she lodges under our windows, under our eaves, in our chimneys. She
does not hold us in the slightest fear.
It might have been said that she trusted to her unrivalled wing, had
she not placed her nest and her children within our reach. The true
reason why she has become the mistress of our house is, that she has
taken possession not only of our house, but of our heart.
In the rural mansion where my father-in-law educated his children,
he would hold his class during summer in a greenhouse in which the
swallows rested without disturbing themselves about the movements of
the family, quite unconstrained in their behaviour, wholly occupied
with their brood, passing out at the windows and returning through the
roof, chattering very loudly with one another, and still more loudly
when the master would make a pretence of saying, as St. Francis said,
"Sister swallows, can you not be silent?"
Theirs is the hearth. Where the mother has built her nest, the daughter
and the grand-daughter build. They return there every year; their
generations succeed to it more regularly than do our own. A family
dies out or is dispersed, the mansion passes into other hands; but the
swallow constantly returns to it, and maintains its right of occupation.
It is thus that our traveller has come to be accepted as a symbol of
the permanency of home. She clings to it with such fidelity, that
though the house may be repaired, or partially demolished, or long
disturbed by masons, it is still retaken possession of, re-occupied by
these faithful birds of persevering memory.
She is the _bird of return_. And if I bestow this title upon her,
it is not alone on account of her annual return, but on account of
her general conduct, and the direction of her flight, so varied, yet
nevertheless circular, and always returning upon itself.
She incessantly wheels and _veers_, indefatigably hovers about the same
area and the same locality, describing an infinity of graceful curves,
which, however varied, are never far distant from one another. Is it to
pursue her prey, the gnat which dances and floats in the air? Is it to
exercise her power, her unwearying wing, without going too far from her
nest? It matters not; this revolving flight, this incessantly returning
movement, has always attracted our eyes and heart, throwing us into a
reverie, into a world of thought.
We see her flight clearly, but never, or scarcely ever, her little
black face. Who, then, art thou, thou who always concealest thyself,
who never showest me aught but thy trenchant wings--scythes rapid as
that of Time? But Time goes forward without pause; thou, thou always
returnest. Thou drawest close to my side; it seems as if thou wouldst
graze me, wouldst touch me?--So nearly dost thou caress me, that I feel
in my face the wind, almost the whirr of thy wings. Is it a bird? Is it
a spirit? Ah, if thou art a soul, tell me so frankly, and reveal to me
the barrier which separates the living from the dead.
[Illustration]
But let us not anticipate, nor let loose the waters of bitterness.
Rather let us trace this bird in the people's thoughts, in the good old
popular wisdom, close akin, undoubtedly, to the wisdom of Nature.
The people have seen in her only the natural dial, the division of
the seasons, of the two great _hours of the year_. At Easter and at
Michaelmas, at the epochs of family gatherings, of fairs and markets,
of leases and rent-paying, the black and white swallow appears, and
tells us the time. She comes to separate and define the past and the
coming seasons. At these epochs families and friends meet together, but
not always to find the circle complete; in the last six months this
friend has disappeared, and that. The swallow returns, but not for all;
many have gone a very long journey, longer than _the tour of France_.
To Germany? No; further, further still.
Our _companions_, industrious travellers, followed the swallow's
life, except that on their return they frequently could no longer
find their nest. Of this the pendant bird warns them in an old German
saying, wherein the narrow popular wisdom would fain retain them
round the roof-tree of home. On this proverb, the great poet Rückert,
metamorphosing himself into a swallow, reproducing her rhythmical and
circular flight, her constant turns and returns, has founded a lyric at
which many will laugh, but more than one will weep:--
[Illustration]
"De la jeunesse, de la jeunesse,
Un chant me revient toujours--
Oh! que c'est loin! Oh! que c'est loin
Tout ce qui fut autrefois;
"Ce que chantait, ce que chantait
Celle qui ramène le printemps,
Rasant le village de l'aile, rasant le village de l'aile.
Est-ce bien ce qu'elle chante encore?
"'Quand je partis, quand je partis,
Etaient pleins l'armoire et le coffre.
Quand je revins, quand je revins,
Je ne trouvai plus que le vide.'
"O mon foyer de famille,
Laisse-moi seulement une fois
M'asseoir à la place sacrée
Et m'envoler dans les songes!
"Elle revient bien l'hirondelle,
Et l'armoire vidée se remplit.
Mais le vide du coeur reste, mais reste le vide du coeur,
Et rien ne le remplira.
"Elle rase pourtant le village,
Elle chante comme autrefois--
'Quand je partis, quand je partis,
Coffre, armoire, tout était plein.
Quand je revins, quand je revins
Je ne trouvai plus que le vide.'"
_Imitated_:--
From childhood gay, from childhood gay,
E'er breathes to me a strain,
How far the day, how far the day
Which ne'er may come again!
And is her song, and is her song--
She who brings back the spring,
The hamlet touching with her wing, the hamlet touching with her wing--
Is it true what she doth sing?
"When I set forth, when I set forth,
Both barn and chest were brimming o'er;
When I came back, when I came back,
I found a piteous lack of store."
Oh, my own home, so dearly loved,
Kind Heaven grant that I may kneel
Again upon thy sacred hearth,
While dreams the happy past reveal!
The swallow surely will return,
Coffer and barn will brim once more;
But blank remains the heart, empty the heart remains,
And none may the lost restore!
The swallow skims through the hamlet,
She sings as she sang of yore:--
"When I set out, when I set out,
Both barn and chest were brimming o'er;
When I came back, when I came back,
I found a piteous lack of store."
[Illustration]
The swallow, caught in the morning, and closely examined, is seen to
be a strange and ugly bird, we confess; but this fact perfectly well
agrees with what is, _par excellence_, the _bird_--the being among
all beings born for flight. To this object Nature has sacrificed
everything; she has laughed at _form_, thinking only of _movement_; and
has succeeded so well that this bird, ugly in repose, is, when flying,
the most beautiful of all.
Scythe-like wings; projecting eyes; no neck (in order to treble her
strength); feet, scarcely any, or none: all is wing. These are her
great general features. Add a very large beak, always open, which, in
flight, snaps at its prey without stopping, closes, and again re-opens.
Thus she feeds while flying; she drinks, she bathes while flying; while
flying, she feeds her young.
If she does not equal in accuracy of line the thunderous swoop of
the falcon, by way of compensation she is freer; she wheels, makes a
hundred circles, a labyrinth of undefined figures, a maze of varied
curves, which she crosses and re-crosses, _ad infinitum_. Her enemy
is dazzled, lost, confused, and knows not what to do. She wearies and
exhausts him; he gives up the chase, but leaves her unfatigued. She
is the true queen of the air; the incomparable agility of her motions
makes all space her own. Who, like her, can change in the very moment
of springing, and turn abruptly? No one. The infinitely varied and
capricious pursuit of a prey which is ever fluttering--of the gnat, the
fly, the beetle, the thousand insects that waver to and fro and never
keep in the same direction--is, undoubtedly, the best training school
for flight, and renders the swallow superior to all other birds.
Nature, to attain this end, to achieve this unique wing, has adopted
an extreme resolution, that of suppressing the foot. In the large
church-haunting swallow, which we call the martin, the foot is reduced
to a mere nothing. The wing gains in proportion; the martin, it is
said, accomplishes eighty leagues in an hour. This astounding swiftness
equals even that of the frigate-bird. The foot, remarkably short in
the latter, is but a stump in the martin; if he rests, it is on his
belly; so that he never perches. With him it is the reverse of all
other beings; movement alone affords him repose. When he darts from
the church-towers, and commits himself to the air, the air cradles
him amorously, supports, and refreshes him. If he would cling to any
object, he has only his own small and feeble claws. But when he rests,
he is infirm, and, as it were, paralyzed; he feels every roughness; the
hard fatality of gravitation has resumed possession of him; the chief
among birds seems sunk to a reptile.
[Illustration]
To take the range of a place is a great difficulty for him: so, if he
fixes his nest aloft, at his departure from it he is constrained to let
himself fall into his natural element. Afloat in the air he is free, he
is sovereign; but until then he is a slave, dependent on everything, at
the disposal of any one who lays hand upon him.
The true name of the genus, which is a full explanation in itself, is
the Greek _A-pode_, "Without feet." The great race of swallows, with
its sixty species which fill the earth, charms and delights us with its
gracefulness, its flight, and its soft chirping, owes all its agreeable
qualities to the deformity of a very little foot; it is at once the
foremost among the winged tribes by the gift of the perfect art of
flight, and the most sedentary and attached to its nest.
Among this peculiar genus, the foot not supplying the place of the
wing, the training of the young being confined to the wing alone and
a protracted apprenticeship in flying, the brood keep the nest for
a long time, demanding the cares and developing the foresight and
tenderness of the mother. The most mobile of birds is found fettered by
her affections. Her nest is not a transient nuptial bed, but a home, a
dwelling-place, the interesting theatre of a difficult education and
of mutual sacrifices. It has possessed a loving mother, a faithful
mate,--what do I say?--rather, young sisters, which eagerly hasten
to assist the mother, are themselves little mothers, and the nurses
of a still younger brood. It has developed maternal tenderness, the
anxieties and mutual teaching of the young to the younger.
The finest thing is, that this sentiment of kinship expands. In danger,
every swallow is a sister; at the cry of one, all rush to her aid;
if one be captured, all lament her, and torture their bosoms in the
attempt to release her.
That these charming birds extend their sympathy to birds foreign to
their own species one easily conceives. They have less cause than any
others to dread the beasts of prey, from their lightness of wing, and
they are the first to warn the poultry-coops of their appearance. Hen
and pigeon cower and seek an asylum as soon as they hear the swallow's
warning voice.
No; man does not err in considering the swallow the best of the winged
world.
And why? She is the happiest, because the freest.
Free by her admirable flight.
Free by her facility of nourishment.
Free by her choice of climate.
Also, whatever attention I have paid to her language (she speaks
amicably to her sisters, rather than sings), I have never heard her do
aught but bless life and praise God.
_Libertà! molto e desiato bene!_ I revolved these words in my heart
on the great piazza of Turin, where we never wearied of watching
the flight of innumerous swallows, hearing a thousand little joyous
cries. On their descent from the Alps they found there convenient
habitations all prepared for their reception, in the apertures left
by the scaffold-beams in the very walls of the palaces. At times,
and frequently in the evening, they chattered very loudly and cried
shrilly, to prevent us from understanding them. Often they darted down
headlong, just skimming the ground, but rising again so quickly that
one might have thought them loosened from a spring or shot from a
bow. Unlike man, who is incessantly called back to earth, they seem
to gravitate above. Never have I seen the image of a more sovereign
liberty. Their tricks, their sports, were infinite.
We travellers regarded with pleased eyes these other travellers,
which bore their pilgrimage so gaily and so lightly. The horizon,
nevertheless, was heavy, and ringed by the Alps, which at that hour
seemed close at hand. The black pine-woods were already darkened
and overshadowed by the evening; the glaciers glittered again with
a ghastly whiteness. The sorrowful barrier of these grand mountains
separated us from France, towards which we were soon about to travel
slowly.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: HARMONIES OF THE TEMPERATE ZONE.]
[Illustration]
HARMONIES OF THE TEMPERATE ZONE.
Why do the swallow and so many other birds place their habitation so
near to that of man? Why do they make themselves our friends, mingling
with our labours, and lightening them by their songs? Why is that
happy spectacle of alliance and harmony, which is the end of nature,
presented only in the climates of our temperate zone?
For this reason, that here the two parties, man and the bird, are free
from the burdensome fatalities which in the south separate them, and
place them in antagonism to one another.
That which enervates man, on the contrary, excites the bird, endows him
with ardent activity, inquietude, and the vehemence which finds vents
in harsh cries. Under the Tropics both are in complete divergence,
slaves of a despotic nature, which weighs upon them differently.
To pass from those climates to ours is to become free.
_Here_ we dominate over the nature which _there_ subjugated us. I quit
willingly, and without one wistful glance, the overwhelming paradise
where, a feeble child, I have languished in the arms of the great nurse
who, with a too potent draught, has intoxicated while thinking to
suckle me.
This milder nature was made for me, is my legitimate spouse--I
recognize her. And, above all, she resembles me; like me, she is grave,
she is laborious, she has the instinct of work and patience.
Her renewed seasons share among themselves her great annual day,
as the workman's day alternates between toil and repose. She gives
no fruit gratuitously; she gives what is worth all the fruits of
earth--industry, activity.
With what rapture I find there to-day my image, the trace of my will,
the creations of my exertions and my intelligence! Deeply laboured by
me, by me metamorphosed, she relates to me my works, reproduces to me
myself. I see her as she was before she underwent this human creative
work, before she was made man.
Monotonous at the first glance, and melancholy, she exhibited her
forests and meadows; but both strangely different from those which are
seen elsewhere.
The meadow, the rich green carpet of England and Ireland, with its
delicate soft sward constantly springing up afresh--not the rough
fleece of the Asiatic steppes, not the spiny and hostile vegetation of
Africa, not the bristling savagery of American savannahs, where the
smallest plant is woody and harshly arborescent--the European meadow,
through its annual and ephemeral vegetation, its lowly little flowers,
with mild and gentle odours, wears a youthful aspect; nay, more, an
aspect of innocence, which harmonizes with our thoughts and refreshes
our hearts.
On this first layer of humble yielding herbage, which has no
pretensions to mount higher, stands out in bold contrast the strong
individuality of the robust trees, so different from the confused
vegetation of meridional forests.
Who can single out, beneath such a mass of lianas, orchids, and
parasitical plants, the trees, themselves herbaceous, which are there,
so to speak, engulphed? In our ancient forests of Gaul and Germany
stand, strong and serious, slowly and solidly built, the elm or the
oak--that forest hero, with kindly arms and heart of steel, which has
conquered eight or ten centuries, and which, when felled by man and
associated with his labours, endows them with the eternity of the works
of nature.
[Illustration]
As the tree, so the man. May it be given us to resemble it--to
resemble that mighty but pacific oak, whose powerful absorption has
concentrated every element, and made of it the grave, useful, enduring
individual--the solid personality--of which all men confidently demand
a support, a shelter; which stretches forth its helpful arms to the
divers animal tribes, and shelters them with its foliage! With a
thousand voices they gratefully enchant, by day and night, the still
majesty of this aged witness of the years. The birds thank it from
their hearts, and delight its paternal shades with song, love, and
youth.
Indestructible vigour of the climates of the West? Why doth this oak
live through a thousand years? Because it is ever young.
It is the oak which chronicles the commencement of spring. For us the
emotion of the new life does not begin when all nature clothes itself
in the uniform verdure of the meaner vegetation. It commences only when
we see the oak, from the woody foliage of the past, which it still
retains, gathering its fresh leaves; when the elm, permitting itself to
be outstripped by inferior trees, tints with a light green the severe
delicacy of its airy branches, clearly defined against the sky.
[Illustration]
Then, then, Nature speaks to all--her potent voice troubles even the
soul of sages. And why not? Is she not holy? And this surprising
awakening, which has stirred life everywhere--from the hard dumb heart
of the oaks, even to their lofty crest, where the bird pours out its
gladness--is it not, as it were, a return of God?
I have lived in climates where the olive and the orange preserve an
eternal bloom. Without ignoring the beauty of these favoured trees,
and their special distinction, I could never accustom myself to the
monotonous permanency of their unchangeable garb, whose verdure
responded to the heaven's unchangeable sapphire. I was ever in a state
of expectancy, waiting for a renewal which never came. The days passed
by, but were always identical. Not a leaf the less on the ground, not a
cloudlet in the sky. Mercy, I exclaimed, O everlasting Nature! To the
changeful heart which thou hast given me, grant a little change. Rain,
mire, storm, I accept them all; so that from sky or earth the idea of
movement may return to me--the idea of renovation; that every year the
spectacle of a new creation may refresh my heart, may restore to me
the hope that my soul shall enjoy a similar resurrection, and, by the
alternations of sleep, of death, or of winter, create for itself a new
spring!
[Illustration]
Man, bird, all nature, utter the same desire. We exist through change.
To these forcible alternations of heat, cold, fog, and sun, melancholy
and joyaunce, we owe the tempered, the powerful personality of our
West. Rain wearies us to-day; fine weather will come with the morrow.
The splendours of the East, the marvels of the Tropics, taken together,
are not worth the first violet of Easter, the first song of April, the
blossom of the hawthorn, the glee of the young girl who resumes her
robes of white.
In the morning a potent voice, of singular freshness and clearness, of
keen metallic _timbre_, the voice of the mavis, rises aloft, and there
is no heart so sick or so sour as to hear it without a smile.
One spring, on my way to Lyons, among the intertangled vines which the
peasants laboured to raise up again, I heard a poor, old, miserable,
and blind woman singing, with an accent of extraordinary gaiety, this
ancient village lay:
"Nous quittons nos grands habits,
Pour en prendre de plus petits."
[Illustration]
[Illustration: THE BIRD AS THE LABOURER OF MAN.]
[Illustration]
THE BIRD
AS THE LABOURER OF MAN.
The "_miserly_ agriculturist," is the accurate and forcible expression
of Virgil. Miserly, and blind, in truth, for he proscribes the birds
which destroy insects and protect his crops.
Not a grain will he spare to the bird which, during the winter rains,
hunted up the future insect, sought out the nests of the larvæ,
examined them, turned over every leaf, and daily destroyed myriads of
future caterpillars; but sacks of corn to the adult insects, and whole
fields to the grasshoppers which the bird would have combated!
With his eyes fixed on the furrow, on the present moment, without
sight or foresight; deaf to the grand harmony which no one ever
interrupts with impunity, he has everywhere solicited or approved the
laws which suppressed the much-needed assistant of his labour, the
insect-destroying bird. And the insects have avenged the bird. It has
become necessary to recall in all haste the banished. In the island
of Bourbon, for example, a price was set on each martin's head; they
disappeared, and then the grasshoppers took possession of the island,
devouring, extinguishing, burning up with harsh acridity all that they
did not devour. The same thing has occurred in North America with the
starling, the protector of the maize. The sparrow even, which attacks
the grain, but also defends it--the thieving, pilfering sparrow, loaded
with so many insults, and stricken with so many maledictions--it has
been seen that without him Hungary would perish; that he alone could
wage the mighty war against the cockchafers and the myriad winged foes
which reign in the low-lying lands: his banishment has been revoked,
and the courageous militia hastily recalled which, if not strictly
disciplined, are not the less the salvation of the country.
No long time ago, near Rouen, and in the valley of Monville, the
crows had for a considerable period been proscribed. The cockchafers,
accordingly, profited to such an extent--their larvæ, multipled _ad
infinitum_, pushed so far their subterranean works--that an entire
meadow was pointed out to me as completely withered on the surface;
every root of grass or herb was eaten up; and all the turf, easily
detached, could be rolled back on itself just as one raises a carpet.
All toil, all appeals of man to nature, supposes the intelligence of
the natural order. Such is the order, and such the law: _Life has
around it and within it its enemy--most frequently as its guest--the
parasite which undermines and cankers it_.
Inert and defenceless life, especially vegetable, deprived of
locomotion, would succumb to it but for the stronger support of the
indefatigable enemy of the parasite, the merciless pursuer, the winged
conqueror of the monsters.
The war rages _without_ under the Tropics, where they surge up on all
sides. _Within_ in our climates, where everything is hidden, more
profound, and more mysterious.
In the exuberant fecundity of the Torrid Zone, the insects, those
terrible destroyers of plant-life, carry off the superfluous. They
are there a necessity. They ravage among the prodigious abundance of
spontaneous plants, of lost seeds, of the fruits which Nature scatters
over the wastes. Here, in the narrow field watered by the sweat of
man, they garner in his place, devour his labour and its harvest; they
attack even his life.
[Illustration]