealthily sketched as the Solitary was sitting on a tree. You must

catch him napping, indeed, before he will allow you an opportunity of

colouring him on the spot from nature. It is not that he is more jealous

or suspicious of man's approach than other bird; for never shall we

suffer ourselves to believe that any tribe of the descendants of the

Dove that brought to the Ark the olive tidings of reappearing earth, can

in their hearts hate or fear the race of the children of man. But Nature

has made the Cushat a lover of the still forest-gloom; and therefore,

when his lonesome haunts are disturbed or intruded on, he flies to some

yet profounder, some more central solitude, and folds his wing in the

hermitage of a Yew, sown in the time of the ancient Britons.

It is the Stock-Dove, we believe, not the Ring-Dove, from whom are

descended all the varieties of the races of Doves. What tenderer praise

can we give them all, than that the Dove is the emblem of Innocence, and

that the name of innocence--not of frailty--is Woman? When Hamlet said

the reverse, he was thinking, you know, of the Queen--not of Ophelia. Is

not woman by nature chaste as the Dove--as the Dove faithful? Sitting

all alone with her babe in her bosom, is she not as a Dove devoted to

her own nest? Murmureth she not a pleasant welcome to her wearied

home-returned husband, even like the Dove among the woodlands when her

mate re-alights on the pine? Should her spouse be taken from her and

disappear, doth not her heart sometimes break, as they say it happens to

the Dove? But oftener far, findeth not the widow that her orphans are

still fed by her own hand, that is filled with good things by

Providence; till grown up, and able to shift for themselves, away they

go--just as the poor Dove lamenteth for her mate in the snare of the

fowler, yet feedeth her young continually through the whole day, till

away too go they--alas, in neither case, perhaps, ever more to return!

We dislike all favouritism, all foolish and capricious partiality for

particular bird or beast; but dear, old, sacred associations, will

_tell_ upon all one thinks or feels towards any place or person in this

world of ours, near or remote. God forbid we should criticise the

Cushat! We desire to speak of him as tenderly as of a friend buried in

our early youth. Too true it is, that often and oft, when schoolboys,

have we striven to steal upon him in his solitude, and to shoot him to

death. In morals, and in religion, it would be heterodox to deny that

the will is as the deed. Yet in cases of high and low-way robbery and

murder, there does seem, treating the subject not in philosophical but

popular style, to be some little difference between the two; at least we

hope so, for otherwise we can with difficulty imagine one person not

deserving to be ordered for execution, on Wednesday next, between the

hours of eight and nine ante-meridian. Happily, however, for our future

peace of mind, and not improbably for the whole confirmation of our

character, our Guardian Genius--(every boy has one constantly at his

side, both during school and play hours, though it must be confessed

sometimes a little remiss in his duty, for the nature even of angelical

beings is imperfect)--always so contrived it, that with all our cunning

we never could kill a Cushat. Many a long hour--indeed whole

Saturdays--have we lain perdue among broom and whins, the beautiful

green and yellow skirting of sweet Scotia's woods, watching his egress

or ingress, our gun ready cocked, and finger on trigger, that on the

flapping of his wings not a moment might be lost in bringing him to the

ground. But couch where we might, no Cushat ever came near our insidious

lair. Now and then a Magpie--birds who, by the by, when they suspect you

of any intention of shooting them, are as distant in their manners as

Cushats themselves, otherwise as impudent as Cockneys--would come,

hopping in continual tail-jerks, with his really beautiful plumage, if

one could bring oneself to think it so, and then sport the pensive

within twenty yards of the muzzle of Brown-Bess, impatient to let fly.

But our soul burned, our heart panted for a Cushat; and in that strong

fever-fit of passion, could we seek to slake our thirst for that wild

blood with the murder of a thievish eavesdropper of a Pye? The

Blackbird, too, often dropt out of the thicket into an open glade in the

hazel-shaws, and the distinctness of his yellow bill showed he was far

within shot-range. Yet, let us do ourselves justice, we never in all our

born days dreamt of shooting a Blackbird--him that scares away sadness

from the woodland twilight gloom, at morn or eve; whose anthem, even in

those dim days when Nature herself it might be well thought were

melancholy, forceth the firmament to ring with joy. Once "the snow-white

cony sought its evening meal," unconscious of our dangerous vicinity,

issuing with erected ears from the wood edge. That last was, we confess,

such a temptation to touch the trigger, that had we resisted it we must

have been either more or less than boy. We fired; and kicking up his

heels, doubtless in fright, but as it then seemed to us, during our

disappointment, much rather in frolic--nay, absolute derision--away

bounced Master Rabbit to his burrow, without one particle of soft

silvery wool on sward or bush, to bear witness to our unerring aim. As

if the branch on which he had been sitting were broken, away then went

the crashing Cushat through the intermingling sprays. The free flapping

of his wings was soon heard in the air above the tree-tops, and ere we

could recover from our almost bitter amazement, the creature was

murmuring to his mate on her shallow nest--a far-off murmur, solitary

and profound--to reach unto which, through the tangled mazes of the

forest, would have required a separate sense, instinct, or faculty,

which we did not possess. So, skulking out of our hiding-place, we made

no comment on the remark of homeward-plodding labourer, who had heard

the report, and now smelt the powder--"Cushats are geyan kittle birds to

kill"--but returned, with our shooting-bag as empty as our stomach, to

the Manse.

"Why do the birds sing on Sunday?" said once a little boy to us--and we

answered him in a lyrical ballad, which we have lost. But although the

birds certainly do sing on Sunday--behaviour that with our small gentle

Calvinist, who dearly loved them, caused some doubts of their being so

innocent as during the week-days they appeared to be--we cannot set

down their fault to the score of ignorance. Is it in the holy

superstition of the world-wearied heart that man believes the inferior

creatures to be conscious of the calm of the Sabbath, and that they know

it to be the day of our rest? Or is it that we transfer the feeling of

our inward calm to all the goings-on of Nature, and thus imbue them with

a character of reposing sanctity, existing only in our own spirits? Both

solutions are true. The instincts of those creatures we know only in

their symptoms and their effects, in the wonderful range of action over

which they reign. Of the instincts themselves--as feelings or ideas--we

know not anything, nor ever can know; for an impassable gulf separates

the nature of those that may be to perish, from ours that are to live

for ever. But their power of memory, we must believe, is not only

capable of minutest retention, but also stretches back to afar--and some

power or other they do possess, that gathers up the past experience into

rules of conduct that guide them in their solitary or gregarious life.

Why, therefore, should not the birds of Scotland know the Sabbath-day?

On that day the Water-Ouzel is never disturbed by angler among the

murmurs of his own waterfall; and, as he flits down the banks and braes

of the burn, he sees no motion, he hears no sound about the cottage that

is the boundary of his furthest flight--for "the dizzying mill-wheel

rests." The merry-nodding rooks, that in spring-time keep following the

very heels of the ploughman--may they not know it to be Sabbath, when

all the horses are standing idle in the field, or taking a gallop by

themselves round the head-rig? Quick of hearing are birds--one and

all--and in every action of their lives are obedient to sounds. May they

not, then--do they not connect a feeling of perfect safety with the

tinkle of the small kirk-bell? The very jay himself is not shy of people

on their way to worship. The magpie, that never sits more than a minute

at a time in the same place on a Saturday, will on the Sabbath remain on

the kirkyard wall with all the composure of a dove. The whole feathered

creation know our hours of sleep. They awake before us; and ere the

earliest labourer has said his prayers, have not the woods and valleys

been ringing with their hymns? Why, therefore, may not they, who know,

each week-day, the hour of our lying down and our rising up, know also

the day of our general rest? The animals whose lot is labour, shall

they not know it? Yes; the horse on that day sleeps in shade or sunshine

without fear of being disturbed--his neck forgets the galling collar,

"and there are forty feeding like one," all well knowing that their

fresh meal on the tender herbage will not be broken in upon before the

dews of next morning, ushering in a new day to them of toil or travel.

So much for our belief in the knowledge, instinctive or from a sort of

reason, possessed by the creatures of the inferior creation of the

heaven-appointed Sabbath to man and beast. But it is also true that we

transfer our inward feelings to their outward condition, and with our

religious spirit imbue all the ongoings of animated and even inanimated

life. There is always a shade of melancholy, a tinge of pensiveness, a

touch of pathos, in all profound rest. Perhaps because it is so much in

contrast with the turmoil of our ordinary being. Perhaps because the

soul, when undisturbed, will, from the impulse of its own divine nature,

have high, solemn, and awful thoughts. In such state, it transmutes all

things into a show of sympathy with itself. The church-spire, rising

high above the smoke and stir of a town, when struck by the sun-fire,

seems, on a market-day, a tall building in the air, that may serve as a

guide to people from a distance flocking into the bazaars. The same

church-spire, were its loud-tongued bell to call from aloft on the

gathering multitude below, to celebrate the anniversary of some great

victory, Waterloo or Trafalgar, would appear to stretch up its stature

triumphantly into the sky--so much the more triumphantly, if the

standard of England were floating from its upper battlements. But to the

devout eye of faith, doth it not seem to express its own character, when

on the Sabbath it performs no other office than to point to heaven?

So much for the second solution. But independently of both, no wonder

that all nature seems to rest on the Sabbath; for it doth rest--all of

it, at least, that appertains to man and his condition. If the Fourth

Commandment be kept--at rest is all the household--and all the fields

round it are at rest. Calm flows the current of human life, on that

gracious day, throughout all the glens and valleys of Scotland, as a

stream that wimples in the morning sunshine, freshened but not flooded

with the soft-falling rain of a summer night. The spiral smoke-wreath

above the cottage is not calmer than the motion within. True, that the

wood warblers do not cease their songs; but the louder they sing, the

deeper is the stillness. And what perfect blessedness, when it is only

joy that is astir in rest!

Loud-flapping Cushat! it was thou that inspiredst these solemn fancies;

and we have only to wish thee, for thy part contributed to our

Recreations, now that the acorns of autumn must be well-nigh consumed,

many a plentiful repast, amid the multitude of thy now congregated

comrades, in the cleared stubble lands--as severe weather advances, and

the ground becomes covered with snow, regales undisturbed by fowler, on

the tops of turnip, rape, and other cruciform plants, which all of thy

race affect so passionately--and soft blow the sea-breezes on thy

unruffled plumage, when thou takest thy winter's walk with kindred

myriads on the shelly shore, and for a season minglest with gull and

seamew--apart every tribe, one from the other, in the province of its

own peculiar instinct--yet all mysteriously taught to feed or sleep

together within the roar or margin of the main.

Sole-sitting Cushat! We see thee through the yew-tree's shade, on some

day of the olden time, but when or where we remember not--for what has

place or time to do with the vision of a dream? That we see thee is all

we know, and that serenely beautiful thou art! Most pleasant is it to

dream, and to know we dream! By sweet volition we keep ourselves half

asleep and half awake; and all our visions of thought, as they go

swimming along, partake at once of reality and imagination. Fiction and

truth--clouds, shadows, phantoms and phantasms--ether, sunshine,

substantial forms and sounds that have a being, blending together in a

scene created by us, and partly impressed upon us, and which one motion

of the head on the pillow may dissolve, or deepen into more oppressive

delight! In some such dreaming state of mind are we now; and, gentle

reader, if thou art broad awake, lay aside the visionary volume, or read

a little longer, and likely enough is it that thou too mayest fall half

asleep. If so, let thy drowsy eyes still pursue the glimmering

paragraphs--and wafted away wilt thou feel thyself to be into the heart

of a Highland forest, that knows no bounds but those of the uncertain

sky.

Away from our remembrance fades the noisy world of men into a silent

glimmer--and now it is all no more than a mere faint thought.

On--on--on! through briery brake--matted thicket--grassy

glade--On--on--on! further into the Forest! What a confusion of huge

stones, rocks, knolls, all tumbled together into a chaos--not without

its stern and sterile beauty! Still are there, above, blue glimpses of

the sky--deep though the umbrage be, and wide-flung the arms of the

oaks, and of pines in their native wilderness gigantic as oaks, and

extending as broad a shadow. Now the firmament has vanished--and all is

twilight. Immense stems, "in number without number

numberless,"--bewildering eye and soul--all

still--silent--steadfast--and so would they be in a storm. For what

storm--let it rage aloft as it might, till the surface of the forest

toss and roar like the sea--could force its path through these many

million trunks? The thunder-stone might split that giant there--how

vast! how magnificent!--but the brother by his side would not tremble;

and the sound--in the awful width of the silence--what more would it be

than that of the woodpecker alarming the insects of one particular tree!

Poor wretch that we are!--to us the uncompanioned silence of the

solitude hath become terrible. More dreadful is it than the silence of

the tomb; for there, often arise responses to the unuttered soliloquies

of the pensive heart. But this is as the silence, not of Time, but of

Eternity. No burial heaps--no mounds--no cairns! It is not as if man had

perished here, and been forgotten; but as if this were a world in which

there had been neither living nor dying. Too utter is the solitariness

even for the ghosts of dead! For they are thought to haunt the

burial-places of what once was their bodies--the chamber where the

spirit breathed its final farewell--the spot of its transitory love and

delight, or of its sin and sorrow--to gaze with troubled tenderness on

the eyes that once they worshipped--with cold ear to drink the music of

the voices long ago adored; and in all their permitted visitations, to

express, if but by the beckoning of the shadow of a hand, some

unextinguishable longing after the converse of the upper world, even

within the gates of the grave.

A change comes over us. Deep and still as is the solitude, we are

relieved of our awe, and out of the forest-gloom arise images of beauty

that come and go, gliding as on wings, or, statue-like, stand in the

glades, like the sylvan deities to whom of old belonged, by birthright,

all the regions of the woods. On--on--on!--further into the Forest!--and

let the awe of imagination be still further tempered by the delight

breathed even from any one of the lovely names sweet-sounding through

the famous fables of antiquity. Dryad, Hamadryad! Faunus!

Sylvanus!--Now, alas! ye are but names, and no more! Great Pan himself

is dead, or here he would set up his reign. But what right has such a

dreamer to dream of the dethroned deities of Greece? The language they

spoke is not his language; yet the words of the great poets who sang of

gods and demigods, are beautiful in their silent meanings as they meet

his adoring eyes; and, mighty Lyrists! has he not often floated down the

temple-crowned and altar-shaded rivers of your great Choral Odes?

On--on--on!--further into the Forest!--unless, indeed, thou dreadest

that the limbs that bear on thy fleshy tabernacle may fail, and the

body, left to itself, sink down and die. Ha! such fears thou laughest to

scorn; for from youth upwards thou hast dallied with the wild and

perilous: and what but the chill delight in which thou hast so often

shivered in threatening solitude brought thee here! These dens are not

dungeons, nor are we a thrall. Yet if dungeons they must be called--and

they are deep, and dark, and grim--ten thousand gates hath this great

prison-house, and wide open are they all. So on--on--on!--further into

the Forest! But who shall ascend to its summit? Eagles and dreams. Round

its base we go, rejoicing in the new-found day, and once more cheered

and charmed with the music of birds. Say whence came, ye scientific

world-makers, these vast blocks of granite? Was it fire or water, think

ye, that hung in air the semblance of yon Gothic cathedral, without

nave, or chancel, or aisle--a mass of solid rock? Yet it looks like the

abode of Echoes; and haply when there is thunder, rolls out its

lengthening shadow of sound to the ear of the solitary shepherd afar off

on Cairngorm.

On--on--on!--further into the Forest! Now on all sides leagues of

ancient trees surround us, and we are safe as in the grave from the

persecuting love or hatred of friends or foes. The sun shall not find us

by day, nor the moon by night. Were our life forfeited to what are

called the laws, how could the laws discover the criminal? How could

they drag us from the impenetrable gloom of this sylvan sanctuary? And

if here we chose to perish by suicide or natural death--and famine is a

natural death--what eye would ever look on our bones? Raving all; but so

it often is with us in severest solitude--our dreams will be hideous

with sin and death.

Hideous, said we, with sin and death? Thoughts that came flying against

us like vultures, like vultures have disappeared, disappointed of their

prey, and afraid to fix their talons in a thing alive. Hither--by some

secret and sacred impulse within the soul, that often knoweth not the

sovereign virtue of its own great desires--have we been led as into a

penitentiary, where, before the altar of nature, we may lay down the

burden of guilt or remorse, and walk out of the Forest a heaven-pardoned

man. What guilt?--O my soul! canst thou think of Him who inhabiteth

eternity, and ask what guilt? What remorse?--For the dereliction of duty

every day since thou received'st from Heaven the understanding of good

and of evil. All our past existence gathers up into one dread

conviction, that every man that is born of woman is a sinner, and worthy

of everlasting death. Yet with the same dread conviction is interfused a

knowledge, clear as the consciousness of present being, that the soul

will live for ever. What was the meaning, O my soul! of all those

transitory joys and griefs--of all those fears, hopes, loves, that so

shook, each in its own fleeting season, the very foundations on which

thy being in this life is laid? Anger, wrath, hatred, pride, and

ambition--what are they all but so many shapes of sin coeval with thy

birth? That sudden entrance of heaven's light into the Forest, was like

the opening of the eye of God! And our spirit stands ashamed of its

nakedness, because of the foulness and pollution of sin. But the awful

thoughts that have travelled through its chambers have ventilated,

swept, and cleansed them--and let us break away from beneath the weight

of confession.

Conscience! Speak not of weak and fantastic fears--of abject

superstitions--and of all that wild brood of dreams that have for ages

been laws to whole nations; though we might speak of them--and, without

violation of the spirit of true philosophy, call upon them to bear

testimony to the truth. But think of the calm, purified, enlightened,

and elevated conscience of the highest natures--from which objectless

fear has been excluded--and which hears, in its stillness, the eternal

voice of God. What calm celestial joy fills all the being of a good man,

when conscience tells him he is obeying God's law! What dismal fear and

sudden remorse assail him, whenever he swerves but one single step out

of the right path that is shining before his feet! It is not a mere

selfish terror--it is not the dread of punishment only that appals

him--for, on the contrary, he can calmly look on the punishment which he

knows his guilt has incurred, and almost desires that it should be

inflicted, that the incensed power may be appeased. It is the

consciousness of offence that is unendurable--not the fear of consequent

suffering; it is the degradation of sin that his soul deplores--it is

the guilt which he would expiate, if possible, in torments; it is the

united sense of wrong, sin, guilt, degradation, shame, and remorse, that

renders a moment's pang of the conscience more terrible to the good than

years of any other punishment--and it thus is the power of the human

soul to render its whole life miserable by its very love of that virtue

which it has fatally violated. This is a passion which the soul could

not suffer--unless it were immortal. Reason, so powerful in the highest

minds, would escape from the vain delusion; but it is in the highest

minds where reason is most subjected to this awful power--they would

seek reconcilement with offended Heaven by the loss of all the happiness

that earth ever yielded--and would rejoice to pour out their heart's

blood if it could wipe away from the conscience the stain of one deep

transgression! These are not the high-wrought and delusive states of

mind of religious enthusiasts, passing away with the bodily agitation of

the dreamer; but they are the feelings of the loftiest of men's

sons--and when the troubled spirit has escaped from their burden, or

found strength to support it, the conviction of their reasonableness and

of their awful reality remains; nor can it be removed from the minds of

the wise and virtuous, without the obliteration from the tablets of

memory of all the moral judgments which conscience has there recorded.

It is melancholy to think that even in our own day, a philosopher, and

one of high name too, should have spoken slightingly of the universal

desire of immortality, as no argument at all in proof of it, because

arising inevitably from the regret with which all men must regard the

relinquishment of this life. By thus speaking of the desire as a

delusion necessarily accompanying the constitution of mind which it has

pleased the Deity to bestow on us, such reasoners but darken the mystery

both of man and of Providence. But this desire of immortality is not of

the kind they say it is, nor does it partake, in any degree, of the

character of a blind and weak feeling of regret at merely leaving this

present life. "I would not live alway," is a feeling which all men

understand--but who can endure the momentary thought of annihilation?

Thousands, and tens of thousands--awful a thing as it is to die--are

willing to do so--"passing through nature to eternity"--nay, when the

last hour comes, death almost always finds his victim ready, if not

resigned. To leave earth, and all the light both of the sun and of the

soul, is a sad thought to us all--transient as are human smiles, we

cannot bear to see them no more--and there is a beauty that binds us to

life in the tears of tenderness that the dying man sees gushing for his

sake. But between that regret for departing loves and affections, and

all the gorgeous or beautiful shows of this earth--between that love and

the dread of annihilation, there is no connection. The soul can bear to

part with all it loves--the soft voice--the kindling smile--the starting

tear--and the profoundest sighs of all by whom it is beloved; but it

cannot bear to part with its existence. It cannot even believe the

possibility of that which yet it may darkly dread. Its loves--its

passions--its joys--its agonies are _not itself_. They may perish, but

it is imperishable. Strip it of all it has seen, touched, enjoyed, or

suffered--still it seems to survive; bury all it knew, or could know in

the grave--but itself cannot be trodden down into the corruption. It

sees nothing like itself in what perishes, except in dim analogies that

vanish before its last profound self-meditation--and though it parts

with its mortal weeds at last, as with a garment, its life is felt at

last to be something not even in contrast with the death of the body,

but to flow on like a flood, that we believe continues still to flow

after it has entered into the unseen solitude of some boundless desert.

"Behind the cloud of death,

Once, I beheld a sun; a sun which gilt

That sable cloud, and turn'd it all to gold.

How the grave's alter'd! fathomless as hell!

A real hell to those who dream'd of heaven,

ANNIHILATION! How it yawns before me!

Next moment I may drop from thought, from sense,

The privilege of angels and of worms,

An outcast from existence! and this spirit,

This all-pervading, this all-conscious soul,

This particle of energy divine,

Which travels nature, flies from star to star,

And visits gods, and emulates their powers,

_For ever is extinguish'd._"

If intellect be, indeed, doomed utterly to perish, why may not we ask

God, in that deep despair which, in that case, must inevitably flow from

the consciousness of those powers with which He has at once blessed and

cursed us--why that intellect, whose final doom is death, and that final

doom within a moment, finds no thought that can satisfy it but that of

Life, and no idea in which its flight can be lost but that of Eternity?

If this earth were at once the soul's cradle and her tomb, why should

that cradle have been hung amid the stars, and that tomb illumined by

their eternal light? If, indeed, a child of the clay, was not this

earth, with all its plains, forests, mountains, and seas, capacious

enough for the dreams of that creature whose course was finally to be

extinguished in the darkness of its bosom? What had we to do with

planets, and suns, and spheres, "and all the dread magnificence of

heaven?" Were we framed merely that we might for a few years rejoice in

the beauty of the stars, as in that of the flowers beneath our feet? And

ought we to be grateful for those transitory glimpses of the heavens, as

for the fading splendour of the earth? But the heavens are not an idle

show, hung out for the gaze of that idle dreamer Man. They are the work

of the Eternal God, and He has given us power therein to read and to

understand His glory. It is not our eyes only that are dazzled by the

face of heaven--our souls can comprehend the laws by which that face is

overspread by its celestial smiles. The dwelling-place of our spirits is

already in the heavens. Well are we entitled to give names unto the

stars; for we know the moment of their rising and their setting, and

can be with them at every part of their shining journey through the

boundless ether. While generations of men have lived, died, and are

buried, the astronomer thinks of the golden orb that shone centuries ago

within the vision of man, and lifts up his eye undoubting, at the very

moment when it again comes glorious on its predicted return. Were the

Eternal Being to slacken the course of a planet, or increase even the

distance of the fixed stars, the decree would be soon known on earth.

Our ignorance is great, because so is our knowledge; for it is from the

mightiness and vastness of what we do know that we imagine the

illimitable unknown creation. And to whom has God made these

revelations? To a worm that next moment is to be in darkness? To a piece

of earth momentarily raised into breathing existence? To a soul

perishable as the telescope through which it looks into the gates of

heaven?

"Oh! star-eyed science, hast thou wander'd there

To waft us home--the message of despair?"

No; there is no despair in the gracious light of heaven. As we travel

through those orbs, we feel indeed that we have no power, but we feel

that we have mighty knowledge. We can create nothing, but we can dimly

understand all. It belongs to God only to _create_, but it is given to

man to _know_--and that knowledge is itself an assurance of immortality.

"Renounce St Evremont, and read St Paul.

Ere rapt by miracle, by reason wing'd,

His mounting mind made long abode in heaven.

This is freethinking, unconfined to parts,

To send the soul, on curious travel bent,

Through all the provinces of human thought:

To dart her flight through the whole sphere of man;

Of this vast universe to make the tour;

In each recess of space and time, at home;

Familiar with their wonders: diving deep;

And like a prince of boundless interests there,

Still most ambitious of the most remote;

To look on truth unbroken, and entire;

Truth in the system, the full orb; where truths,

By truths enlighten'd and sustain'd, afford

An archlike, strong foundation, to support

Th' incumbent weight of absolute, complete

Conviction: here, the more we press, we stand

More firm; who most examine, most believe.

Parts, like half-sentences, confound: the whole

Conveys the sense, and GOD is understood,

Who not in fragments writes to human race.

Read his whole volume, sceptic! then reply."

Renounce St Evremont! Ay, and many a Deistical writer of high repute now

in the world. But how came they by the truths they did know? Not by the

work of their own unassisted faculties--for they lived in a Christian

country; they had already been imbued with many high and holy beliefs,

of which--had they willed it--they could never have got rid; and to the

very last the light which they, in their pride, believed to have

emanated from the inner shrine--the penetralia of Philosophy--came from

the temples of the living God. They walked all their lives long---

though they knew it not, or strived to forget it--in the light of

revelation, which, though often darkened to men's eyes by clouds from

earth, was still shining strong in heaven. Had the New Testament never

been--think ye that men in their pride, though

"Poor sons of a day,"

could have discerned the necessity of framing for themselves a _religion

of humility_? No. As by pride we are told the angels fell--so by pride

man, after his miserable fall, strove to lift up his helpless being from

the dust; and though trailing himself, soul and body, along the soiling

earth, and glorying in his own corruption, sought to eternise here his

very sins by naming the stars of heaven after heroes, conquerors,

murderers, violators of the mandates of the Maker whom they had

forgotten, or whose attributes they had debased by their own foul

imaginations. They believed themselves, in the delusion of their own

idolatries, to be "Lords of the world and Demigods of Fame," while they

were the slaves of their own sins and their own sinful Deities. Should

we have been wiser in our generation than they, but for the Bible? If in

moral speculation we hear but little--too little--of the confession of

what it owes to the Christian religion--in all the Philosophy,

nevertheless, that is pure and of good report, we _see_ that "the

dayspring from on high has visited it." In all philosophic inquiry there

is, perhaps, a tendency to the soul's exaltation of itself--which the

spirit and genius of Christianity subdues. It is not sufficient to say

that a natural sense of our own infirmities will do so--for seldom

indeed have Deists been lowly-minded. They have talked proudly of

humility. Compare their moral meditations with those of our great

divines. Their thoughts and feelings are of the "earth earthy;" but when

we listen to those others, we feel that their lore has been God-given.

"It is as if an angel shook his wings."

Thus has Christianity glorified Philosophy; its celestial purity is now

the air in which intellect breathes. In the liberty and equality of that

religion, the soul of the highest Philosopher dare not offend that of

the humblest peasant. Nay, it sometimes stands rebuked before it--and

the lowly dweller in the hut, or the shieling on the mountain-side, or

in the forest, could abash the proudest son of Science, by pointing to

the Sermon of our Saviour on the Mount--and saying, "I see my duties to

man and God _here_!" The religious establishments of Christianity,

therefore, have done more not only to support the life of virtue, but to

show all its springs and sources, than all the works of all the

Philosophers who have ever expounded its principles or its practice.

Ha! what has brought thee hither, thou wide-antlered king of the

red-deer of Braemar, from the spacious desert of thy hills of storm? Ere

now we have beheld thee, or one stately as thee, gazing abroad, from a

rock over the heather, to all the points of heaven, and soon as our

figure was seen far below, leading the van of the flight thou went'st

haughtily away into the wilderness. But now thou glidest softly and

slowly through the gloom--no watchfulness, no anxiety in thy large

beaming eyes; and, kneeling among the hoary mosses, layest thyself down

in unknown fellowship with one of those human creatures, a glance of

whose eye, a murmur of whose voice, would send thee belling through the

forest, terrified by the flash or sound that bespoke a hostile nature

wont to pursue thy race unto death.--The hunter is upon

thee--away--away! Sudden as a shooting-star up springs the red-deer, and

in the gloom as suddenly is lost.

On--on--on! further into the Forest!--and now a noise as of "thunder

heard remote." Waterfalls--hundreds of waterfalls sounding for

ever--here--there--everywhere--among the remoter woods. Northwards one

fierce torrent dashes through the centre--but no villages--only a few

woodmen's shielings will appear on its banks; for it is a torrent of

precipices, where the shrubs that hang midway from the cleft are out of

the reach of the spray of its cataracts, even when the red Garroch is in

flood.

Many hours have we been in the wilderness, and our heart yearns again

for the cheerful dwellings of men. Sweet infant streamlet, that flows by

our feet without a murmur, so shallow are yet thy waters--wilt

thou--short as hitherto has been thy journeying--wilt thou be our guide

out into the green valleys and the blue heaven, and the sight once more

of the bright sunshine and the fair fleecy clouds? No other clue to the

labyrinth do we seek but that small, thin, pure, transparent thread of

silver, which neither bush nor brier will break, and which will wind

without entanglement round the roots of the old trees, and the bases of

the shaggy rocks. As if glad to escape from its savage birthplace, the

small rivulet now gives utterance to a song; and sliding down shelving

rocks, so low in their mossy verdure as hardly to deserve that name,

glides along the almost level lawns, here and there disclosing a little

hermit flower. No danger now of its being imbibed wholly by the thirsty

earth; for it has a channel and banks of its own--and there is a

waterfall! Thenceforwards the rivulet never loses its merry voice--and

in an hour it is a torrent. What beautiful symptoms now of its approach

to the edge of the Forest! Wandering lights and whispering airs are here

visitants--and there the blue eye of a wild violet looking up from the

ground! The glades are more frequent--more frequent open spaces cleared

by the woodman's axe--and the antique Oak-Tree all alone by itself,

itself a grove. The torrent may be called noble now; and that deep blue

atmosphere--or say rather, that glimmer of purple air--lies over the

Strath in which a great River rolls along to the Sea.

Nothing in all nature more beautiful than the boundary of a great

Highland Forest. Masses of rocks thrown together in magnificent

confusion, many of them lichened and weather-stained with colours

gorgeous as the eyed plumage of the peacock, the lustre of the rainbow,

or the barred and clouded glories of setting suns--some towering aloft

with trees sown in the crevices by bird or breeze, and checkering the

blue sky--others bare, black, abrupt, grim as volcanoes, and shattered

as if by the lightning-stroke. Yet interspersed, places of perfect

peace--circles among the tall heather, or taller lady-fern, smoothed

into velvet, it is there easy to believe, by Fairies' feet--rocks where

the undisturbed linnet hangs her nest among the blooming briers, all

floating with dew-draperies of honeysuckle alive with bees--glades green

as emerald, where lie the lambs in tempered sunshine, or haply a lovely

doe reposes with her fawn; and further down, where the fields half

belong to the mountain and half to the strath, the smoke of hidden

huts--a log-bridge flung across the torrent--a hanging-garden, and a

little broomy knoll, with a few laughing children at play, almost as

wild-looking as the wanderers of the woods!

Turn your eyes, if you can, from that lovely wilderness, and behold down

along a mile-broad Strath, fed by a thousand torrents, floweth the

noblest of Scotia's rivers, the strong-sweeping Spey! Let Imagination

launch her canoe, and be thou a solitary steersman--for need is none of

oar or sail; keep the middle course while all the groves go by, and ere

the sun has sunk behind yon golden mountains--nay, mountains they are

not, but a transitory pomp of clouds--thou mayest list the roaring, and

behold the foaming of the Sea.

Was there ever such a descriptive dream of a coloured engraving of the

Cushat, Quest, or Ring-Dove, dreamt before? Poor worn-out and glimmering

candle!--whose wick of light and life in a few more flickerings will be

no more--what a contrast dost thou present with thyself of eight hours

ago! Then, truly, wert thou a shining light, and high aloft in the

room-gloaming burned thy clear crest like a star--during its midnight

silence, a _memento mori_ of which our spirit was not afraid. Now thou

art dying--dying--dead! Our cell is in darkness. But methinks we see

another--a purer--a clearer light--one more directly from Heaven. We

touch but a spring in a wooden shutter--and lo! the full blaze of day.

Oh! why should we mortal beings dread that night-prison--the Grave?

DR KITCHINER.

FIRST COURSE.

It greatly grieved us to think that Dr Kitchiner should have died before

our numerous avocations had allowed us an opportunity of dining with

him, and subjecting to the test-act of our experienced palate his claims

to immortality as a Cook and a Christian. The Doctor had, we know, a

dread of Us--not altogether unalloyed by delight; and on the dinner to

Us, which he had meditated for nearly a quarter of a century, he knew

and felt must have hung his reputation with posterity--his posthumous

fame. We understand that there is an unfinished sketch of that Dinner

among the Doctor's papers, and that the design is magnificent. Yet,

perhaps, it is better for his glory that Kitchiner should have died

without attempting to embody in forms the Idea of that Dinner. It might

have been a failure. How liable to imperfection the _matériel_ on which

he would have had to work! How defective the instruments!

Yes--yes!--happier far was it for the good old man that he should have

fallen asleep with the undimmed idea of that unattempted Dinner in his

imagination, than, vainly contending with the physical evil inherent in

matter, have detected the Bishop's foot in the first course, and died of

a broken heart!

"Travelling," it is remarked by our poor dear dead Doctor in his

"Traveller's Oracle," "is a recreation to be recommended, especially to

those whose employments are sedentary--who are engaged in abstract

studies--whose minds have been sunk in a state of morbid melancholy by

hypochondriasis, or, by what is worst of all, a lack of domestic

felicity. Nature, however, will not suffer any sudden transition; and

therefore it is improper for people accustomed to a sedentary life to

undertake suddenly a journey, during which they will be exposed to long

and violent jolting. The case here is the same as if one accustomed to

drink water should, all at once, begin to drink wine."

Had the Doctor been alive, we should have asked him what he meant by

"long and violent jolting?" Jolting is now absolutely unknown in

England, and it is of England the Doctor speaks. No doubt, some

occasional jolting might still be discovered among the lanes and

cross-roads; but, though violent, it could not be long: and we defy the

most sedentary gentleman living to be more so, when sitting in an

easy-chair by his parlour fireside, than in a cushioned carriage

spinning along the turnpike. But for the trees and hedgerows all

galloping by, he would never know that he was himself in motion. The

truth is, that no gentleman can be said, nowadays, to lead a sedentary

life, who is not constantly travelling before the insensible touch of

M'Adam. Look at the first twenty people that come towering by on the

roof of a Highflier or a Defiance. What can be more sedentary? Only look

at that elderly gentleman with the wig, evidently a parson, jammed in

between a brace of buxom virgins on their way down to Doncaster races.

Could he be more sedentary, during the psalm, in his own pulpit?

We must object, too, to the illustration of wine and water. Let no man

who has been so unfortunate as to be accustomed to drink water, be

afraid all at once to begin to drink wine. Let him, without fear or

trembling, boldly fill bumpers to the Throne--the Navy--and the Army.

These three bumpers will have made him a new man. We have no objection

whatever to his drinking, in animated succession, the Apotheosis of the

Whigs--the Angler's delight--the cause of Liberty all over the

World--Christopher North--Maga the Immortal.--"Nature will not suffer

any sudden transition!" Will she not? Look at our water-drinker now! His

very own mother could not know him--he has lost all resemblance to his

twin-brother, from whom, two short hours ago, you could not have

distinguished him but for a slight scar on his brow--so completely is

his apparent personal identity lost, that it would be impossible for him

to establish an _alibi_. He sees a figure in the mirror above the

chimney-piece, but has not the slightest suspicion that the rosy-faced

Bacchanal is himself, the water-drinker; but then he takes care to

imitate the manual exercise of the phantom--lifting his glass to his

lips at the very same moment, as if they were both moved by one soul.

The Doctor then wisely remarks, that it is "impossible to lay down any

rule by which to regulate the number of miles a man may journey in a

day, or to prescribe the precise number of ounces he ought to eat; but

that nature has given us a very excellent guide in a sense of lassitude,

which is as unerring in exercise as the sense of satiety is in eating."

We say the Doctor wisely remarks, yet not altogether wisely; for the

rule does not seem to hold always good either in exercise or in eating.

What more common than to feel oneself very much fatigued--quite done up

as it were, and unwilling to stir hand or foot. Up goes a lark in

heaven--tira-lira--or suddenly the breezes blow among the clouds, who

forthwith all begin campaigning in the sky, or, quick as lightning, the

sunshine in a moment resuscitates a drowned day--or tripping along, all

by her happy self, to the sweet accompaniment of her joy-varied songs,

the woodman's daughter passes by on her way, with a basket in her hand,

to her father in the forest, who has already laid down his axe on the

meridian shadow darkening one side of the straight stem of an oak,

beneath whose grove might be drawn up five-score of plumed chivalry!

Where is your "sense of lassitude now, nature's unerring guide in

exercise?" You spring up from the mossy wayside bank, and renewed both

in mind and body, "rejoicing in Nature's joy," you continue to pass over

houseless moors, by small, single, solitary, straw-roofed huts, through

villages gathered round Stone Cross, Elm Grove, or old Monastic Tower,

till, unwearied in lith and limb, you see sunset beautifying all the

west, and drop in, perhaps, among the hush of the Cottar's Saturday

Night--for it is in sweet Scotland we are walking in our dream--and know

not, till we have stretched ourselves on a bed of rushes or of heather,

that "kind Nature's sweet restorer balmy sleep," is yet among the number

of our bosom friends--alas! daily diminishing beneath fate or fortune,

the sweeping scythe-stroke of death, or the whisper of some one poor,

puny, idle, and unmeaning word!

Then, as to "the sense of satiety in eating." It is produced in us by

three platefuls of hotch-potch--and, to the eyes of an ordinary

observer, our dinner would seem to be at an end. But no--strictly

speaking, it is just going to begin. About an hour ago did we, standing

on the very beautiful bridge of Perth, see that identical salmon, with

his back-fin just visible above the translucent tide, arrowing up the

Tay, bold as a bridegroom, and nothing doubting that he should spend his

honeymoon among the gravel-beds of Kinnaird or Moulinearn, or the rocky

sofas of the Tummel, or the green marble couches of the Tilt. What has

become now of "the sense of satiety in eating?" John--the

castors!--mustard--vinegar--cayenne--catchup--pease and potatoes, with a

very little butter--the biscuit called "rusk"--and the memory of the

hotch-potch is as that of Babylon the Great. That any gigot of mutton,

exquisite though much of the five-year-old blackfaced must assuredly be,

can, with any rational hopes of success, contend against a haunch of

venison, will be asserted by no devout lover of truth. Try the two by

alternate platefuls, and you will uniformly find that you leave off

after the venison. That "sense of satiety in eating," of which Dr

Kitchiner speaks, was produced by the Tay salmon devoured above--but of

all the transitory feelings of us transitory creatures on our transit

through this transitory world, in which the Doctor asserts nature will

not suffer any sudden transitions, the most transitory ever experienced

by us is "the sense of satiety in eating." Therefore, we have now seen

it for a moment existing on the disappearance of the hotch-potch--dying

on the appearance of the Tay salmon--once more noticeable as the last

plate of the noble fish melted away--extinguished suddenly by the vision

of the venison--again felt for an instant, and but for an instant--for a

brace and a half of as fine grouse as ever expanded their voluptuous

bosoms to be devoured by hungry love! Sense of satiety in eating indeed!

If you please, my dear friend, one of the backs--pungent with the most

palate-piercing, stomach-stirring, heart-warming, soul-exalting of all

tastes--the wild bitter-sweet.

But the Doctor returns to the subject of travelling--and fatigue. "When

one begins," he says, "to be low-spirited and dejected, to yawn often

and be drowsy, when the appetite is impaired, when the smallest movement

occasions a fluttering of the pulse, when the mouth becomes dry, and is

sensible of a bitter taste, _seek refreshment and repose_, if you wish

to PREVENT ILLNESS, already beginning to take place." Why, our dear

Doctor, illness in such a deplorable case as this, is just about to end,

and death is beginning to take place. Thank Heaven, it is a condition to

which we do not remember having very nearly approximated! Who ever saw

us yawn? or drowsy? or with our appetite impaired, except on the

withdrawal of the table-cloth? or low-spirited, but when the Glenlivet

was at ebb? Who dare declare that he ever saw our mouth dry? or sensible

of a bitter taste, since we gave over munching rowans? Put your ringer

on our wrist, at any moment you choose, from June to January, from

January to June, and by its pulsation you may rectify Harrison's or

Kendal's chronometer.

But the Doctor proceeds--"By raising the temperature of my room to about

65°, a broth diet, and taking a tea-spoonful of Epsom salts in half a

pint of warm water, and repeating it every half-hour till it moves the

bowels twice or thrice, and retiring to rest an hour or two sooner than

usual, I have often very speedily got rid of colds, &c."

Why, there may be no great harm in acting as above; although we should

far rather recommend a screed of the Epsoms. A tea-spoonful of Epsom

salts in half a pint of warm water, reminds one, somehow or other, of

Tims. A small matter works a Cockney. It is not so easy--and that the

Cockneys well know--to move the bowels of old Christopher North. We do

not believe that a tea-spoonful of anything in this world would have any

serious effect on old "Ironsides." We should have no hesitation in

backing him against so much corrosive sublimate. He would dine out on

the day he had bolted that quantity of arsenic;--and would, we verily

believe, rise triumphant from a tea-spoonful of Prussic acid.