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FOR THE PEOPLE
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FOR SCIENCE

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LIBRARY

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THE AMERICAN MUSEUM

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NATURAL HISTORY

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THE BIRD

BY

JULES MICHELET

WITH 210 ILLUSTRATIONS BY GIACOMELLI.

f -i:""^

LONDON:

T. NELSON AND SONS, PATERNOSTER ROW
EDINBURGH; AND NEW YORK.

1868.

C0 itatiamt pitl^cld.

j / dedicate to thee ivhat is really thine oiun : three books ^^

of the fireside, sprung from our siveet evening talk, —

THE BIRD— THE INSECT — THE SEA.

Thou alone didst inspire them. WitJiout thee I
should have pursued, ever in my oiun track, the rude path
of human history.

Thou alone didst prepare them. I received from
thy hands the rich harvest of Nature.

And thou alone didst crown them, placing on the
accomplished tvork the sacred flower which blesses them.

J. MICHELET.

^xKixshtoxB "Bxdim.

^S^'OISEAU," or "The Bird," was first published in 1856. It
Ij/llMi has since been followed by "L'Insecte " and "La Mer;" the
|i three works forming a trilogy which few writers have sur-
passed in grace of style, beauty of description, and sug-
gestiveness of sentiment. "L'Oiseau" may be briefly described as an
eloquent defence of the Bird in its relation to man, and a poetical
exposition of the attractiveness of Natural History. It is animated
by a fine and tender spirit, and written with an inimitable charm of
lano-uaQfe.

In submitting the following translation to the English public, I
am conscious of an urgent need that I should apologize for its short-
comings. It is no easy matter to do justice to Michelet in English ;
yet, if I have failed to convey a just idea of his beauties of expression,
if I have suflfered most of the undefinable aroma of his style to
escape, I believe I have rendered his meaning faithfully, without
exaggeration or diminution. I have endeavoured to preserve, as far
as possible, his more characteristic peculiarities, and even mannerisms,
carrying the literalness of my version to an extent which some critics,
perhaps, will be disposed to censure. But in copying the masterpiece

viii PREFACE.

of a great ai-tist, what we ask of the copyist is, that he will
reproduce every effect of light and shade with the severest accuracy;
and, in the translation of a noble work from one language to another,
the public have a right to demand the same exact adherence to the
original. They want to see as much of the author as they can, and
as little as may be of the translator.

The present version is from the eighth edition of " L'Oiseau," and
is adorned with all the original Illustrations.

A. E

■y

INTRODUCTION.
HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO THE STUDY OF NATURE,

13

PART FIRST.
THE EGG, ..

THE POLE— AQC7ATIC BIRDS,
THE WING,

THE FIRST FLUTTERINGS OF THE WING,
TRIUMPH OF THE WING— THE FRIGATE BIRD, ..
THE SHORES— DECAY OF CERTAIN SPECIES,
THE HERONRIES OF AMERICA— WILSON, THE ORNITHOLOGIST,
THE COMBAT— THE TROPICAL REGIONS, ..
PURIFICATION,
DEATH— BIRDS OF PREY ^THE RAPTORES),

71
81
91

101
111
121
131
143
153

PART SECOND.

THE LIGHT— THE NIGHT, ..
STORM AND WINTER— MIGRATIONS,
MIGRATIONS, Confuiiteti— THE SWALLOW,
HARMONIES OF THE TEMPERATE ZONE,
THE BIRD AS THE LABOURER OF MAN.

171
181
193
205
213

CONTENTS.

LABOUR— THE WOODPECKER,

THE SONG,

THE NEST— ARCHITECTURE OF BIRDS,

THE COMMUNITIES OF BIRDS— ESSAYS AT A REPUBLIC

EDUCATION,

THE NIGHTINGALE— ART AND THE INFINITE, ..

THE NIGHTINGALE, Continued,

CONCLUSION,

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES,

Page
•223

236

247

257

265

277
287
297
311

/^I

'^V/ THE STUDY OF NATURE. -^^^iS^"^'

^mm^i}

<-r>

THE BIRD.

fllv) lljc %x\i\px toas leb io tlj£ Stubn of |latuvc.

y^'t- 0 my faithful friend, the Public, who has listened
"f^p^ to rae for so long a period without disfavour, I
"^ ■ owe a confession of the peculiar circumstances

^_f._^ which, while not leading me altogether astray
from history, have induced me to devote myself
to the natural sciences.

The book which 1 now publish may be described as
the offspring of the domestic circle and the home fireside. It is from
our hours of rest, our afternoon conversations, our winter readings,
our summer gossips, that this book, if it be a book, has been
gradually evolved.

Two studious persons, naturally reunited after a day's toil, put
together their gleanings, and refreshed their hearts by this closing
evening feast.

Am I saying that we have had no other assistance ? To make

14 HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

such a statement would be unjust, ungrateful. The domesticated
swallows which lodged under our roof mingled in our conversation.
The homely robin, fluttering around me, interjected his tender notes,
and sometimes the nightingale suspended it by her solemn music.

The burden of the time, life, labour, the violent fluctuations of
our era, the dispersion of a world of intelligence in which we lived,
and to which nothing has succeeded, weighed heavily upon me.
The arduous toils of history found occasional relaxation in friendly
instruction. These pauses, however, are only periods of silence.
Where shall we seek repose or moral invigoration, if not of
nature ?

The mighty eighteenth century, which included a thousand years
of struggle, rested at its setting on the amiable and consoling, though
scientifically feeble book of Bemardin de St. Pierre.* It ended with
that pathetic speech of Ramond's : "So many irreparable losses
lamented in the bosom of nature !"

We, whatever we had lost, asked of solitude something more than
tears, something more than the dittany -f- which softens wounded
hearts. We sought in it a panacea for continual progi-ess, a draught
from inexhaustible fountains, a new strength, and — wings.

This work, whatever its character, possesses at least the distinction
of having entered upon life under the usual conditions of existence.
It results from the intimate communion of two souls; and is in all

* The book referred to was the " Etudes 'de la Nature." — Translator.

t Dittany was formerly much used as a cordial and sedative. — Translator.

THE STUDY OF NATURE.

15

things itself uniform and harmonious because the offspring of two
different principles.

Of the two souls to which it owes its existence, one was the
more powerfully attracted to natural studies by the fact that, in a
certain sense, it had been born among them, and had ever preserved
their fragrance and sweet savour. The other was so much the more
strongly impelled towards them because it had always been separated
by circumstances, and detained in the rugged ways of human history.

History never releases its slave. He who has once drunk of its
sharp strong wine will drink thereof till his death. I could not wrench
myself from it even in days of suffering. Wlien the sorrows of the
past blended with those of the present, and when on the ruins of our
fortunes I inscribed "ninety-three," my health might fail, but not my
soul, my will. All day I applied myself to this last duty, and
pressed forward among the thorns. In the evening I listened — at
first not without effort — to the peaceful nan-ative of some naturalist
or traveller. I listened and I admired, unable as yet to console
myself, or to escape from my thoughts, but, at all events, keeping
them under control, and preventing any anxieties and any mental
storms from disturbing this innocent tranquillity.

Not that I was insensible to the sublime legends of those heroic men
whose labours and enterprise have so largely benefited humanity. The
gi-eat national patriots whose history I was relating were the nearest of
kindred to these cosmopolitan patriots, these citizens of the world.

16

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

,-v-: ..■*•_-

For myself, I had long hailed, with all my heart, the great French
Revolution which had occun-ed in the Natural Sciences — the era of
Lamarck and of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire,* so fertile in method, the
mighty restorers of all science. With what happiness I traced their
features in their leg-itimate sons — those increnious children who have
inherited their intellect '

V ■•^\''*-^

At their head let me name the amiable and original author of the
" Monde des Oiseaux," -f- whom the world has long recognized as one
of the most solid, if not also the most amusing, of naturalists. I
shall refer to him more than once ; but I hasten, on the threshold of
my book, to pay this preliminary homage to a truly great observer,
who, in all that concerns his own observations, is as weighty, as
special, as Wilson or Audubon.

® Jean Baptiste de Monet, Chevalier cle Lamarck, was born August 1, 1744; died
December 20, 1829. His chief work is his " History of Invertebrate Animals." — Etienne
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was born in 1772, and died in 1844. He expounds his theory of
natural history in tlie " Philosophie Anatomique," 2 vols., 1818-20. — Translator.

t Alphonse Toussenel, an illustrious French litterateur, born in 1803. The first edition
of his " Le Monde des Oiseaux, Ornithologie Passionelle," was published in 1852. —
Translator.

THE STUDY OF NATURE. 17

He has ^vronged himself by saying that, in his noble work, " he
has only sought a pretext for a discourse on man." On the contrary,
numerous pages demonstrate that, apart from all analogy, he has loved
and studied the Bird for its own sake. And it is for this reason
that he has surrounded it with so many legends, with such vivid and
profound personifications. Each bird which Toussenel treats of is
now, and will for ever remain, a person.

■4mh

v>^

Nevertheless, the book now before the reader starts from a point of
view which differs in all things from that of our illustrious master.

A point of view by no means contrary, yet symmetrically
opposed, to his.

For I, as much as possible, seeking only the bird in the bird,
avoid the human analogy. With the exception of two chapters, I
have written as if only the bird existed, as if man had never been.

Man ! we have already met with him sufficiently often in other
places. Here, on the contrary, we have sought an alibi from the human
world, from the profound solitude and desolation of ancient days.

Man could not have lived without the bird, which alone could
save him from the insect and the reptile ; but the bird had lived
without man.

Man or no man, the eagle had reigned on his Alpine throne.
The swallow would not the less have performed her yearly migration.
The frigate bird,* unseen by human eyes, had stiU hovered over the
* The frigate bird, or man-of-war bird {Trachi/j^etes aquila). — Translator.

2

18

HOW THE AUTHOE WAS LED TO

lonely ocean-waters. Without waiting for human listeners, and with
all the gi-eater security, the nightingale had still chanted in the
forest his sublime hymn. And for whom ? For her whom he loves,
for his offspring, for the woodlands, and, finally, for himself, his most
fastidious auditor.

Another difference between this book and that of Toussenel's is,
that, harmonious as he is, and a disciple of the gentle Fourier, he is
not the less a sportsman. In every page the military calling of the
Lorraine is clearly visible.

My book, on the contrary, is a book of peace, wiitten specifically
in hatred of sport.

Hunt the eagle and the lion, if you will ; but do not hunt the
weak.

The devout faith which we cherish at heart, and which we teach
in these pages, is, that man will peaceably subdue the whole earth,
when he shall gradually perceive that every adopted animal, accus-
tomed to a domesticated life, or at least to that degree of friendship
or neighbourliness of which its nature is capable, will be a hundred
times more useful to him than if he had simply cut its throat.

Man will not be truly man — we return to this topic at the close
of our volume — until he shall labour seriously to accomplish the
mission which the earth expects of him :

The pacification and harmonious communion of all living nature.

THE STUDY OF NATURE. 19

" A woman's dreams !" you exclaim. What matters that ?

Since a woman's heart breathes in this book, I see no reason
to reject the reproach. We accept it as an eulogy. Patience and
gentleness, tenderness and pity, and maternal warmth — these are the
things which beget, preserve, develop a living creation.

May this, in due time, become not a book, but a reality ! Then,
haply, it shall prove suggestive, and others derive from it theii'
inspiration.

The reader, au reste, will better understand the character of
the work, if he will take the trouble to read the few pages which
follow, and which I transcribe word for word. [The succeeding section,
as the reader will perceive, is written by Madame Michelet.]

20

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

//

" I was bom in the country, where I have passed ^^^
two-thirds of my life-time. I feel mj^self constantly
recalled to it, both by the charm of early habits, by
natural sensibilities, and also, undoubtedly, by the dear
m.emories of my father, who bred me among its shades,
and was the object of my life's woi-ship.

" Owing to my mother's illness, I was nursed for a
considerable period by some honest peasants, who loved
me as their own child. I was, in tiiitli, their daughter;
and my brothers, struck by my iiistic ways, called me
the Shepherdess.

" My father resided at no great distance from the
town, in a very pleasant mansion, which he had pur-
chased, built, and surrounded by plantations, in the
hope that the charms of the spot might console his
young wnfe for the sublime American nature she had
recently quitted. The house, well exposed on the east
and south, saw the morninff sun rise on a vine-clad
slope, and tiu^n, before its meridian heats, towards the

THE STUDY OF NATUHE. 21

'MJy

remote summits of the Pyrenees, which were visible
in clear weather. The young elm-trees of our own
France, mingled with American acacias, rose-laurels, and

1^?

young cypresses, interrupted its full flood of light, and 'vXty'-

transmitted to us a softened radiance. '-^'Wv

'■'■ On our right, a thicket of oaks, inclosed with a fwi)

dense hedge, sheltered us from the north, and from the |M|\

keen wind of the Cantal. Far awa}'-, on the left, swept v/l^

the green meadows and the corn-fields. Through the \t$^

broom, and in the shade of some tall trees, flowed a y^h^

brooklet — a thin thread of limpid water, defined against v|pf,

the evening horizon by a small belt of haze which ran fi^ft"^

along its border. j V

" The climate is intermediate. In the valley, which ^^^

is that of the Tarn, and which shares the mildness of j<*«''(

^J,V' the Garonne- and the sevei'ity of Auvergne, we find '^^,

tyn none of those southern products common everywhere OtS

)'/l around Bordeaux. But the mulbeny, and the melting km

C^rn^ perfumed peach, the juicy gi'ape, the sugared fig, and ^5(l|7

{^ the melon, growing in the open air, testify that we are tw%

\W ill the south. Fruits superabounded with us ; one ^J^

X{j portion of the estate was an immense vineyard. ?''()#

^.fJ " Memory viv^idly recalls to me all the charms of ^'i^

'■'fe this locality, and its varied character. It was never '-Wt^,

(,>i? otherwise than grave and melancholy in itself, and it 'j\^v

tM^ impressed these feelings on all about it. My father, ^U^

''l';]!"^' though lively and agreeable, was a man already aged, ^/^^

''i ►( and of uncertain health. My mother, young, beautiful, . -X

1 \ austere, had the queenly bearing of the North American, ' * ^
with a prudence and an active economy very rare in
Creoles. The estate which we occupied formerly belonged

22

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

to a Protestant family, and after passing througli
SiM many hands before it fell into ours, still retained the
graves of its ancient owners — simple hillocks of turf,
where the proscribed had enshrined their dead under a
thick gi-ove of oaks. I need hardly say, that these trees
and these tombs, consecrated by their very oblivion,
were religiously respected by my father. Each grave
was marked out by rose-bushes, which his own hands
had planted. These sweet odours, these bright blossoms,
concealed the gloom of death, while suffering, neverthe-
less, something of its melancholy to remain. Thither,
then, we were drawn, and as it were in spite of our-
selves, at evening time. Overcome by emotion, we
often mourned over the departed ; and, at each falHng
star, exclaimed, ' It is a soul which passes !' *

" In this living country-side, among alternate joys
and pains, I lived for ten years — from four to fourteen.
I had no comrades. My sister, five years older than
myself, was the companion of my mother when I was
still but a little girl. My brothers, numerous enough
to play among themselves without my help, often left
me all alone in the hours of recreation. If they ran off
to the fields, I could only follow them with my eyes.
fm I passed, then, many solitary hours in wandering near
the house, and in the long garden alleys. There I
acquired, in spite of a natural vivacity, habits of con-

* Alluding to a popular superstition, wiiich Beranger has made the
subject of a fine lyric : —

" AVhat means the fall of yonder star,

Which falls, falls, and fades away?

My son, whene'er a mortal dies,

Earthward liis star drops instantly." — Translator.

w

THE STUDY OF NATURE.

2r;

templation. At the bottom of my dreams I beo-an to
feel the Infinite : I had glimpses of God, of the paternal
di\dnity of nature, wliich regards with equal tenderness
the blade of grass and the star. In this I found the
chief source of consolation ; nay, more, let me say, of
happiness.

" Our abode would have offered to an observant mind
a very agi-eeable field of study. All creatures under its
benevolent protection seemed to find an asylum. We
had a fine fish-pond near the house, but no dove-cot ;
for my parents could not endure the idea of dooming
creatures to slavery whose life is all movement and
freedom. Dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea-pigs, lived together
in concord. The tame chickens, the pigeons, followed
my mother everywhere, and fed from her hand. The
sparrows built their nests among us ; the swallows
even brooded under our barns ; they flew into our very
chambers, and returned with each succeeding spring to
the shelter of our roof

" How often, too, have I found, in the goldfinches'
nests torn from our cypress-trees by rude autumnal
winds, fragments of my summer-robes buried in the
sand ! Beloved birds, which I then sheltered all unwit-
tingly in a fold of my vestment, ye have to-day a surer
shelter in my heart, but ye know it not !

" Our nightingales, less domesticated, wove their
nests in the lonely hedge-rows ; but, confident of a
generous welcome, they came to our threshold a hundred
times a-day, and besought from my mother, for them-
selves and their family, the silk-worms which had
perished.

24

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

<^^£c^^/-?^_,;-

" Li the depths of the wood the woodpecker
laboured obstinately at the venerable trunks ; one might
hear him at his task when aU other sounds had ceased.
We listened in trembling silence to the mysterious blows
of that indefatigable workman mingling with the owl's
slow and lamentable voice.

" It was my highest ambition to have a bird all to
myself — a turtle-dove. Those of my mother's — so
familiar, so plaintive, so tenderly resigned at breeding-
time — attracted me strongly towards them. If a young
girl feels like a mother for the doll which she dresses,
how much more so for a living creature which responds
to her caresses ! I would have given everything for
this treasure. But it was not to be so ; and the dove
was not my first love.

" The first was a flower, whose name I do not
know.

" I had a small garden, situated under an enormous
fig-tree, whose humid shades rendered useless aU my
cultivation. Feeling very sad and sorely discouraged, I
descried one morning, on a pale-gi*een stem, a beautiful
little golden blossom. Very little, trembling at the
lightest breath, its feeble stalk issued from a small basin
excavated by the rains. Seeing it there, and always
trembling, I supposed it was cold, and provided it with
a canopy of leaves. How shall I express the transports
which this discovery awakened ? I alone knew of its
existence ; I alone possessed it. All day we could do
nothing but gaze at each other. In the evening I
glided to its side, my heart full of emotion. We spoke
little, for fear of betraying ourselves. But ah ! what

»

f

if

W'i

if

n

THE STUDY OF NATURE.

25

tender kisses before the last adieu ! These joys endured
but three days. One afternoon my flower folded itself
l^^ up slowly, never again to re-open. There was an end
fiv to its love.

" I kept to myself my keen regret, as I had kept
my happiness. No other flower could have consoled
me ; a life more full of life was needed to restore the
freedom of my soul.

" Every year my good nurse came to see me,
invariably bringing some little present. On one occa-
sion, with a mysterious air, she said to me, ' Put thy
hand in my basket.' I did so, expecting to find some
fruit, but felt a silken fur, and something trembling.
Ah ! it is a rabljit ! Seizing it, I ran in all directions
to announce the news. I hugged the poor animal with
a convulsive joy, which nearly proved fatal to it. My
head was troubled with giddiness. I could not eat.
My sleep was disturbed by painful dreams. I saw my
rabbit dying ; I was unable to move a single step to
succour it. Oh ! how beautiful it was, my rabbit, witli
its pink nose, and its fur as polished as a mirror ! Its
large pearled ears, Avhich were constantly in motion, its
fantastic gambols, had, I confess, a share of my admira-
tion. As soon as the morning dawned, I escaped from
{^^ my mother's bed to visit my favourite, and carry it a
green leaf or two. There it sat, and gravely ate the
leaves, casting upon me protracted glances, which I
thought full of aflection ; then, erecting itself on its
hind paws, it turned to the sun its little snow-white
belly, and sleeked its fine whiskers with marvellous
dexterity.

W^

26

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

" Nevertheless, slander was busy in its detraction ;
its face was too small, said its enemies, and it was very-
gluttonous. To-day, I might subscribe to these asser-
tions ; but at seven years of age I fought for the honour
of my rabbit ! Alas ! there was no need to make it the
subject of dispute, it lived so short a time. One Sunday,
my mother having set out for the town with my sister
and eldest brother, we were wandering — we, the little
ones — in the enclosure, when a sudden report broke
over our heads. A strange cry, like an infant's first
moan, followed it close at hand. My rabbit had been
wounded by a flash of fire, Tbe unfortunate beast had
transgressed beyond the vineyard-hedge, and a neigh-
bour, having nothing better to do, had amused himself
with shooting at it.

" I was in time to see it rise up, bleeding. So
great was my grief that I almost choked, utterly unable
to sob out a single word. But for my father, who
received me in his arms, and by gentle words gave my
full heart relief, I should have fainted. My limbs
yielded under me. Pardon the tears which this recollec-
tion still calls forth.

" For the first time, and in early youth, I had a
revelation of death, abandonment, desolation. The
house, the garden, appeared to me empty and bare.
Do not laugh : my grief was bitter, and all the deeper
because concentrated in myself

" Thenceforth, having learned the meaning of death,
I began to watch my father ^vitll wistful eyes. I
saw, not without teiTor, that his face was very pale
and his hair white. He would quit us ; he would go

1

m

1

'w>.L

THE STUDY OF NATURE.

21

whither the village -bell summoned him,' to use his

I had not the strength to conceal
my thoughts. Sometimes I flung my arms around his
neck, exclaiming : ' Papa, do not die ! oh, never die I '
He embraced me, without replying ; but his fine large
black eyes were troubled as they gazed on me.

" I was attached to him by a thousand ties, by a
thousand intimate relations. I was the daughter of
'ij^ his mature age, of his shattered health, of his affections.
I had not that happy equilibrium which his other chil-
dren derived from my mother. My father was trans-
mitted in me {pass4 en moi). He said so himself:
' How I feel that thou art my daughter ! '

" Years and life's trials had deprived him of nothing ;
to his last hour he retained the vivacity, the aspira-
tions, and even the charm of youth. Every one felt
it without being able to account for it, and all flocked
around him of their own accord — women, children, men.
I still see him in his little study, seated before his
small black table, relating his Odyssey, his long jour-
neys in America, his life in the colonies ; one never
grew weary of his stories. A maiden of twenty years,
in the last stage of a pulmonary disease, heard him
shortly before her end : she would fain have listened
to him always ; implored him to visit her, for while he
was discoursing she forgot her sufferings and her decay,
even the approach of death.

" This chai-m I speak of was not that of a clever
talker only ; it was due to the great goodness so
plainly visible in him. The trials, the life of ad-
venture and misfortune, which harden so many hearts,

28

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

liad, on the contrary, but softened his. No man in
this generation — a generation so much agitated, tossed
to and fro by so many waves — had undergone such
painful experiences. His father, an Auvergnat, the
principal of a college, then juge consulaire in our
most southern city, and finally summoned to the
Assembly of Notables in '88, had all the hard austerity
of his country and his functions, of the school and the
tribunals. The education of that era was cruel, a per-
petual chastisement ; the more wit, the more character,
the more strength, the more did this education tend to
shatter them, to break them down. My father, of a
delicate and tender natui'e, could never have survived
it, and only escaped by flying to America, where one
of his brothers had previously established himself A
change of linen was his only fortune, except his youth,
his confidence, his golden dreams of freedom. Thence-
forth he always cherished a peculiar tenderness for that
land of liberty ; he often revisited it, and earnestly
wished to die there.

" Called by the needs of business to St. Domingo, he
was present in that isLand at the gi-eat crisis of the reign
of Toussaint L'Ouverture. This tiaily extraordinary-
man, who up to his fiftieth year had been a slave, who
comprehended and foresaw everything, did not know
how to write, or to give expression to his ideas. His
genius succeeded better in great actions than in fine
speeches. He lacked a hand, a pen, and more — the
young bold heart which shall teach the hero the heroic
language, the words in harmony with the moment and
the situation. Toussaint, at his age, could only utter

THE STUDY OF NATURE.

29

':.«&'.

this noble appeal : ' The First of the Blacks to the "; 4'

First of the Whites ! ' * Permit me to doubt if it were !.^^

his. At least, if he conceived it, it was my father Vf^

who gave expression to the idea. >J|^\;t

"He loved my father warmly; he perceived his r^i^'

■v"-^ frankness, and he trusted him — he, so profoundly mis- w^'^'.

^y trustful, dumb with his long slavery, and secret as the \'^m^

Q\ ' tomb ! But who can die without having one day un- ' l-^j!

g}»v'? locked his heart ? It was my father's misfortune that i^^ff^;

i^^, at certain moments Toussaint broke his silence, and .^ptS

made him the confidant of dangerous mysteries. ^Wk

Thenceforth, all was over ; he became afraid of the M%

young man, and felt himself dependent upon him — a \tf."

new sei-vitude, which could only end with mv father's %M-'

death. Toussaint threw him into piison, and then, *>?*'

with a fresh access of fear, would have sacrificed him. ''*/-'

Fortunately, the prisoner was guarded by gr-atitude ; '^^

he had been bountiful to manv of the blacks ; a negress v^s^

whom he had protected, warned him of his peril, and iiA-

assisted him to escape from it. All his life long he /.ri^^i

sought that woman, to show his gratitude towards her ; ^A'.r

he did not discover her until some fourteen years after- #;.\t

wards, on his last voyage ; she was then living in the ■^^^:^^

United States. ^4'-'
"To return: though out of prison, he was not saved.

\f^W Wandering astray in the forest, at night, without a
guide, he had cause to dread the Maroons, those im-
placable enemies of the whites, who would have killed
him, in ignorance that they were murdering the best

* It was with this exordium Toussaint commenced his appeal to
Napoleon Bonaparte.

30

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

^^4^^V V^^^

l<%

friend of their race. Fortune is the boon of youth ;
he escaped every danger. Having discovered a good
horse, whenever the blacks issued from their hiding-
places, one touch of the spear, a wave of the hat, a
cry : ' Advanced guard of General Toussaint ! ' and this
was enough. At that formidable name all took to
flight, and disappeared as if by enchantment.

" Such was the tenderness of my father's soul, that
he did not withdraw his regard from the great man
who had misunderstood him. When, at a later period,
he saw him in Finance, abandoned by everybody, a
wretched prisoner in a^ fort of the Jura, where he
perished of cold and misery,* he alone was faithful to
him. Despite his errors, despite the deeds of violence
inseparable from the grand and terrible part which that
man had played, he revered in him the daring pioneer
of a race, the creator of a world. He corresponded
with him until his death, and afterwards T\dth his
family.

"A singular chance ordained that my father should
be engaged in the isle of Elba when the First of the
Whites, dethroned in his turn, amved to take posses-
sion of his miniature kingdom. Heart and imagina-
tion, my father fell captive to this wonderful romance.
An American, and imbued with Republican ideas, he
became on this occasion, and for the second time, the
courtier of misfortune. He was the most intimate of

* Napoleon's treatment of Toussaint L'Ouvertnre is one of the
darkest spots on his fame. He flung this son of the Tropics into a
dungeon among the icy fastnesses of the Alps, where he died, slain by-
cold and undeserved ill-treatment, on the 27th of April 180S,— Translator.

THE STUDY OF NATURE.

31

the servants of the Emperor, of his children, of that
fM$' accomplished and adored lady who was the charm and
'l^y} happiness of his exile. He undertook to convey her
W^*- ^^ck to France in the perilous return of March 1815.
'^jL^ This attraction, had there been no obstacle, would have
^M, led him even to St. Helena. As it was, he could not
Cw 6^du^6 the restoration of the Bourbons, and returned to
^^*aJ;; his beloved America.

"The New World was not ungrateful, and made the
happiness of his life. He had resigned every official
capacity in order to abandon himself wholly to the more
independent career of tuition. He taught in Louisiana.
That colonial France, isolated, sundered by the events
of her mother-land's history, and mingling so many
diverse elements of population, breathes ever the breath
of France. Among my father's pupils was an orphan,
of English and German extraction. She came to him
when very young, to learn the first elements of know-
ledge ; she grew under his hands, and loved him more
and more ; she found a second family, a second father ;
she sympathized with the paternal heart, with a charm
of youthful vivacity which our French of the south
preserve in their mature age. She had but three
faults : wealth, beauty, extreme youth — for she was at
least thirty years younger than my father; but neither
of them perceived it, and they never reminded them-
selves of it. My mother has been inconsolable for my
father's death, and has ever since worn mourning.

" My mother longed to see France, and my father,
in his pride of her, was delighted to show to the Old
World the brilliant flower he had gathered in the New.

r''>:&}

) i s

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

But anxious as lie was to maintain this J^oung Creole
lady in the position and vdth. the fortune which she
had always enjoyed, he would not embark until he
had accomplished, with her consent, a religious and
holy act. This was the manumission of his slaves — of
those, at least, above the age of twenty -one ; the

li/^f young, whom he was prevented by the American law
fi^om setting free, received from him their future

k/Wk liberty, and, on attaining their majority, were to rejoin
their parents. He never lost sight of them. Tliey
were always before his eyes ; he knew their names,
their ages, and their appointed hour of liberty. In
his French home, he took note of these epochs, and
would say, with a glow of happiness, 'To-day, such
an one becomes free ! '

" See my father now in his native country, happy
in a residence near his birth-place — building, planting,
bringing up his family, the centre of a young world in
which everything sprung from him : the house, the
garden, were his creation ; even his wife, whom he had
reared and trained, and whom everybody thought to
be his daughter. My mother was so young that her
eldest dauffhter seemed to be her sister. Five other

U

promptly enwreathing my father with a living garland,
which was his special pride. Few families exhibited a
greater variety of tastes and temperaments; the two worlds
were distinctly represented in ours : the French of the
south with the sparkling vivacity of Languedoc — the gi'ave
colonists of Louisiana marked from their birth ^vith the
phlegTiiatic idiosyncrasies of the American character.

w

fe

m

it

.. . . . hi

(1^ children followed, almost in as many successive years, yj-tif

i

f

THE STUDY OF NATURE.

33

m.

It

" It was ordered, however, that, with the exception
of the eldest, who was already my mother's companion
and shared wdth her the management of the household,
the five youngest should receive their education in
common fi'om one master — my father. Notwithstand-
ing his age, he undertook the duties of preceptor and
schoolmaster. He gave up to us his whole day, from
six in the morning until six in the evening. He
reserved for his correspondence, his favourite studies,
only the first hours of morning, or, more truly speak-
ing, the last hours of night. Retiring to rest very
early, he rose every day at three o'clock, without
taking any heed of his pulmonary weakness. First of
all, he threw wide his door, and there, before the stars
or the dawn, according to the season, he blessed God ;
and God also blessed that venerable head, silvered by
the experiences of life, not by the passions of humanity.
In summer time, after his devotions, he took a short
walk in the garden, and watched the insects and the
plants awake. His knowledge of them was wonderful;
and very often, after breakfast, taking me by the hand,
he would describe the nature of each flower, would
point out where each little animal that he had sur-
prised at dawn took refuge. One of these was a
snake, which the sight of my father did not in the
least disconcert ; each time that he seated himself near
its domicile, it never failed to put forth its head and peer
at him curiously. He alone knew that it was there,
and he told none but me of its retirement ; it remained
a secret between us.

" In those morning -hours everything he met with

34

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

became a fertile text for his religious effusions. "With-
out formal phrases, and inspired by true feeling, he
spoke to me of the goodness of God, for whom there is
neither great nor small, but all are brothers in His eyes,
and all are equals.

" Associated with my brothers in their labours, I
also took a part in those of my mother and my sister.
Wlien I put aside my grammar and arithmetic, it was
to take up the needle.

" Happily for me, our life, naturally blending
with that of the fields, was, whether we willed it or
not, frequently varied by charming incidents which
broke the chains of habit. Study has commenced ; we
apply ourselves with eagerness to our books ; but what
now ? See, a storm is coming ! the hay will be spoiled.
Quick, we must gather it in ! Everybody sets to
work ; the very chikh-en hasten thither ; study is
adjourned ; we toil courageously, and the day goes
by. It is a pity, for the rain does not fall ; the
storm has lingered on the Bordeaux side ; it will come
to-morrow.

"At harvest-time we frequently diverted ourselves
with gleaning. In those gi-and moments of fiTiition,
at once a labour and a festival, all sedentary applica-
tion is impossible ; one's thoughts are in the fields.
We were constantly escaping out-of-doors, with the
lark's swiftness ; we disappeared among the furrows —
we little ones concealed by the tall corn, hidden among
the forest of ripe ears.

" It was well understood that during the vintage
there was no time to think of study : much needed

i^

THE STUDY OF NATURE

85

labourers, we lived among the vines ; it was our right.
But before the gi'ape ripened, we had numerous other
vintages, those of the fruit-trees — cherries, apricots, ^■^'^^
peaches. Even at a later period, the apples and the ^^^^
pears imposed upon us new and severe laboui-s, in .^^7^
which it was a matter of conscience that our hands
should be employed. And thus, even in winter, these
necessities returned — to act, to laugh, and to do nothing.
The last ta.sks, occurring in mid-November, were perhaps
the most delightful ; a light mist then enfolded every-
thing ; I have seen nothing like it elsewhere ; it was a
dream, an enchantment. All objects were transfigured
under the wavy folds of the vast pearl-gray canopy
which, at the breath of the warm autumn, lovingly
alighted hither and thither, like a farewell kiss.

" The digiiified hospitality of my mother, my father's
charm of manner and piquant conversation, drew upon
us also the unforeseen distractions of visitors from the
town, constraining suspensions of our studies, at which
we did not weep. But the great and unceasing visit
was from the poor, who well knew the house and the
hand inexhaustibly opened by charity. All partici-
pated in its benefits, even the very animals; and it
was a curious and diverting thing to see the dogs of
the neighbourhood, patiently, silently seated on their
hind legs, waiting until my father should raise his
eyes from his book: they felt assured that he would
not resist the mute eloquence of their prayer. My
mother, more reasonable, was inclined to drive away
these indiscreet gue.sts who came at their own invitation.
My father felt that he was wrong, and yet he never

3G

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

c:-"^-/::?

m

failed to throw tliem stealthily some fragments, which
sent them away satisfied.

"This they knew perfectly well. One day, a new
guest, lean, bristling, unprepossessing, something be-
tween a dog and a wolf, arrived; he was, in fact, a
half-breed of the two species, born in the forests of the
Gresigne. He was very ferocious, very irascible, and
bore much too close a resemblance to his wolfish
mother. But, besides this, he was intelKgent, and
gifted with a very keen instinct. From the fii'st he
gave himself wholly up to my father, and neither
words nor rough usage could induce him to quit his
side. For us he had but little love; and we repaid
him in kind, seizing every opportunity of playing him
a hundi'ed tricks. He ground and gnashed his teeth,
though, out of regard for my father, he abstained
from devouring us. To the poor he was furious, im-
placable, very dangerous; which decided us on sufier-
ing him to be lost. But there was no such chance.
He always came back again. His new masters would
chain him to a post; chains and post, he carried them
all ofi", and brought them into our house. It was too
much for my father; he would never forsake him.

"But the cats enjoyed even more of his good gi-aces
than the dogs. This was due to his early education,
to the cruel years spent at college; bis brother and
himself, beaten and repulsed, between the harshness of
their home and the severities of their school, had found
a consolation in a couple of cats. This predilection
was transmitted to his family — each of us, in childhood,
possessed our cat. The gathering at the fireside was

m
"ft

m

m

m

{

\

THE STUDY OF xVATURE.

37

ii(r

S^^^lf^^vSM

a beautiful spectacle; all the grimalkins, in furred
dignity, sitting majestically under the chaire of their
3^oung masters. One alone was missing from the
circle — a poor wi-etch, too ugly to figure among the
othei-s ; he knew his unworthiness, and held himself
aloof, in a wild timidity which nothing was able to
conquer. As in every assembly (such is the piteous
malignity of our nature !) there must be a butt, a scape-
goat, who receives all the blows, he, in ours, filled this
unthankful role. If there were no blows, at least there
were abundant mockeries : we named him Moquo. Weak,
and scantily provided with fur, he stood in more need
than the othera of the genial hearth; but we children
filled him with fear: even his comrades, better clothed
in their warm ermine, appeared to esteem him but
lightly, and to look at him askant. Of course, tliere-
fore, my father turned to him, and fondled him; the
grateful animal lay down under that beloved hand,
and gained confidence. Wrapped up in his coat, and
revived by its warmth, he would frequently be brought,
unseen, to the fireside. We C{uickly caught sight of him;
and if he showed a hair, or the tip of an ear, our laughter
and our glances threatened him, in spite of my father.
I can still see that shadow gatheiing itself up— melt-
ing, so to speak — in its protector's bosom, closing its
eyes, annihilating itself, weU content to see nothing.

"All that I have read of the Hindus, and their
tenderness for nature, reminds me of my father. He
was a Brahmin. More even than the Brahmins did
he love every living thing. He had lived in a time
of blood and war — he had been an eye-witness of the

38

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

most terrible slaugliters of men that had ever disgraced
history; and it seemed as if tliat frightful lavishness of
the in^ecoverable good, which is life, had given him a
respect for all life, an insurmountable aversion to all
destruction.

"This had in time arrived at such an extreme, that
he would have willingly lived upon vegetable food alone.
He would have no viands of blood; they excited his
horror. A morsel of chicken, or, more often, an Qgg
or two, sei-ved for his dinner. And frequently he
dined standing,

"Such a regimen, however, could not strengd^hen
him. Nor did he economize his strength, expending it
largely in lessons, in conversations, and in the habitual
overflow of a too benevolent heart, which li^ed in all
things, interested itself in all. Age came, and with
it anxieties: family anxieties? no, but from jealous
neighbours or unfaithful debtors. The crisis of the
American banks dealt a severe blow to his fortune.
He came to the extreme resolution, in spite of his ill
health and his years, of once more visiting America, in
the belief that his personal activity and his industry
might re-establish affairs, and secure the fortune of
his wife and children.

"This departure was terrible. It was preceded for
me by another blow. I had quitted the mansion and the
country; I had entered a boarding-school in the town.
Cruel servitude, which deprived me of all that made
my life — of air and respiration ! Everj^where, walls !
I should have died, but for the frequent visits of my
mother, and the rarer visits of my father, to which 1

THE STUDY OF NATURE.

39

;;^T

l^

looked forward with a delirious impatience that per-
haps love has never known. But now that my father
himself was leaving us — heaven, earth, everything
seemed undone. With whatever hope of reunion he
mio-ht endeavour to cheer me, an internal voice, dis-
tinct and tenible, such as one hears in great trials, toLl
me that he would return no more.

" The house was sold, and the plantations laid out
by our hands, tlie trees which belonged to the family,
were abandoned. Our animals were plainly inconsolable
at my father s departure. The dog — I forget for how
many successive days — seated himself on the road which
he had taken at his departure, howled, and returned.
The most disinherited of all, the cat Moquo, no longer
confided in any person, though he still came to regard
with fui-tive glances the empty place. Then he took
his resolution, and fled to the woods, from which we
could never call him back; he resumed his early life,
miserable and savage.

" And I, too, I quitted the paternal roof, the hearth
of my young years, with a heart for ever wounded.
My mother, my sister, my brothers, the sweet friend-
ships of infancy, disappeared behind me. I entered
upon a life of trial and isolation. At Bayonne, how-
ever, where I first resided, the sea of Biarritz spoke to
me of my father; the waves which break on its shore,
from America to Europe, repeated the story of his death ;
the snow-white ocean birds seemed to say, ' We have
seen him.'

"Wliat remained to me? My climate, my birth-
land, my language. But even these I lost. I was

40

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

compelled to go to the North, to an unknown tongue
and a hostile sky, where the earth for half a year
wears mourning weeds. During these long seasons of
frost, my failing health extinguishing imagination, I
could scarcely re-create for myself my ideal South. A
dog might have somewhat consoled me: in default, I
made two little friends, who resembled, I fancied, my
mother's turtle-doves. They knew me, loved me,
sported by my fireside; I gave to them the summer
which my heart had not.

"Seriously affected, I fell very ill, and thought I
should soon touch the other shore. However studious
and tender towards me might be the hospitality of the
stranger, it was needful I should return to France.
It was long before carefulness of affection, and a
marriage in which I found again a father's heart and
arms, could restore my health. I had seen death
from so near a view-point — let us rather saj, I had
entered so far upon it — that nature hereelf, living
nature, that first love and rapture of my young years,
had for a long time little hold upon me, and she alone
had any. Nothing had supplied her place. History,
and the recital of the pathetic stirring human drama,
moved me but lightly; nothing seized firmly on my
mind but the unchangeable, God and Nature.

" Nature is immovable and yet mobile; that is her
eternal charm. Her unwearied activity, her ever-
shifting phantasmagoria, do not weary, do not disturb;
this harmonious motion bears in itself a profound
repose.

" I was recalled to her by the flowers — by the cares

X.h

I

M

V

I '

THE STUDY OF NATURE.

41

which they demand, and the species of maternity which
they soKcit. My imperceptible garden of twelve trees
and three beds did not fail to remind me of the ffreat
fertile vineyard where I was born; and I found, too,
some degi-ee of happiness, by the side of an ardent in-
tellect, which toiled athirst in the dreary ways and wastes
of human history, in cherishing for him these living
waters and the charm of a few flowers."

^^

m;}ry^^--/y

'/■

42 HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

I resume.

See me now torn from the city by this loving inquietude, by
my fears for an invalid whom it was essential to restore to the
conditions of her early life and the free air of the country. I
quitted Paris, my city, which I had never left before; that city
which comprises the three worlds ; that cradle of Art and Thought.

I returned there daily for my duties and occupations ; but I
hastened to get quit of it. Its noise, its distant hum, the ebb and
flow of abortive revolutions, impelled me to wander afar. It was
with nuich pleasure that, in the spring of 1852, I broke through all
the ties of old habits; I closed my library with a bitter joy, I put
under lock and key my books, the companions of my life, which
had assuredly thought to hold me bound for ever. I travelled so
long as earth supported me, and only halted at Nantes, close to the
sea, on a hill which overlooks the yellow streams of Brittany as they
flow onward to mingle, in the Loire, with the gray waters of La Vende'e.

We established ourselves in a large country mansion, completely
isolated, in the midst of the constant rains with which our western
fields are inundated at this season. At such a distance from the
ocean, one does not feel its briny influence; the rains are tempests
of fresh water. The hause, in the Louis Quinze style, had been
uninhabited for a considerable period, and at first sight seemed a
little gloomy. Situated on elevated gi-ound, it was rendered not the
less sombre by thick hedges on the one side, on the other by tall
trees and by an untold number of unpruned cherry-trees. The
whole, on a greensward, which the undrained waters preserved,
even in summer, in a beautifully fresh condition.

I adore neglected gardens, and this one reminded me of the
great abandoned vineyards of the Italian villas; but it possessed,
what these villas lack, a charming medley of vegetables and
plants of a thousand diflferent species — all the herbs of the St. John,
and each herb tall and vigorous. The forest of cherry-trees, bending
under their burden of scarlet fruit, gave also the idea of inex-
hau.stible abundance.

THE STUDY OF NATURE.

43

It was not the sweet austerity {soave austero) of Italy; it was
a soft and overflowing profusion, under a warm, mild, and moist sky.

Nothing appeared in sight, though a large town was close at
hand, and a little river, the Erdre, wound under the hill, and from

thence dragged itself towards the Loire. But this vegetable pro-
digality, this virgin forest of fruit trees, completely shut in the view.
For a prospect, one must mount into a species of turret, whence the
landscape began to reveal itself in a certain gi-andeur, with its woods
and its meadows, its distant monuments, its towers. Even from this
observatory the view was still limited, the city only appearing im-
perfectly, and not allowing you to catch sight of its mighty river,
its islands, its stir of commerce and navigation. A few paces from
its great harbour, of whose existence there was no sign, one might
believe oneself in a desert, in the landes of Brittany, or the clearings
of La Yende'e.

Two things were of a lofty character, and detached them-

44

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

selves from tliis sombre orchard. Penetrating the ancient hedges
and chestnut-alleys, jon found yourself in a nook of barren argil-
laceous soil, where, among thyme-laurels and other strong, rude trees,
rose an enormous cedar, a veritable leafy cathedral, of such stature
that a cypress already grown very tall was choked by it, and lost.
This cedar, bare and stripped below, was living and vigorous where
it received the light; its immense arms, at thirty feet from the
ground, clothed themselves with strange and pointed leaves; then
the cn.nopy thickened; the trunk attained an elevation of eighty feet.
You saw, about three leagues distant, the fields opposite the banks

of the Sevre and the woods of La Vendee. Our home, low and
sheltered on the side of this giant, wa.s not less distinguished by it

THE STUDY OF NATURE. 45

throughout an immense circuit, and perhaps owed to it its name, the
High Forest.

At the other end of the enclosure, from a deep sheet of water,
rose a small ascent, crowned with a garland of pines. These fine
trees, incessantly beaten by the sea-breezes, and shaken by the
adverse winds which follow the currents of the great river and its
two tributaries, groaned in the struggle, and day and night filled the
profound silence of the place with a melancholy harmony. At times,
you might have thought yourself by the sea; they so imitated the
noise of the waves, of the ebbing and flowing tide.

By degi'ees, as the season became a little drier, this sojourn ex-
hibited itself to me in its real character; serious, indeed, but more
varied than one would have supposed at the first glance, and beauti-
ful with a touching beauty which went home to the soul. Austere,
as became the gate of Brittany, it had all the luxuriant verdure of
the Vendean coast.

I could have thought, when I saw the pomegranates blooming in
the open air, robust and loaded with flowers, that I was in the south.
The magnolia, no dwarf, as we see it elsewhere, but splendid and
magnificent, and full-grown, like a great tree, perfumed all my garden
with its huge white blossoms, which contain in their thick chalices an
abundance of I know not what kind of oil, an oil sweet and penetrat-
ing, whose odour follows you everywhere; you are enveloped in it.

We found ourselves this time in possession of a true garden, a
large establishment, a thousand domestic occupations with which we
had previously dispensed. A wild Breton girl rendered help only in
the coarser tasks. Save one weekly journey to the town, we were
very lonely, but in an extremely busy solitude; rising very early in
the morning, at the first awakening of the birds, and even before the
day. It is time that we retired to rest at a good hour, and almost at
the same time as the birds.

This profusion of fruits, vegetables, and plants of every kind,
enabled us to keep numerous domestic animals: only the difiiculty
was, that nourishing them, knowing each of them, and well-known by

46

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

them, we could not make up our minds to eat them. We planted,
and here we met with quite a distinct kind of inconvenience — our
plantations were nearly always devoured beforehand.

This earth, fertile in vegetables, was equally or more prolific of
destructive animals ; enonnous capacious snails, devouring insects.
In the morning we collected a great tubful of snails. The next
day you would never have thought so. There still seemed to be
the full complement.

Our hens did their best. But how much more effective would
have been the skilful and prudent stork, the admirable scavenger of
Holland and all marshy districts, which some Western lands ought at
all costs to adopt. Everybody knows the affectionate respect in which
this excellent bird is held by the Dutch. In their markets you may
see him standing peacefully on one foot, dreaming in the midst of
the crowd, and feeling as safe as in the heart of the deepest deserts.
It is a fantastic but well-assured fact, that the Dutch peasant who
has had the misfortune to wound his stork and to break his leg, pro-
vides him with one of wood.

To return: our residence near Nantes would have possessed an
infinite charm for a less absoi'bed mind. This beautiful spot, this great
liberty of work, this solitude, so sweet in such society, formed a rare
harmony, such as one but seldom meets w*ith in life. Its sweetness
contrasted strongly with the thoughts of the present, with the gloomy

THE STUDY OF NATURE.

47

past which then occupied my pen. I was writing of '93. Its heroic
primeval history enveloped, possessed, shall I say consumed, me. All
the elements of happiness which surrounded me, which I sacrificed to
work, adjourning them for a time that, according to all appearances,

■ :iv'^^ci?-#%^:^:^f;^

might never he mine, I regretted daily, and incessantly cast back
upon them a look of sorrow. It was a daily battle of affection and
nature, against the sombre thoughts of the human world.

That battle for me will be always a powerful souvenir. The
scene has remained sacred in my thought. Elsewhere it no longer
exists. The house is destroyed — another built on its site. And it
is for this reason that I have dallied here a little. My cedar, how-
ever, has survived ; a notable thing, for architects now-a-days hate
trees.

When, however, I drew near the end of my task, some glimpses
of light enlivened the wild darkness. My son-ows were less keen,
when I felt sure that I should thenceforth enjoy this memorial of a
cruel but fertile experience. Once more I began to hear the voices

48

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

of solitude, and more plainly I believe than at any other age, but
slowly and with unaccustomed ear, like one who shall have been some
time dead, and have returned from the other world.

In my youth, before I was taken captive by this implacable
History, I had sympathized with nature, but with a blind warmth,
with a heart less tender than ardent. At a later period, when
residing in the suburb of Paris, I had again felt that emotion of love.
I watched with interest my sickly flowers in that arid soil, so
sensible every evening of the joy of refreshing waterings, so plainly
grateful. How much more at Nantes, surrounded by a natui*e ever
powerful and prolific, seeing the herbage shoot upward hour after
hour, and all animal life multiplying around me, ought I not, I too,
to expand and revive with this new sentiment !

If there were aught that could have re-inspired my mind and
broken the sombre spell that lay upon it, it would have been a book
which we frequently read in the evening, the "Birds of France,"
by Toussenel, a charming and felicitous transition from the thought
of country to that of nature.

So long as France exists, his Lark and his Uedbreast, his Bullfinch,
his Swallow, will be incessantly read, re-read, re-told. And if there
were no longer a France, in its ingenious pages we should re-discover

all which it owned of good, the true breath of that country, the
Gallic sense, the French esprit, the very soul of our fatherland.

The formulae of a system which it bears, however, very lightly, its

THE STUDY OF NATURE. 49

forced comparisons (which sometimes make us think of those too
spirituel animals of Granville), do not prevent the French genius, gay,
good, serene, and courageous, young as an April sun, from illuminating
the entire book. It possesses numerous passages enlivened with the
joyousness, the elasticity, the gushing song of the lark in the first
day of spring.

Add a thing of gi-eat beauty, which does not spring from youth.
The author, a child of the Meuse and of a land of hunters, himself in his
early years an ardent and impassioned sportsman, appears altered in
character by his book. He wavers visibly between the first habits of
slaughterous youth, and his new sentiment, his tenderness for those
pathetic lives which he unveils — for these souls, these beings recognized
by his soul. I dare to say that thenceforth he will no more hunt
without remorse. Father and second creator of this world of love
and innocence, he will find interposed between them and him a barrier
of compassion. And what barrier ? His own work, the book in
which he gives them life.

I had scarcely begun my book, when it became necessary for me to
leave Nantes. I, too, was ill. The dampness of the climate, the hard
continuous labour, and still more keenly, without doubt, the conflict
of my thoughts, seemed to have struck home to that vital nerve of
which nothing had ever before taken hold. The road which our
swallows tracked for us, we followed ; we proceeded southward. We
fixed oui' transitory nest in a fold of the Apennines, two leagues from
Genoa.

An admirable situation, a secure and well-defended shelter, which,
in the variable climate of that coast, enjoys the astonishing boon of
an equable temperature. Although one could not entirely dispense
with fires, the winter sun, warm in January, encouraged the lizard
and the invalid to think it was spring. Shall I confess it, however ?
Tliese oranges, these citrons, harmonizing in their changeless foliage
with the changeless blue of heaven were not without monotony.
Animated life was very rare. There were few or no small birds ; no
sea birds. The fish, limited in numbers, did not fill with life those

4

50

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

translucent waters. My glance pierced them to a great depth, and
saw nothing but solitude, and the white and black rocks which form
the bed of that gulf of marble.

The littoral, exceedingly naiTow, is nothing but a small cornice, an
extremely confined border, a mere eyebrow {sourcil) of the mountains,
as the Latins would have said. To ascend the ladder and overlook
the gulf is, even for the most robust, a violent gymnastic effort. My
sole promenade was a little quay, or rather a rugged circular road,
which wound, with a breadth of about three feet, between ancient
garden walls, rocks, and precipices.

% *|;

^-5^»4^^v,>C"'-.

Deep was the silence, sparkling the sea, but all lonesome and
monotonous, except for the passage of a few distant barks. "Work
was prohibited to me ; for the first time for thirty years, I was separated
from my pen, and had escaped from that paper and ink existence in
which I had previously lived. This pause, which I thought so

THE STUDY OF NATUEE. 51

barren, in reality proved to me very fertile. I watched, I observed.
Unknown voices awoke within me.

At some distance from Genoa, and the excellent friends whom we
knew there, our only society was the small people of the lizards, which
run over the rocks, played, and slumbered in the sun. Charming,
innocent animals, which every noon, when we dined, and the quay was
absolutely deserted, amused me with their vivacious and graceful
evolutions. At the outset my presence had appeared to disquiet
them ; but a week had not passed before all, even the youngest, knew
me, and knew they had nothing to fear from the peaceful dreamer.

Such the animal, and such the man. The abstemious life of my
lizards, for which a fly was an ample banquet, differed in nothing
from that of the povera gente of the coast. Many lived wholly on
herbs. But herbs were not abundant in the barren and gaunt moun-
tain. The destitution of the country exceeded all belief. I was not
grieved at daring it, at finding myself sympathizing with the woes of
Italy, my glorious nurse, who has nourished France, and me more
than any Frenchman.

A nurse ? That was she ever, so far as was possible in her poverty
of resources, in the poverty of nature to which my health reduced me.
Incapable of food, I still received from her the only nourishment which
I could support, the vivifying air and the light — the sun, which fre-
quently permitted us, in one of the severest winters of the century, to
keep the windows open in January.

In the lazy, lizard-like Kfe which I lived upon that shore, I wholly
occupied myself with the surrounding country, with the apparent
antiquity of the Apennines and the mountains which girdle the
Mediterranean. Is there then no remedy ? Or rather, in their
leafless declivities shall we not discover the fountains which may
renew their life ? Such was the idea which absorbed me. I no
longer thought of my iUness ; I troubled myself no more about re-
covering. I had made what is truly great progress for an invalid : I
had forgotten myself My business henceforward was to resuscitate
that mighty patient, the Apennines. And as by degrees I became

62 HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

aware that the case was not hopeless — that the waters were hidden, not
lost — that by their discovery we might restore vegetable life, and
eventually animal life, — I felt myself much stronger, refreshed, renewed.
For each spring that revealed itself, I grew less athii-st ; I felt its
waters rise within my soul.

Ever fertile is Italy. She proved so to me through her very bar-
renness and poverty. The ruggedness of the bald Apennines, the lean
Ligurian coast, did but the more awaken, by contrast, the recollection
of that genial nature which cherishes the luxuriant richness of our
western France. I missed the animal life ; I felt its absence. From
the mute foliage of sombre orange-gardens I demanded the woodland
birds. For the fii'st time I perceived the seriousness of human
existence when it is no longer surrounded by the grand society of
innocent beings whose movements, voices, and sports are, so to speak,
the smile of creation.

A revolution took place in me which I shall, perhaps, some day
relate. I returned, with all the strength of my ailing existence, to the
thoughts which I had uttered, in 1846, in my book of "The People,"
to that City of God where . the humble and simple, peasants and
artisans, the igTiorant and unlettered, barbariaiLS and savages, childi'en,
and those other children, too, which we call animals, are all citizens
under different titles, have all their privileges and their laws, their
places at the great civic banquet. "I protest, for my part, that if any
one remains in the rear whom the City still rejects and does not
shelter with her rights, I myself will not enter in, but will halt upon
her threshold."

Thus, all natural history I had begun to regard as a branch of
the political. Every living species came, each in its humble right,
striking at the gate and demanding admittance to the bosom of
Democracy. Why should their elder brothers repulse them beyond
the pale of those laws which the universal Father harmonizes with
the law of the world ?

Such, then, was my renovation, this tardy new life {vita nuova),
which led me, step by step, to the natural sciences. Italy, whose

THE STUDY OF NATURE. 53

influence over my destiny has always been gi-eat, was its scene, its
occasion, just as, thirty years before, it had lit for me, through Vico,
the first spark of the historic fire.

Beloved and beneficent nurse ! Because I had for one moment
shared her sorrows, suffered, dreamed with her, she bestowed on me a
priceless gift, worth more than all the diamonds of Golconda. What
gift ? A profound sympathy of spirit, a fruitful interchange of the
most intimate ideas, a perfect home-harmony in the thought of Nature.

We arrived at this goal by two paths : I, by my love of the City,
by the effort of completing it through an association of self with all
other beings ; my wife, by religious feeling and by her filial reverence
for the fatherhood of God.

Henceforth we were able, every evening, to enjoy a mutual feast.

I have abeady explained how this work, unknown to ourselves,
gi-ew rich, was rendered fit-uitful, was impelled forward, by our modest
9,uxiliaries. They have almost always dictated it.

Our Parisian flowere prepared what our birds of Nantes accom-
plished. A certain nightingale of which I speak at the close of the
book crowned the work.

These divers impressions blended and melted together, on our return
to France, and especially here, in the presence of the ocean. At the
promontory of La Heve, under the venerable elms which overshadow
it, this revelation completed itself. The gulls, gannets, and guillemots
of the coast, the small birds of the groves, could say nothing which
was not understood All things found an echo in our hearts, like so
many internal voices.

The Pharos, the huge cliff, from three to four hundred feet in
height,* which from so lofty an elevation overlooks the vast embouchure
of the Seine, the Calvados, and the ocean, was the customary goal of
our promenades, and our resting-point. We usually climbed to it by
a deep covered road, full of freshness and shadow, which suddenly
opened upon this immense lighthouse. Sometimes we ascended the

* There are two lights, of which the more elevated is 39G feet above the sea-level. —
Translator.

54 HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

colossal staircase whicli, without surprises, in the full sunlight, and
always facing the mighty sea, leads by three flights to the summit,
each flight covering upwards of a hundred feet. You cannot accom-
plish this ascent at one breath ; at the second stage, you breathe, you
seat yourself for a few moments by the monxmient which the widow
of one of France's greatest soldiers has raised to his memory, in the
hope that its pyramid might prove a beacon to the mariner, and
guard him from shipwreck.

This cliff, of a very sandy soil, loses a little every winter.* It is
not, however, the sea which gnaws at it ; the heavy rains wash it
away, carrying off the debris, which, at first bare and shapeless, bear
eloquent witness to their downfall. But tender and gi'acious Nature
does not long suffer this. She speedily attires them, bestows upon
them greensward, herbs, shrubs, briers, which in due time become
miniature oases on the declivity, Lihput landscapes suspended on
the vast cliff, consoling its gloomy barrenness with their sweet youth.

Thus the Beautiful and the Sublime here embrace, a thing of rarity.

* La Heveis the ancient Caletorum Promontorinm, and situated about three miles north-
west of Havre. — Translator.

THE STUDY OF NATURE. 55

The storm-beaten mountain relates to you the ejwpea of earth, its rude
dramatic history, and shows its bones in evidence of its truth. But
these young children of chance, who spring up on its arid flank, prove
that she is still fertile, that her debris contain the elements of a new
organization, that all death is a life begun.

So these ruins have never caused us any sadness. We have con-
versed among them freely of destiny, providence, death, the life to
come. I, whom age and toil have given a right to die — she, whose
brow is already bent by the trials of infancy and a wisdom beyond
her years, we have not lived the less for a grand inspiration of soul,
for the rejuvenescent breath of that much-loved mother. Nature.*

Sprung from her at so great a distance from one another, so united
in her to-day, we would fain have rendered eternal this rare moment
of existence, " have cast anchor on the island of time." And how
could we better realize our idea than by this work of tenderness, of
universal brotherhood, of adoption of all life !

My wife incessantly recalled me to it, enlarging my sentiments of
individual tenderness by her facile, bright, emotional interpretation
of the spirit of the country and the voices of solitude.

It was then, among other things, that I learned to understand
birds which, like the swallows, sing little, but talk much — pratthng
of the fine weather, of the chase, of scanty or abundant food, of
their approaching departure ; in fact, of all their affairs. I had
listened to them at Nantes in October, at Turin in June. Their
September causeries were more intelligible at La Heve. We trans-
lated them easily in all their fond vivacity, all their joyousness of
youth and good-humour, free from ostentation or satire, in accord
with the happy moderation of a bird so free and so wise, which
appears not ungratefully to recognize that he has received from God
a lot of such signal felicity.

Alas ! even the swallow is not spared in that senseless warfare

* That the reader may feel the full force of this passage, I subjoin the original : " Nous
n'en vivions pas moins d'un grand souffle dame, de la rajeunissante haleine de cette mere
aimee, la Nature."

56

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO

which we wage against nature. We destroy the very birds
that protect our crops — our guardians, our honest labourers
— which, following close upon the plough, seize the future
I I pest, which the heedless peasant disturbs only to replace in

the earth.
Whole races, valuable and interesting, perish. Those lords of ocean,
those wild and sagacious creatures which Nature has endowed with
blood and milk — I speak of the cetacea — to what number are they
reduced ! Many great quadrupeds have vanished from the globe.
Many animals of every kind, without utterly disappearing, have
recoiled before man ; bnitalized (ensauvag^s) they fly, they lose their
natural arts, and relapse into barbarism. The heron, whose pnidence
and address were remarked by Aristotle, is now, at least in
Europe, a misanthropical, naiTow-minded, half-foolish animal. The
beaver, which, in America, in its peaceful solitudes, had become
a great architect and engineer, has grown discouraged ;* to-day
it has scarcely the heart to excavate a burrow in the earth. The
hare, so gentle, so handsome, distinguished by its fur, its swiftness,
its wonderful delicacy of ear, will soon have disappeared ; the few
of its kind which remain are positively embrated. And yet the

* Compare the interesting descriptions of the huge dams erected by beavers across the
American rivers, in Milton and Cheadle's valuable narrative of travel, " The North- West
Passage by Land." — Translator.

THE STUDY OF NATUKE. 57

poor ammal is still docile and teachable : in careful hands it might
be taught the things most antagonistic to its nature, even those
which need a display of courage.*

These thoughts, which others have expressed in far better
language, we cherished at heart. They had been our aliment, our
habitual dream, over which we had brooded for two years, in
Brittany, in Italy ; it is here that they have developed into —
what shall I say — a book ? a living fruit ? At La Heve it ap-
peared to us in its genial idea, that of the primitive alliance which
God has ordained for all his creatures, of the love-bond which the
universal mother has sealed between her children.

The winged order — the loftiest, the tenderest, the most sjanpathetic
with man — is that which man now-a-days pursues most cruelly.

What is required for its protection ? To reveal the bird as soul,
to show that it is a person.

The bird, then, a single bird — that is all my book ; but the bird
in all the variations of its destiny, as It accommodates itself to the
thousand conditions of eaiih, to the thousand vocations of the winged
life. Without any knowledge of the more or less ingenious systems of
transformations, the heart gives oneness to its object ; it neither
allows itself to be aiTCsted by the external differences of species,
nor by that death which seems to sever the thread. Death, rude and
cniel, intervenes in this book, in the fiill cuiTcnt of life, but as a
passing accident only ; life does not the less continue.

The agents of death, the murdering species, so glorified by man,
who recognizes in them his image, are here replaced very low in
the hierarchy, remitted to the rank which is rightly theirs. They
are the most deficient in the two special qualifications of the bird —
nest-making and song. Sad instruments of the fatal passage, they
appear in the midst of this book as the blind ministers of nature's
hardest necessity.

But the lofty light of life — art in its earliest dawn — shines only

* The reader -will hardly require to be reminded of the poet Cowper and his hares. —
Translator.

88 THE STUDY OF NATURE.

in the smallest. With the small birds, unostentatious as they are,
modestly and seriously clad, art begins, and, on certain points,
rises higher than the sphere of man. Far from equalling the
nightingale, we have been unable to express or to render an account
of his sublime song.

The eagle, then, is in these pages dethroned ; the nightingale
reigns in his stead. In that moral crescendo, where the bird con-
tinuously advances in self-culture, the apex and the supreme point
are naturally discovered, not in brutal strength, so easily overpassed
by man, but in a puissance of art, of soul, and of aspiration which
man has not attained, and which, beyond this world, transports
him in a moment to the further spheres.

High justice and tnie, because it is clear- visioned and tender !
Feeble on too many points, I doubt not, this book is strong in
tenderness and faith. It is one, constant and faithful. Nothing
makes it divaricate. Above death and its false divorce, through life
and the masks which disguise its unity, it flies, it loves to hover, from
nest to nest, from o^gg to &gg, from love to the love of God.

La IIeve, near Havke, September 21, 1855.

^4

m

^4^^

iai|t (^iiist.

'^'^tTrrrr*^'

^vr^-, .

r? It' T' fi

GIs,

V The wise ignorance, the clear-seeing instinct
of our forefathers gave utterance to this oracle :
" Eveiy thing springs from the egg ; it is the world's
ciadle "

Even our original, but especially the diversity

of our destiny, is due to the mother. She acts and she

(f.S'iy ^"^ J foiesees, she loves with a stronger or a weaker love,

h^ she is more or less the mother. The more she is so,

the higher mounts her offspring ; each degTee in

•^"'x^ existence depends on the degree of her love.

'it

WHiat can the mother effect in the mobile existence

'w^ t ^^ ^^® ^^^^ ^ Nothing, but trust her birth to the ocean.

^P What in the insect world, where she generally dies as

i" soon as she has produced the egg ? To obtain for it

before dying a secure asylum, where it may come to light, and

live.

In the case of the superior animal, the quadruped, where the

64 THE EGG.

warm blood should surely stir up love, where the mother's womb is
so long the rest and home of her young, the cares of maternity are
also of minor import. Tlie offspring is bom fully formed, clothed
in all thmgs like its mother ; and its food awaits it. And in many
species its education is accomplished without any further care on the
part of the mother than she bestowed when it gi'ew in her bosom.

Far otherwise is the destiny of the bird. It would die if it
were not loved.

Loved ! Every mother loves, from the ocean to the stars. I
should rather say anxiously tended, sun-ounded by infinite love,
enfolded in the warmth of the maternal magnetism.

Even in the egg, where you see it protected by a calcareous
shell, it feels so keenly the access of air, that every chilled point
in the egg is a member the less for the future bird. Hence the
prolonged and disquieted labour of incubation, the self-inflicted cap-
tivity, the motionlessness of the most mobile of beings. And all
this so very pitiful ! A stone pressed so long to the heart, 'to the
flesh — often the live flesh !

It is born, but born naked. Wliile the baby-quadruped, even
from his first day of life, is clothed, and crawls, and akeady walks,
the young bird (especially in the higher species) lies motionless upon
its back, without the protection of any feathers. It is not only
while hatching it, but in anxiously inibbing it, that the mother main-
tains and stimulates warmth. The colt can readily suckle and
nourish itself; the young bird must wait while the mother seeks,
selects, and prepares its food. She cannot leave it ; the father
must here supply her place ; behold the real, veritable family, faitli-
faLness in love, and the first moral enlightenment.

I will say nothing here of a protracted, very peculiar, and very
hazardous education — that of flidit. And nothinp- here of that of

O O

song, so refined among the feathered art:sts. The quadruped soon
knows aU that he will ever know : he gallops when born ; and if
he experiences an occasional fall, is it the same thing, teU me, to slide
without danger among the herbage, as to drop headlong from the skies?

THE EGG. 65

Let US take the egg in our hands. This elliptical form, at once
the most easy of comprehension, the most beautiful, and presenting
the fewest salient points to external attack, gives one the idea of
a complete miniature world, of a perfect harmony, from which
nothing can be taken away, and to which nothing can be added.
No inorganic matter adopts this perfect form. I conceive that,
under its apparent inertness, it holds a high mystery of life and
some accomplished work of God.

What is it, and what should issue from it ? I know not. But
she knows well — yonder trembling creature who, with outstretched
wings, embraces it and matures it with her warmth ; she who,
until now the free queen of the air, lived at her own wild will,
but, suddenly fettered, sits motionless on that mute object which
one would call a stone, and which as yet gives no revelation.

Do not speak of blind instinct. Facts demonstrate how that
clear-sighted instinct modifies itself according to surrounding con-
ditions ; in other words, how that rudimentary reason differs in its
nature from the lofty human reason.

Yes ; that mother knows and sees distiuctly by means of the pen^

6

66 THE EGG.

tration and clairvoyance of love. Through the thick calcareous
shell, where your rude hand perceives nothing, she feels by a
delicate tact the mysterious being which she nourishes and forms.
It is this feeling which sustains her during the arduous labour of
incubation, during her protracted captivity. She sees it delicate
and charming in its soft down of infancy, and she predicts with the
\dsion of hope that it will be vigorovis and bold, when, with out-
spread wings, it shall eye the sun and breast the storm.

Let us profit by these days. Let us hasten nothing. Let us
contemplate at our leisure this delightful image of the maternal
reverie — of that second cliildbirth by which she completes the
invisible object of her love — the unknown offspring of desire.

A delightful spectacle, but even more sublime than delightful.
Let us be modest here. With us the mother loves that which stirs
in her bosom— that which she touches, clasps, enfolds in assured
possession ; she loves the reality, certain, agitated and moving, which
responds to her own movements. But this one loves the future
and unknown ; her heart beats alone, and nothing as yet responds
to it. Yet is not her love the less intense ; she devotes herself and
suffers ; she will suffer unto death for her dream and her faith.

A faith powerful and efficacious ! It produces a world, and one
of the most wonderful of worlds. Speak not to me of suns, of the
elementary chemistry of globes. The marvel of a humming-bird's egg
transcends the Milky Way.

THE EGG. 67

Understand that this little point which to you seems imperceptible,
is an entire ocean — the sea of milk where floats in embryo the well-
beloved of heaven. It floats ; fears no shipwreck ; it is held suspended
by the most delicate ligaments ; it is saved from jar and shock. It
swims all gently in the warm element, as it will swim hereafter in
the atmosphere. A profound serenity, a perfect state in the bosom
of a nourishing habitation ! And how superior to all suckling
(allaitement) !

But see how, in this divine sleep, it has perceived its mother and
her magnetic warmth. And it, too, begins to dream. Its dream is
of motion ; it imitates, it conforms to its mother ; its first act, the
act of an obscure love, is to resemble her.

" Knowest thou not that love transforms
Into itself whate'er it loves ? "

And as soon as it resembles her, it will seek to join her. It in-
clines, it presses more closely against the shell, which thenceforth is
the sole barrier between it and its mother. Then, then she listens !
Sometimes she is blessed by hearing already its first tender piping.
It will remain a prisoner no longer. Grown daring, it will take its
ovm part. It has a beak, and makes use of it. It strikes, it cracks,
it cleaves its prison wall. It has feet, and brings them to its assist-
ance. See now the work begun ! Its reward is deliverance ; it
enters into liberty.

To tell the rapture, the agitation, the prodigious inquietude, the
mother's many cares, is beyond our province here ; of the difficulties
of its education we have already spoken.

It is only through time and tenderness that the bird receives its
initiation. Superior by its powers of flight, it is so much the more
so through this, that it has had a home and has gained life through
its mother ; fed by her, and by its father emancipated, the freest of
beings is the favourite of love.

If one wishes to admire the fertility of nature, the vigour of inven-
tion, the charming, and in a certain sense, the terrifying richness, which
from one identical creation draws a million of opposite miracles, one

68 THE EGG.

should regard this egg, so exactly like another, and yet the source
whence shall issue the innumerable tribes born to a life of wings on
earth.

From the obscure unity it pours out, it expands, in countless and
prodigiously divergent rays, those winged flames which you name birds,
glowing with ardour and life, with colour and son^:. From the

burning hand of God escapes continuously that vast fan of astound-
ing diversity, where eveiything shines, where everything sings, where
everything floods me "wdth harmony and light. Dazzled, I lower my
eyes.

Melodious sparks of celestial fire, whither do ye not attain ?
For ye exists nor height nor distance ; the heaven, the abyss, it is
all one. What cloud, what watery deep is inaccessible to ye ? Earth,
in all its vast circuit, great as it is with its mountains, its seas, and
its valleys, is wholly yours. I hear ye under the Equator, ardent as
the arrows of the sun. I hear ye at the Pole, in the eternal lifeless
silence, where the last tuft of moss has faded ; the very bear sees
ye afar, and slinks away growling. Ye, ye still remain ; ye live, ye
love, ye bear witness to God, ye reanimate death. In those terrestrial
deserts your touching loves invest with an atmosphere of innocence
what man has desisrnated the barbarism of nature.

THE peii-ASiSfjc ami

■:^ THE POLE.

AQUATIC BIRDS.

That powerful fairy which endows man with most of
his blessings and misfortunes, Imagination, sets herself to
work to travestie nature for him in a hundred ways.
In all which exceeds his energies or wounds his sensa-
tions, in all the necessities which oveiTule the harmony of
__ the world, he is tempted to see and to curse a maleficent

^^^^ will. One writer has made a book against the Alps; a

^^ poet has foolishly placed the throne of evil among those

beneficent glaciers which are the reservoir of the waters of Europe,
which pour forth its rivers and make its fertility. Others, still more
absurdly, have vented their wrath upon the ices of the Pole, misunder-

72 THE POLE.

standing the magnificent economy of the globe, the majestic balance
of those alternative currents which are the life of Ocean. They have
seen war and hate, and the malice of nature, in those regular and
profoundly pacific movements of the universal Mother.

Such are the dreams of man. Animals, however, do not share
in these antipathies, these terrors ; a twofold attraction, on the
contrary, impels them yearly towards the Poles in innumerable
legions.

Every year birds, fishes, gigantic cetaceans, hasten to people the
seas and islands which surround the southern Pole. Wonderful seas,
fertile, full to overfiowing of rudimentary life (in the stage of the
zoophytes), of living fermentation, of viscous waters, of spawn, of
superabundant embryos.

Both the Poles are for these innocent myriads, everywhere pur-
sued by foes, the great, the happy rendezvous of love and peace. The
whale, that unfoi'tunate fish, which has, however, like ourselves, sweet
milk and hot blood, that poor proscribed unfortunate wliich will soon
have disappeared — it is there that it again finds a refuge, a halt for
the sacred moments of maternity. No races are of purer or gentler
disposition, none more fraternal towards their kin, more tender towards
their oflfspring. Cruel ignorance of man ! How can he have slain
without horror the walrus and the seal, which in so many points
are like himself?

The giant man of the old ocean, the whale — a being as gentle
as man the dwarf is brutal — enjoys this advantage over him : sure of
species whose fecundity is alarming, it can accomplish the mission
of destruction which nature has ordained, without inflicting upon them
any pain. It has neither teeth nor saw ; none of those means of
punishment with which the destroyers of the world are so abundantly
provided. Suddenly absorbed in the depths of this moving cnicible,
they lose themselves, they swoon away, they undergo instantaneously
the transformations of its grand chemistry. Most of the living matter
on which the inhabitants of the Polar Seas support themselves — ceta-
ceans, fishes, birds — have neither organism nor the means of suffering.

AQUATIC BIRDS. 73

Hence these tribes possess a character of innocence which moves us
infinitely, fills us with sympathy, and also, we must confess, with envy.
Thrice blessed, thrice fortunate that world where life renews and
repairs itself without the cost of death — that world which is generally
free from pain, which ever finds in its nourishing waters the sea
of milk, has no need of cruelty, and still clings to Nature's kindly
breast !

Before man's appearance, profound was the peace of these soli-
tudes and their amphibious races. From the bear and the blue fox,
the two tyrants of that region, they found an easy shelter in the ever-
open bosom of the sea, their bountiful nurse.

f^

When our mariners first landed there, their only difiiculty was to
pierce through the mass of curious and kindly-natured phocse which
came to gaze upon them. The penguins of Australian lands, the auks
and razor-bills of the Arctic shores, peaceable and more active, made no
movement. The wild geese, whose fine down, of incomparable softness,
furnishes the much-prized eider, readily permitted the spoilers to
approach and seirie them with their hands.

The attitude of these novel creatures was the cause of pleasant
mistakes on the part of our navigators. Those who from afar first
saw the islands thronged with penguins, standing upright, in their

74 THE POLE.

costume of white and black, imagined them to be bands of children
in white aprons ! The stiffness of their small arms — one can scarcely
call them wings in these rudimentary birds — their awkwardness on
land, their difficulty of movement, prove that they belong to the
ocean, where they swim with wonderful ease, and which is their
natural and legitimate element. One might speak of them as its
emancipated eldest sons, as ambitious fishes, candidates for the char-
acters of birds, which had abeady progressed so far as to transform
their fins into scaly pinions. Tlie metamorphosis was not attended
with complete success; as birds powerless and clumsy, they remain
skilful fishes.

Or again, with their large feet attached so near to the body, with
their neck short or poised on a gi-eat cylindrical trunk, with their
flattened head, one might judge them to be near relations of their
neighbours the seals, whose kmdly nature they possess, but not their
intelligence.

These eldest sons of nature, eye-witnesses of the ancient ages of
transformation, appeared like so many strange hieroglyphics to those
who first beheld them. With eyes mild, but sad and pale as the
face of ocean, they seemed to regard man, the last-bom of the planet,
from the depths of their antiquity.

AQUATIC BIRDS. 75

Levaillant, not far from the Cape of Good Hope, found them in
great numbers on a desert isle where rose the tomb of a poor Danish
mariner, a child of the Arctic Pole, whom Fate had led thither to die
among the Austral wastes, and between whom and his fatherland
the density of the globe intei'vened. Seals and peng-uins supplied him
with a numerous society; the former prostrate and lying down; the
latter standing erect, and mounting guard with dignity around the
lonely grave: all melancholy, and responding to the moans of Ocean,
which one might have imagined to be the wail of the dead.

Their winter station is the Cape. In that warm African exile they
invest themselves with a good and solid coat of fat, which will be
very useful defences for them against cold and hunger. When spring
returns, a secret voice admonishes them that the tempestuous thaw has
broken and rent the sharp crystalline ice; that the blissful Polar Seas,
their country and their cradle, their sweet love-Eden, are open and
calling upon them. Impatiently they set forth; with rapid wings
they oar their way across five or six hundred leagues of sea, without
other resting-place than occasional pieces of floating ice may, for a
few moments, offer them. They arrive, and all is ready. A summer
of thirty days' duration makes them happy.

=.V"'* ""*' ~>-Si^

With a gi'ave happiness. The happiness of discovering a profound
tranquillity separates them from the sea where their sole element lies.
The season of love and incubation is, therefore, a time of fasting and

76 THE POLE.

inquietude. The blue fox, their enemy, aliases them into the desert.
But union is strength. The mothers all incubate at one and the same
time, and the legion of fathers watches around them, prepared to
sacrifice themselves in their behalf Let but the little one be hatched,
and the serried ranks conduct it to the sea ; it leaps into the waters,
and is saved !

Stern, sad climates ! Yet who would not love them, when he sees
there the vast tenderness of nature, which impartially orders the home
of man and the bird, the central source of love and devotion? From
nature the Northern home receives a moral grace which that of the
South rarely possesses ; a sun shines there which is not the sun of
the Equator, but far more gentle — that of the soul. There every
creature is exalted, either by the very austerity of the climate or the
urgency of peril.

The supreme effort in this world of the North, which is nowhere
that of beauty, is to have discovered the Beautiful. This miracle
springs from the mother's soul. Lapland has but one art, one soli-
tary object of art — the cradle. "It is a charming object," says a
lady who has visited those regions; " elegant and gi^aceful, like a pretty
little shoe lined with the soft fur of the white hare, more delicate than
the feathers of the swan. Around the hood, where the infant's head
Ig completely protected, warmly and softly sheltered, are hung fes-
toons of coloured pearls, and tiny chains of copper or silver which
clink incessantly, and whose jingling makes the young Laplander
laugh."

O wonder of maternity ! Through its influence the rudest woman
becomes artistic, tenderly heedful. But the female is always heroic.
It is one of the most affecting spectacles to see the bird of the eider —
the eider-duck — plucking its down from its breast for a couch and a
covering for its young. An(iif man steals the nest, the mother still
continues upon herself the cruel operation. When she has stripped
off every feather, when there is nothing more to despoil but the
flesh and the blood, the father takes his turn ; so that the little
one is clothed of themselves and their substance, by their devotion

AQUATIC BIRDS.

77

and their suffering. Montaigne, speaking of a cloak which had served
his father, and which he loved to wear in remembrance of him, makes
use of a tender phrase, which this poor nest recalls to my mind—" I
wiapped myself up in my father."

• ?*«-- ^^^~

^-

TME wmz.

^.*

-,.cr

THE WING.

Wings ! -wingis ! to sweep
O'er mountain liigli and valley deep.
"Wings ! that my heart may rest
In the radiant morning's breast.

Wings ! to hover free

O'er the dawn-empurpled sea.

Wings ! 'bove life to soar,

And beyond death for evermore."

^CS5^^ => ^ EUCKEET.

-^ ^ It is the cry of the whole earth, of the world, of all

life ; it is that which every species of animals or plants

utters in a hundred diverse tongues — the voice which

^^^^ issues from the very rock and the inorganic creation:

" Wings ! we seek for wings, and the power of flight and motion !"

Yea; the most inert bodies rush greedily into the chemical trans-
formations which will make them part and parcel of the current of
the universal life, and bestow upon them the organs of movement
and fermentation.

82 THE WING.

Yea ; the vegetables, fettered by their immovable roots, expand their
secret loves towards a winged existence, and commend themselves to
the winds, the waters, the insects, in quest of a life beyond their
narrow limits — of that gift of flight which nature has refused to them.

We contemplate pityingly those rudimentary animals, the unau
and the ai, sad and suffering images of man, which cannot advance a
step without a gi'oan^ — sloths or tardigrades. The names by which
we identify them we might justly reserve for ourselves. If slowness
be relative to the desire of movement, to the constantly futile effort
to progress, to advance, to act, the true tardigrade is man. His
faculty of dragging himself from one point of the earth to another,
the ingenious instruments which he has recently invented in aid of
that faculty — all this does not lessen his adhesion to the earth ; he is
not the less firmly chained to it by the tyranny of gi-avitation.

I see upon earth but one order of created beings which enjoy the
power of ignoring or beguiling, by their freedom and swiftness of motion,
this universal sadness of impotent aspiration ; I mean those beings
which belong to earth, so to speak, only by the tips of their wings ;

THE WING. 83

which the air itself cradles and supports, most frequently without
being otherwise connected with them than by guiding them at their
need and their caprice.

A life of ease, yet sublime ! With what a glance of scorn may
the weakest bird regard the strongest, the swiftest of quadrupeds — a
tiger, a lion ! How it may smile to see them in their utter power-
lessness bound, fastened to the earth, which they terrify with vain
and useless roaring — with the nocturnal wailings that bear witness
to the bondage of the so-called king of animals, fettered, as we are
all, in that inferior existence which hunger and gTavitation equally
prepare for us !

Oh, the fatality of the appetites! the fatality of motion which
compels us to drag our unwilling limbs along the earth! Implacable
heaviness which binds each of our feet to the dull, rude element
wherein death will hereafter resolve us, and says, "Son of the earth,
to the earth thou belongest! A moment released from its bosom,
thou shalt lie there henceforth for ages."

Do not let us inveigh against nature ; it is assuredly the sign that
we inhabit a world still in its first youth, still in a state of barbarism —
a world of essay and apprenticeship, in the grand series of stars, one
of the elementary stages of the sublime initiation. This planet is the
world of a child. And thou, a child thou art. From this lower
school thou shalt be emancipated also; thy wings shall be majestic
and powerful. Thou shalt win and deserve, while here, by the sweat
of thy brow, a step forward in libei-ty.

Let us make an experiment. Ask of the bird while still in the
egg what he would wish to be; give him the option. Wilt thou be
a man, and share in that royalty of the globe which men have won
by art and toil?

No, he will immediately reply. Without calculating the immense
exertion, the labour, the sweat, the care, the life of slavery by which
we purchase sovereignty, he will have but one word to say: "A king
myself, by birth, of space and light, why should I abdicate when
man, in his loftiest ambition, in his highest aspirations after happi-

84 THE WING.

riess and freedom, dreams of becoming a bird, and taking unto him-
self wings?"

It is in liis sunniest time, his first and richest existence, in his day-
dreams of youth, that man has sometimes the good fortune to forget
that he is a man, a slave to hard fate, and chained to earth.
Behold, yonder, him who flies abroad, who hovers, who dominates over
the world, who swims in the sunbeam; he enjoys the inefl^able felicity
of embracing at a glance an infinity of things which yesterday he
could only see one by one. Obscure enigma of detail, suddenly made
luminous to him who perceives its unity! To see the world beneath
one's self, to embrace, to love it! How divine, how lofty a dream!
Do not wake me, I pray you, never wake me! But what is this?
Here again are day, uproar, and labour; the harsh iron hammer, the
ear-piercing bell with its voice of steel, dethrone and dash me head-
long; my wings are rent. Dull earth, I fall to earth; bruised and
bent, I return to the plough.

When, at the close of the last century, man formed the daring idea
of giving himself up to the winds, of mounting in the air without
rudder, or oar, or means of guidance, he proclaimed aloud that at
length he had secured his pinions, had eluded nature, and conquered
gravitation. Cruel and tragical catastrophes gave the lie to this
ambition. He studied the economy of the bird's wing, he undertook
to imitate it ; rudely enough he counterfeited its inimitable mechanism.
We saw with terror, from a column of a hundred feet high, a poor
human bird, armed with huge wings, dart into air, wrestle with it,
and dash headlong into atoms.

The gloomy and fatal machine, in its laborious complexity, was a
sorry imitation of that admirable arm (far superior to the human
arm), that system of muscles, which co-operate among themselves in
so vigorous and lively a movement. Disjointed and relaxed, the
human wing lacked especially that all-powerful muscle which connects
the shoulder to the chest (the humerus to the sternum), and com-
municates its impetus to the thunderous flight of the falcon. The
instrument acts so directly on the mover, the oar on the rower, and

THE WING.

85

i^'kr

unites with him so perfectly tliat the martinet, the frigate-bird, sweeps
along at tlie rate of eighty leagues an hour, five or six times swifter
than our most rapid railway trains, outstripping the hurricane, and
with no rival but the liglitning.

But even if our poor imitators had exactly imitated the wing, no-
thing would have been accomplished. They, then, had copied the form,
but not the internal ctructure. They thought that the bird's power of
ascension lay in its flight alone, forgetting the secret auxiliary which
nature conceals in the plumage and the bones. The mystery, the
true marvel lies in the faculty with which she endows the bird, of

86

THE WING.

rendering itself light or heavy at its will, of admitting more or less

of air into its expressly constructed
reservoirs. Would it otow light, it
^^^^ inflates its dimension, while dimin-
^g ishing its relative weight; by this
^M means it spontaneously ascends in
^ a medium heavier than itself. To
T^ descend or drop, it contracts itself,
grows thin and small ; cutting
through the air which supported
and raised it in its former heavy
condition. Here lay the error,
the cause of man's fatal ignorance.
He assumed that the bird was a ship,
not a balloon. He imitated the wing
only ; but the wing, however skilfully
imitated, if not conjoined with this
internal force, is but a certain means
of destruction.

But this faculty, this rapid inhal-
ation or expulsion of air, of swim-
ming with a ballast variable at plea-
sure, whence does it proceed ? From
an unique, unheard-of power of re-
spiration. The man who should in-
hale a similar quantity of air at once
would be suffocated. The bird's
lung, elastic and powerful, quaffs it,
grows full of it, grows intoxicated
with vigour and delight, pours it
abundantly into its bones, into its
aerial cells. Each aspiration is re-
newed second after second with tre-
mendous rapidity. The blood, ceaselessly vivified wdth fresh air.

THE WING. 87

supplies each muscle with that inexhaustible energy which no other
being possesses, and which belongs only to the elements.

The clumsy image of AntaBus regaining strength each time he
touched the earth, his mother, does but rudely and weakly render an
idea of this reality. The bird does not need to seek the air that he
may be reinvigorated by touching it; the air seeks and flows into
him — it incessantly kindles within him the buriiing fires of life.

It is this, and not the wing, which is so marvellous. Take the
pinions of the condor, and follow in its track, when, from the summit
of the Andes and their Siberian glaciers, it swoops down upon the
glowing shore of Peru, traversing in a minute all the temperatures and
all the climates of the globe, breathing at one breath the frightful mass
of air — scorched, frozen, it matters not. You would reach the earth
stricken as by thunder.

The smallest bird in this matter shames the strongest quadruped.
Place me, says Toussenel, a chained lion in a balloon, and his harsh
roaring will be lost in space. Far more powerful in voice and respira-
tion, the little lark mounts upward, trilling its song, and makes itself
lieard when it can be seen no longer. Its light and joyous strain,
uttered without fatigue, and costing notliing, seems the bliss of an
invisible spirit which would fain console the earth.

Strength makes joy. The happiest of beings is the bird, because
it feels itself strong beyond the limits of its action ; because, cradled,
sustained by the breath of heaven, it floats, it rises without effbi't, like
a dream. The boundless strength, the exalted faculty, obscure among
inferior beings, in the bird clear and vital, of deriving at will its
vigour from the maternal source, of drinking in life at fuU flood, is a
divine intoxication.

The tendency of every human being — a tendency wholly rational,
not arrogant, not impious — is to liken itself to Nature, the gi'eat
Mother, to fashion itself after her image, to crave a share of the
unwearied wings with which Eternal Love broods over the world.

Human tradition is fixed in this direction. Man does not wish to
be a man, but an angel, a winged deity. Tlie winged genii of Persia

88 THE WING.

suggest the cLerubim of Judea. Greece endows her Psyche with
wings, and discovers the true name of tlie soul, dardjua, aspiration.
The soul has preserved her pinions; has passed at one flight through the
shadowy Middle Age, and constantly increases in heavenly longings.
More spotless and more glowing, she gives utterance to a prayer,
breathed in the very depths of her natui-e and her prophetic ardour :
" Oh, that I were a bird!" saith man.

Woman never doubts but that her offspring will become an angel.
She has seen it so in her di;eams.

Dreams or realities? Winged visions, raptru-es of the night,
which we shall weep so bitterly in the morning ! If ye really tvere !
If, indeed, ye lived! If we had lost some of the causes of our
regret! If, from stars to stars, re-united, and launched on an eternal
flight, we all performed in companionship a happy pilgrimage through
the illimitable goodness !

At times one is apt to believe it. Something whispers us that
these dreams are not all dreams, but glimpses of a world of truth,
momentary flashes revealed through these lower clouds, cei-tain pro-
mises to be hereafter fulfilled, while the pretended reality it is that
shoidd be stigmatized as a foul delusion.

^•«

X-^ ■€;

fim Fissf asf f gfiiEs 8F the wise.

^

i^

Al.tf- , — ^ w

©cyj^^l^TAisi

^^>"

A • 'IP

THE FIRST FLUTTERINGS
OF THE WING.

There is never a man, unlettered, ignorant, exliausted,
insensible, who can deny himself a sentiment of rever-
ence, I might almost say of terror, on entering the
halls of our Museum of Natural History.

No foreign collection, as far as my knowledge ex-
tends, produces this impression.

Others, undoubtedly, as the superb museum of
Lej-den, are richer in particidar branches; but none are
more complete, none more harmonious. This sublime harmony
is felt instinctively; it imposes and seizes on the mind. The
inattentive traveller, the chance visitor, is unwillingly aifected;
he pauses, and he dreams. In the presence of this vast enigma, of
this immense hieroglyph which for the first time is displayed before
him, he may consider himself fortunate if he can read a character or

92 THE FIRST FLUTTERINGS OF THE WING.

spell a letter. How often have different classes of persons, surprised
and tormented by such fantastic forms, inquired of us their meaning!
A word has set them in the right path, a simple indication chaiTQed them ;
they have gone away contented, and promising themselves to return.
On the other hand, they who traversed this ocean of unknown objects
without comprehending them, have departed fatigued and melancholy.

Let us express our wish that an administration so enlightened, so
high in the ranks of science, may return to the original constitu-
tion of the museum, which appointed gardiens demonstrateurs —
attendants who were also cicerones — and wiU only admit as guardians
of this treasure men who can understand it, and, on occasion, become
its intei-preters.

Another "svish we dare to form is, that by the side of our reno^vned
naturalists they will place those courageous navigators, those persever-
ing travellers who, by their labours, their fruits, by a hundred times
hazarding their lives, have procured for us these costly spoils. What-
ever their intrinsic value, it is, perhaps, increased by the heroism and
grandeur of heart of these adventurei-s. This charming colibris,*
madam, a winged sapphire in which you could see only a useless ob-
ject of personal decoration, do you know that an Azara-f- or a Lesson [J:
has brought it from murderous forests where one breathes nothing but
death? This magnificent tiger, whose skin you admire, are you
aware that before it coiUd be planted here, there was a necessity that
it should be sought after in the jungles, encountered face to face, fired
at, struck in the forehead by the intrepid Levaillant? § These illus-

* Family Trochilidx.

t Felix de Azara was an eminent Spanish traveller, -who died at Arragon in 1811. He
acted as one of the commissioners appointed to trace the boundary-line between the Spanish
and Portuguese possessions in the New World. His researches in Paraguay made many
valuable contributions to natural history. — Translator.

X Lesson was a French traveller of repute ; but his works are little known teyond the
limits of his own country. — Translator.

§ Fran9ois Levaillant was born at Paramaribo in Dutch Guiana, in 1753. Passionately
fond of natural history, and scarcely less fond of travel, he gratified both passions in 1780
by undertaking a series of explorations in Southern Africa. His last journey extended a
little beyond the tropic of Capricorn. He returned to Europe in 1781, published several
valuable works of travel and zoology, and died in 1824. — Translator.

THE FIRST FLUTTERINGS OF THE WING. 93

trious travellers, ardent lovers of nature, often without means, often
without assistance, have followed it into the deserts, watched and
surprised it in its mysterious retreats, voluntarily enduring thiret and
hunger and incredible fatigues; never complaining, thinking them-
selves too well recompensed, full of devotion, of gratitude at each
fresh discovery; regretting nothing in such an event, not even the
death of La Perouse* or Mungo Park,f death by shipwreck, or death
among the savages.

Bid them live again here in our midst ! If their lonely life flowed
free from Europe for Europe's benefit, let their images be placed in
the centre of the grateful crowd, with a brief exposition of their for-

* The unfortunate navigator. Jean Fran9ois de Calaup, Comte de La Perouse, was horn
in 1741. At an early age he entered the French navy, rose to a high grade, and distin-
guished himself by his services against the English in North America. In 1783 he was
appointed to command an expedition of discovery, and on the 1st of August 1785, sailed
from Brest with two frigates, the Boussole and the Astrolabe. He reached Botany Bay in
January 1788, and thenceforward was no more heard of for years. Several vessels were
despatched to ascertain his fate, but could obtain no clue to it. In 1826, however. Captain
Dillon, while sailing amongst the Queen Charlotte Islands, discovered at Wanicoro the re-
mains of the shipwrecked vessels. A mausoleum and obelisk to the memory of their un-
fortunate commander was erected on the island in 1828. — Translator.

t Mungo Park, the illustrious African traveller (born near Selkirk in 1771), perished on
his second expedition to the Niger towards the close of the year 1805. No exact informa-
tion of his fate has been obtained, but from the evidence collected by Clapperton and
Lander, it seems probable that he was drowned in attempting to navigate a narrow channel
of the river in the territory of Houssa. Another account, liowever, represents him to have
been murdered by the natives. — Translator.

94 ' THE FIRST FLUTTERINGS OF THE WING.

tiinate discoveries, tlieir sufferings, and their sublime courage. More
than one young man shall be moved by the sight of these heroes, and
depart to dream enthusiastically of following in their footsteps.

Herein lies the twofold grandeur of the place. Its treasures were
sent by heroic men, and they were collected, classified, and harmonized
by illustrious physicists, to whom all things flowed as to a legitimate
centre, and whom their position, no less than their intellect, induced
to accomplish here the centralization of nature.

In the last century, the great movement of the sciences revolved
around a man of genius, influential by his rank, his social relations,
his fortune — M. the Count de Buffon. All the donations of men of
science, travellers, and kings, came to him, and by him were clasvsified
in this museum. In our own days a grander spectacle has fixed upon
this spot the eager eyes of all the nations of the world, when two
mighty men (or rather two systems), Cuvier and Geofii'oy, made
this their battle-field. AU the world em-olled itself on the one side
or the other; all took part in the strife, and despatched to the
Museum, either in support of or opposition to the experiments,
books, animals, or facts previously unknown. Hence these collections,
which one might suppose to be dead, are really living; they still
throb with the recollections of the fray, are still animated by the lofty
minds which invoked all these beings to be the witnesses of their pro-
lific struggle.

It is no fortuitous gathering yonder. It consists of closely
connected series, formed and systematically arranged by profound
thinkers. Those species which form the most curious transitions
between the genera are richly represented. There you may see, far
more fully than elsewhere, what Linne and Lamarck have said, that
just as our museums gradually grew richer, became more complete,
exhibited fewer lacunce, we should be constrained to acknowledge
that nature does nothing abruptly, in all things proceeds by gentle
and insensible transitions. Wherever we seem to see in her works a
bound, a chasm, a sudden and inharmonious intei-val, let us ascribe
the fault to ourselves ; that blank is our own ignorance.

THE FIKST FLUTTERINGS OF THE WING.

95

Let us pause for a few moments at the solemn passages where
life uncei'tain seems still to oscillate, where Nature appears to question
herself, to examine her own volition. " Shall I be fish or mammal?"
says the creature. It falters, and remains a fish, but warm-
blooded ; belongs to the mild race of lamentins and seals. " Shall I
be bird or quadruped ?" A gi-eat question ; a perplexed hesitancy —
a prolonged and changeful combat. All its various phases are dis-
cussed ; the diverse solutions of the problems naively suggested and
realized by fantastic beings like the ornithorhynchus, which has
nothing of the bird but the beak ; like the poor bat, a tender and

innocent animal in its family-circle, but whose undefined form makes
it grim-looking and unfortunate. You perceive that nature has

96 THE FIRST FLUTTERINGS OF THE WING.

sought in it the wing, and found only a hideous membranous skin,
which nevertheless performs a wing's function :

" I am a bird ; see you my wings ?"

Yes ; but even the wing does not make the bird.

Place yourself towards the centre of the museum, and close to
the clock. There you perceive, on jour left, the first rudiment
of the wing in the penguin of the southern pole, and its brother,
the Arctic auk, one degi-ee more developed ; scaly winglets, whose
glittering feathers rather recall the fish than the bird. On land
the creature is feeble ; but while earth is difficult for it, air is
impossible. Do not complain too warmly. Its prescient mother

destines it for the Polar Seas, where it will only need to paddle.
She clothes it carefully in a fine coat of fat and an impenetrable
coverinof. She will have it warm among; the icebergs. Which is the
better means ? It seems as if she had hesitated, had wavered. By
the side of the booby we see with surprise an essay at quite another

THE FIRST FLUTTEEINGS OF THE WING.

97

genus, yet one not less remarkable as a maternal precaution. I refer
to a very rare gorfou — wliicli I have seen in no other museum — -
attired in the rough skin of a quadruped, resembling a goat's fleece,
but more shining, perhaps, in the living animal, and certainly imper-
meable to water.

To link together the birds which do not fly, we must find the
connecting ' point in the navigator of the desert — the bird-camel, the
ostrich, resembling the camel itself in its internal structure. At least,
if its imperfect wings cannot raise it above the earth, they assist it
powerfully in walking, and endow it with extraordinary swiftness :
it is the sail with which it skims its arid African ocean.

Let us return to the penguin, the true starting-point of the
series — to the penguin, whose rudimentary pinion camiot be employed
as a sail, does not aid it in walking, is only an indication, like a
memorial of nature.

She loosens her bonds, she rises with difliculty in a first attempt
at flight by means of two strange figures, which appear to us both
grotesque and pretentious. The penguin is not of these ; a simple,
silly creature, you see that it never had the ambition to fly. But
here are they who emancipate themselves, who seem in quest of the
adornment or the grace of motion. The gorfou may be taken for a

^-jialll

penguin which has decided to quit its condition. It assumes a
coquettish tuft of plumes, that throws into high relief its ugliness.

7

98 THE FIKST FLUTTEEINGS OF THE WING.

The shapeless puffin, which seems the very caricature of a caricature,
the paroquet, resembles it in its great beak, rudely chipped, but
without edge or strength. Tail-less and ill-balanced, it may always
be upset by the weight of its large head. It ventures, never-
theless, to flutter about, at the hazard of toppling over. It swoops
nobly close to the surface of earth, and is, perhaps, the envy of the
penguins and the seals. Sometimes it even risks itself 'at sea— iU-
fated ship, which the lightest breeze will wi'eck !

It is, however, impossible to deny that the first flight is taken.
Birds of various kinds carry on the enterprise more successfully. The
rich genus of divers (Brachypterse), in its species widely diflerent,
connects the sailor-birds with the natatores, or swimmers : those, with
wings perfected, with a bold and secure flight, accomplish the longest
voyages ; these, still clothed with the glittering feathers of the pengTiin,
frisk and sport at the bottom of the seas. They want but fins and
respiratory organs to become actual fishes. They are altei'nately
masters of both elements, air and water.

P

THSSiPM ep THE WML

c

TRIUMPH OF THE WING.

THE FRIGATE BIED.

Let us not attempt to particularize all the
intermediate gradations. Let us proceed to yonder
snow-white bird, which I perceive floating on high
among the clouds; the bird which one sees eveiy where
■ — on the water, on land, on rocks alternately concealed
and exposed by the waves ; the bird which one loves
to watch, familiar as it is, and greedy, and which
miffht well be named " the little vulture of the seas."
I speak of those myriads of petrels, or gulls, with
whose hoarse cries every waste resounds. Find me, if
you can, creatures endowed with fuller liberty. Day
and night, south or north, sea or shore, dead prey or
living, all is one to them. Using everything, at home everywhere,
they indiff"erently display their white sails from the waves to the
heaven; the fresh breeze, ever shifting and changing, is the boun-
teous wind which always blows in the direction they most desire.

102 TEIUMPH OF THE WIXG.

What are they but air, sea, the elements, which have taken wing
and fly ? I know nothing of it. To see their gray eye, stern and
cold (never successfully imitated in our museums), is to see the gi'ay,
indifferent sea of the north in all its icy impassiveness. What do I
say ? That sea exhibits more emotion. At times phosphorescent
and electrical, it will rise into strong animation. Old Father Ocean,
saturnine and passionate, often revolves, under his pale countenance,
a host of thoughts. His sons, the goelands, have less of animal life

ckK"''-'^

than he has. They fly, with their dead eyes seeking some dead prey ;
and in congi-egated flocks they expedite the destruction of the great
carcasses which float upon the sea for their behoof. Not ferocious in
aspect, amusing the voyager by their sports, by frequent glimpses of
their snowy pinions, they speak to him of remote lands, of the shores
which he leaves behind or is about to visit, of absent or hoped-for
friends. And they are useful to him, also, by announcing and pre-
dicting the coming storm. Ofttimes their sail expanded warns liim
to furl his own.

For do not suppose that when the tempest breaks they deign to
fold their wings. Far from this : it is then that they set forth. The
storm is their harvest time ; the more terrible the sea, so much the
less easily can the fish escape from these daring fishers. In the Bay
of Biscay, where the ocean-swell, driven from the north-west, after

THE FRIGATE BIRD.

103

traversing the Atlantic^ arrives in mighty billows, swollen to enor-
mous heights, with a terrific clash and shock, the tranquil petrels
labour imperturbably. " I saw them/' says M. de Quatrefages,
" describe in the air a thousand curves, plunge between two waves,
reappear with a fish. Swiftest when they followed the wind, slowest
when they confronted it, they nevertheless poised always with the
same ease, and never appeared to give a stroke of the wing the more
than in the calmest weather. And yet the billows mounted up the
slopes, like cataracts reversed, as high as the platform of Notre Dame,
and their spray liigher than Montmartre. They did not appear more
moved by it."

_/*-«V--'4^ "*^^5S^^i

Man has not their pliilosophy. The seaman is powerfully affected
when, at the decline of day, a sudden night darkening over the sea, he
descries, hovering about his barque, an ominous little pigeon, a bird
of funereal black. Blach is not the fitting word ; black would be
less gloomy : the true tint is that of a smoky-brown, which cannot
be defined. It is a shadow of hell, an evil vision, which strides along
the waters, breasts the billows, crushes under its feet the tempest. The
stormy petrel (or " St. Peter") is the horror of the seaman, who sees in

104 TRIUMPH OF THE WING.

it, according to his belief, a living curse. Whence does it ccme ?
How is it able to rise at such enormous distances from all land ?
"What wills it ? What does it come in quest of, if not of a wreck ?
It sweeps to and fro impatiently, and already selects the corpses
which its accomplice, the atrocious and iniquitous sea, will soon
deliver up to its mercies.

Such are the fables of fear. Less panic-stricken minds would see
in the poor bird another ship in distress, an imprudent navigator,
which has also been surprised far from shore and without an asylum.
Our vessel is for him an island, where he would fain repose. Tlie
track of the barque, which rides through both wind and wave, is in
itself a refuge, a succour against fatigue. Incessantly, with nimble
flight, he places the rampart of the vessel between himself and the
tempest. Timid and short-sighted, you see it only when it brings
the nio-ht. Like ourselves, it dreads the storm — it trembles with
fear — it would fain escape — and like you, O seaman, it sighs, ""VMiat
will become of my little ones ?"

But the black hour passes, day reappears, and I see a small blue
point in the heaven. Happy and serene region, which has rested in
peace far above the hurricane ! In that blue point, and at an elevation
of ten thousand feet, royally floats a little bird with enormous pens.
A gull ? No ; its wings are black. An eagle ? No ; the bird is too
small.

It is the little ocean-eagle, first and chief of the "winged race, the
daring navigator who never furls his sails, the lord of the tempest,
the scorner of all peril — the man-of-war or frigate-bird.

We have reached the culminating point of the series commenced
by the wingless bird. Here we have a bird which is viiiually nothing
more than wings : scarcely any body — barely as large as that of the
domestic cock — while his prodigious pinions are fifteen feet in span.
The great problem of flight is solved and overpassed, for the power of
flight seems useless. Such a bird, naturally sustained by such sup-
ports, need but allow himself to be borne along. The storm bursts ;
he mounts to lofty heights, where he finds tranquillity. The poetic

THE FRIGATE BIRD. 105

metaphor, untrue when applied to any other bird, is no exaggeration
when applied to him : literally, he sleeps upon the storm.

Wlien he chooses to oar his way seriously, all distance vanishes :
he breakfasts at the Senegal ; he dines in America.

Or, if he thinks fit to take more time, and amuse himself en route,
he can do so. He may continue his progi'ess through the night
indefinitely, certain of reposing himself Upon what ? On his huge
motionless wing, which takes upon itself all the weariness of the
voyage ; or on the wind, his slave, which eagerly hastens to
cradle him.

Observe, moreover, that this strange being is gifted with the
proud prerogative of fearing nothing in this world. Little, but strong
and intrepid, he braves all the tyi'ants of the air. He can despise, if
need be, the pygargue and the condor : those huge unwieldy crea-
tures will with great difficulty have put themselves in motion when
he shall have already achieved a distance of ten leagues.

Oh, it is then that envy seizes us, when, amid the glo-wang azure
of the Tropics, at incredible altitudes, almost imperceptible in the dim
remoteness, we see him triumphantly sweeping past us — this black,
solitary bird, alone in the waste of heaven : or, at the most, at a
lower elevation, the snow-white sea-swallow crosses his flights in easy
grace !

Why dost not thou take me upon thy pens, O king of the air,
thou fearless and unwearied master of space, whose wondrously swift
flio-ht annihilates time ? Who more than thou is raised above the
mean fatalities of existence ?

One thing, however, has astonished me: that, when contemplated
from near at hand, the first of the winged kingdom should have
nothing of that serenity which a free life promises. His eye is
cruelly hard, severe, mobile, unquiet. His vexed attitude is that of
some unliappy sentinel doomed, under pain of death, to keep watch
over the infinity of ocean. He visibly exerts himself to see afar.
And if his ^^sion does not avail him, the doom is on his dark counte-
nance; nature condemns him, he dies.

i06

TEIUMPH OF THE WIXG.

On looking at him closely, you perceive that he has no feet. Or at
all events, feet which being palmate and exceedingly short, can neither
walk nor perch. With a formidable beak, he has not the talons of a
true eagle of the sea. A pseudo-eagle, and superior to the true in
his daring as in his powers of flight, he has not, however, his
strength, his invincible grasp. He strikes and slays : can he seize ?

Thence arises his life of uncertainty and hazard — the life of a
corsair and a pirate rather than of a mariner — and the fixed inquiry

ever legible on his countenance: "Shall I feed? ShaU I have
wherewithal to nourish my little ones this evening?"

The immense and superb apparatus of his wings becomes on land

THE FRIGATE BIRD. 107

♦
a danger and an embarrassment. To raise himself he needs a strong

wind and a lofty station, a promontory, a rock. Surprised on a

sandy level, on the banks, the low reefs where he sometimes halts,

the fi'igate-bird is defenceless; in vain he threatens, he strikes, for a

blow from a stick will overcome him.

At sea, those vast wings, of such admirable utility in ascent, are
ill-fitted for skimming the surface of the water. When wetted, they
may over-weight and sink him. And thereupon, woe to the bird !
He belongs to the fishes, he nourishes the mean tribes on which he
had relied for his own behoof; the game eats the hunter, the ensnarer
is ensnared.

And yet, what shall he do ? His food lies in the waters. He is
ever compelled to draw near them, to return to them, to skim in-
cessantly the hateful and prolific sea which threatens to engulf him.

Thus, then, this being so well-armed, winged, superior to all
others in power of flight and vision as in daring, leads but a trem-
bling and precarious life. He would die of hunger had he not the
industry to create for himself a purveyor, whom he cheats of his food.
His ignoble resource, alas, is to attack a dull and timorous bird, the
noddy, famous as a fisher. The frigate-bird, which is of no larger
dimensions, pursues him, strikes him on the neck with his beak, and
constrains him to yield up his prey. All these incidents transpire in
the air; before the fish can fall, he catches it on its passage.

If this resource fail, he does not shrink from attackinof man.
" On landing at Ascension Island," says a traveller, " we were assailed
by some frigate-birds. One tried to snatch a fish out of my very
hand. Others alighted on the copper where the meat was being
cooked to carry it off, without taking any notice of the sailors w^ho
were around it."

Dampier saw some of these birds, sick, aged, or crippled, perched
upon the rocks which seemed their sanatorium, levying contributions
upon the young noddies, their vassals, and nourishing themselves on
the results of their fishing. But in the vigour of their prime they do
not rest on earth'; living like the clouds, constantly floating on their

108 TRIUMPH OF THE WING.

vast wings from one world to the other, patiently awaiting their
fortune, and piercing the infinite heaven — the infinite waters — with
implacable glance.

Tlie lord of the winged race is he who does not rest. The chief
of na\do'ators is he who never reaches his bourne. Earth and sea are
ahnost equally prohibited to him. He is for ever banished.

Let us envy nothing. No existence is really free here below, no
career is sufficiently extensive, no power of flight sufiiciently great,
no wing can satisfy. The most powerful is but a temporary sub-
stitute. The soul waits, demands, and hopes for others : — •

" "Wings to soar above life".
Wings to soar beyond death 1"

[Note. — The Frigate-Bird. This interesting bird (Tachr/petes) is allied to the cormor-
ants, but diflers from them in the possession of a forked tail, short feet, a curved beak,
and extraordinary spread of wing. Its plumage is coloured of a rich purple black, but the
beak is varied with vermilion red, and the throat with patches of white. It is an inhabi-
tant of the Tropics, where it lives a predatory life, forcing the gannet and the gull to dis-
gorge their prey, and retiring to breed in lonely uninhabited islands.

Of its voracity, Dr. Chamberlaine gives a curious illustration. When the fishermen are
pursuing their vocation on the sand -banks in Kingston Harbour, Jamaica, the gulls,
pelicans, and other sea-birds gather round in swarms, and as the loaded net is hauled
ashore, pounce upon their struggling prey. But no sooner does this take place, than the
frigate-birds attack them with such furious violence that they are glad to surrender their
hard-earned booty to antagonists so formidable.

The lightness of his body, his short tarsi, his enormous spread of wing, together with
his long, slender, and forked tail, all combine to give this bird a superiority over his tribe,
not only in length and swiftness of flight, but also in the capability of maintaining himselt
on extended pinions in his aerial realm, where, at times, he will soar so high that his figure
can scarce be discerned by the spectator in this nether world. — Translator.']

THE SHOBi:

THE SHORES.

^"^ DECAY OF CERTAIN SPECIES.

I HAVE frequently observed, in my days of sad-
ness, a being sadder still, which Melancholy might
have chosen for its symbol: I mean, the Dreamer of
the Marshes, the meditative bird that, in all seasons,
:i^ standing sohtarily before the dull waters, seems,
along with his image, to plunge in their miiTor his
monotonous thought.
His noble ebon-black crest, his pearl-gray mantle — this
semi-royal mourning contrasts with his Y>nnj body and
transparent leanness. When flying, the ])Oor heron dis-
plays but a couple of wings; low as is the elevation to
which he rises, there is no longer any question of his body — he
becomes invisible. An animal truly aerial, to bear so light a frame,

112

THE SHORES.

the heron has enough, nay, he has a foot too many; he folds under his
wing the other; and nearly always his lame figure is thus defined
against the sky in a fantastical hieroglyph.

Whoever has lived in history, in the study of fallen races and

empires, is tempted to see herein

~^fi===E^^^T^K^^ -i% '^^ image of decay. Yonder bird

g^;^^y i°^!^^^F ^j^^ff "~ is a gi-eat ruined lord, a de-

'_ t~ -- throned king, or I am much mis-

^: / ^ taken. No creature issues from

■^' ^'y- iat' "; Nature's hands in so miserable a

condition. Therefore I ventured
to interrogate this dreamer, and I
said to him from a distance the
following words, which his most
delicate hearing caught exactly: —
" My fisher-fr'iend, wouldst thou
oblige me by explaining (without
abandoning thy present position),
why, always so melancholy, thou
seemest doubly melancholy to-day?
Hath thy prey failed thee ? Have
the too subtle fish deceived thine
e3^es ? Does the mocking frog defy
thee from the bottom of the
waters ?"

" No ; neither fish nor fi-ogs
have made sport of the heron. But
the heron laughs at himself, despises
himself, when he remembers the
glory of his noble race, and the bird of the olden times.

"Thou wouldst know wherefore I dream? Ask the Indian chief
of the Cherokees, or the lowas, why for long days he leans his head
u})on his hand, marking on the tree before him an object which was
never there ?

DECAY OF CERTAIN SPECIES. U3

" The earth was our empire, the reahn of tlie aquatic birds in the
Transitional age when, young and fresh, she emerged from the waters.
An era of strife, of battle, but of abundant subsistence. Not a heron
then but earned his life. There was need neither to attack nor
pursue; the prey hunted the hunter; it whistled, or it croaked on
every side. Millions of creatures of undefined natures, bird-frogs,
winged fish, infested the uncertain limits of tlie two elements. Wliat
would ye have done, ye feeble mortals, the latest-bom of the world ?
The Bird prepared earth for ye. Colossal encounters were waged
against the enormous monster-births of the ooze; the son of air, the
bird, attaining the dimensions of an Anak, shrunk not from battle
with the giant. If your ungrateful histories have not traced these
events, God's gi*and record narrates them in the depths of the earth,
where she deposits the conquered and the conquerors, the monsters
exterminated by us, and we who have exterminated them.

" Your lying myths make us contemporaries of a human
Hercules. Wliat had his club availed against the plesiosaurus ? Who
would have met, face to face, the horrible leviathan? The capacity of
flight was absolutely needed, the strong intrepid wing which from the
loftiest height bore downwards the Herculean bird, the epiornis, an
eagle twenty feet in stature, and fifty feet from wing-tip to wing-tip,
the implacable hunter, who, lord of three elements, in the air, in the
water, and in the deep slime, pursued the dragon with ceaseless
hostility.

" Man had peri.shed a hundred times. Through our agency man
became possible on a pacified earth. But who will be astonished
that these awful wars, which lasted for myriads of years, spent the
conquerors, wearied the winged Hercules, transformed him into a
feeble Perseus, a pale and lustreless memory of our heroic
times ?

"Lowered in strength and stature, but not in heart, famished by
our very victory, by the disappearance of evil races, by the division
of the elements which held our prey concealed at the bottom of the
waters, we in our turn were hunted upon the earth, in the forests

R

114 THE SHORES.

and the marsh, by those new-comers who, without our help, had never
been. The malice and dexterity of the woodman were fatal to our
nests. Like a coward, in the thick of the branches which impede
flight and shackle combat, he laid his hand on oirr young ones. A
new war, and a less fortunate one, this, wliich Homer calls the AVar
of the Pigmies and the Cranes. The lofty intelligence of the cranes,
their truly military tactics, have not prevented man their enemy
from gaining the advantage by a thousand execrable arts. Time was
on his side, and earth, and nature: she moves forward, drying up
the earth, exhausting the marshes, narrowing the undefined region
where we reigned. It will be with us, in the end, as with the
beaver. Many species perish: another centuiy, perhaps, and the
heron ^uill have lived."

The story is too true. Except those species which have taken
their side, have abandoned earth, have given themselves up frankly
and unreservedly to the liquid element; except the divers, the cor-
morant, the wise pelican, and a few others, the aquatic tribes seem in
a state of decay. Restlessness and sobriety maintain them still. It
is this persistent anxiety which has gifted the pelican with a peculiar
organ, hollowing for her under her distended beak a movable
reservoir, a living sign of economy and of attentive foresight.

Others, skilful voyagers, like the swan, live by constantly
changing their abode. But the swan herself, which, though un-
eatable, is trained by man on account of her beauty and her grace —
the swan, formerly so common in Italy, and to which Virgil so con-
stantly refers, is now very rare there. In vain the traveller would
seek for those snow-white flotillas which covered with their sails the
waters of the Mincio, the marshes of Mantua ; which mourned for
Phaeton in despite of liis sisters, or in their sublime flight, pursuing
the stars with harmonious song, repeated to them the name of
Varus.*

Tliat song, of which all antiquity speaks, is it a fable? Tliese
organs of singing, which are so largely developed in the swan, were

* See Yirgil, " Georgics."

DECAY OF CERTAIN SPECIES

115

they always useless? Did they never dispoi-t themselves in happy
freedom when enjoying a more genial atmosphere, and spending the
greater portion of the year in the mild climates of Greece and Italy?
One might be tempted to believe it. The swan, driven back to the
north, where his amours secure mystery and repose, has sacrificed his
song, has gained the accent of barbarism, or become voiceless. The
muse is dead; the bird has survived.

Gregarious, disciplined, full of tactic and resources, the crane, the
superior type of intelligence among these species, might contrive, one
would fancy, to prosper, and to maintain herself everywhere in her
ancient royalty. She has lost two kingdoms, however : France,
where she now only appears as a bird of passage ; England, where she
rarely ventures to deposit her eggs.

The heron, in the days of Aristotle, was full of industry and
sagacity. The ancients consulted him in reference to fine weather or
tempest, as one of the gravest of augurs. Fallen in the mediaeval
days, but preserving his beauty, his heavenward flight, he was still a

116

THE SHORES.

prince, a feudal bird; kings esteemed it kingly sport to hunt him, and

considered him a meet quany for the

^p^ " ^^^ggj^^^glff"' noble falcon. And so keenly was

he hunted, that ah-eady, in the reign
of Francis I., he had gi-own rare :
that monarch lodged him near his
own palace at Fontainebleau, and
established there some herom-ies.
Two or three centuries pass, and
BufFon can still believe that there
are no provinces in France where
heronries could not be found. In
our own days, Toussenel knows of
but one in all the country — at least
in its northern districts, in Cham-
j)agne : a wood between Rheims and
Epernay conceals the last asylum
where the poor lonely bird still dares
to hide his loves.

Lonely ! In that lies his con-
demnation. Less gi'egarious than the
crane, less domesticated than the
stork, he seems to have grown harsh
towards liis progeny, towards the
mate whom he loves. His brief
rare fits of desire scarcely beguile
him for a day from his melancholy.
He cares little for life. In captivity
he often refuses nourishment, and
pines away without complaint and
without regret.

The aquatic birds, creatures of
great experience, for the most part

reflective and learned in two elements, were, at their palmiest epoch,

DECAY OF CERTAIN SPECIES.

11^

more advanced than many others. They well deserved the care of
man. All of them possessed merits of diverse originality. The social
instinct of the cranes, and their various imitative talent, rendered
them amusing and agreeable. The joviality of the pelican, and his
joyous humour; the tenderness of the goose, and his strong faculty of
attachment; and, finally, the good disposition of the storks, their piety
towards their aged parents, confirmed by so many witnesses, formed
between this world and our own firm ties of sympathy, which human
levity ought not barbarously to have rent asunder.

[Note. — Heronries in England. The heron, though rare in England, is certainly not so
scarce as he seems to be in France, perhaps because it is against the laws of sport to hunt
him. In some districts the man who shot a heron would be regarded with as much scora
as if he had killed a fox. He is a very rapacious bird, and it is asserted that, on an average,
he will destroy daily half a hundred small roach and dace.

There is a fine heronry at Cobham, near Gravesend, in Kent, the seat of the Earl of
Darnley. Another, in Great Sowdens Wocid, on the Rye road, one mile from Udimere, in
Sussex, contains fully four hundred nests. That at Parham, the Hon. R. Curzon"s
beautiful seat has quite a history.

118

THE SHORES.

The original birds were brought from Wales to Penshurst, by the Earl of Leicester's
steward, in the reign of James I. Thence, some two centuries later, they migrated to
Michel Grove, at Angmering. It may be about twenty years since that the Duke of Norfolk-
caused two or three trees to be felled near their retreat, and the offended birds immediately
commenced their migrations, and, in the course of three seasons, all assembled in Parham
Woods. Here, in the thick shelter of pine and spruce-fir, are now about fifty-seven nests.
(See Kuox"s " Ornithological Fiambles in Kent and Sussex.") — Translator.]

%..~r^

THE I1EB0SR3ES W mMm.

WILSON, THE ORNITHOLOGIST.

"K'^ The decay of the heron is less perceptible in

,j America. He is not so frequently hunted. The solitudes
are of vaster dimensions. He can still find, among his
beloved marshes, gloomy and almost impenetrable forests.
'wh^-^ ^ ^"^ these shadowy recesses he is more gregarious : ten or
fifteen " domestic exiles " establish themselves in the
same locality, or at but a short distance from each
other. The complete obscurity which tlie huge cedars
throw over the livid waters re-assures and rejoices them.
Towards the summit of these trees they build w4th sticks a
wide platform, which tliey cover with small branches : this is
the residence of the family, and the shelter of their loves; there,
the eggs are laid and hatched in cpiiet, the young are taught to fly, and
all those paternal lessons are given which will perfect the young fisher.
They have little cause to fear the intrusion of man into their peaceful

122 THE HERONRIES OF AMERICA.

retreats : these they find near the sea-shore, especially in Noi-th and
South Carolina, in low swampy levels, the haunt of yellow fever.
Such morasses — an ancient arm of the sea or a river, an old swamp
left behind in the gi-adual recession of the waters — extend sometimes
over a length of five or six miles, and a breadth of one mile. The
entry is not very inviting : a barrier of trees confronts you, their
trunks perfectly upright and stripped of bi-anches, fifty or sixty feet
high, and bare to the very summit, where they mingle and bring to-
gether their leafy arches of sombre gi*een, so as to shed upon the
waters an ominous twilight. What waters ! A seething mass of
leaves and debris, where the old stems rise pell-mell one upon another ;
the whole of a muddy yellow colour, coated on the surface with a
gi-een frothy moss. Advance, and the seemingly firm expanse is a
quicksand, into which you plunge. A laurel-tree at each step inter-
cepts you ; you cannot pass without a painful struggle with their
branches, with wi'ecks of trees, with laurels constantly springing up
afresh. Rare gleams of light shoot athwart the darkness, and the
silence of death prevails in these terrible regions. Except the mel-
ancholy notes of two or three small birds, which you catch at intervals,
or the hoarse cry of the heron, all is dumb and desolate ; but when
the wind rises, from the summit of the trees comes the heron's moans
and sighs. If the storm bursts, these great naked cedars, these tall
"ammiral's masts," waver and clash together; the forest roars, cries,
groans, and imitates with singular exactness the voices of wolves, and
bears, and all the beasts of pre}^.

It was not then without astonishment that, about 1805, the heron,
thus securely settled, saw a rare face, a man's, roaming under their
cedars, and in the open swamp. One man alone was capable of visiting
them in their haunts, a patient indefatigable traveller, no less courageous
than peaceable — the friend and the admirer of birds, Alexander Wilson.

If these people had been acquainted with their visitor's character,
far from feeling terrified at his appearance, they would undoubtedly
have gone forth to meet him, and, with clapping of wings and loud
cries, have given him an amicable salute, a fraternal ovation.

WILSON, THE ORNITHOLOGIST.

123

In those terrible years when
man waojed against man the most
destructive war that had ever
been known, there lived in Scot-
land a man of peace. A poor
Paisley weaver,* in his damp
dull lodging, he dreamed of
nature, of the infinite liberty of
the woods, and, above all, of
the winged life. A cripple, and
condemned to inactivity, his verj^
bondage inspired him with an
ecstatic love of light and flight.
If he did not take to himself
wings, it was because that sviblime

gift is, upon earth, only the dream and hope of another world.

* Alexander "Wilson, the eminent ornithologist, was born at Paisley in 1766. He was
bred a weaver, but emigrating to the United States in 1794, found means to pursue the
studies for which he had a natural bias, and in which he earned an enduring reputation.
The first volume of his "American Ornithology" was published in 1808. He died of
dysentery, in August 1813. — Translator.

124 THE HERONRIES OF AMERICA.

At first he attempted to gratify his love of birds by the
purchase of those illustrated works which pretend to represent them.
Clumsy caricatures, which convey but a ridiculous idea of their
form, and none at all of their movement ; and what is the bird
deprived of grace and motion ? These did not suffice. He took a
decisive resolution : to abandon everything, his trade, his country.
A new Robinson CiTisoe, he was willing, by a voluntary ship-
wreck, to exile himself to the solitudes of America ; where he
might see with his own eyes, observe, describe, and paint. He
then remembered one little fact : that he neither knew how
to draw, to paint, or to write. But this strong and patient man,
whom no difficulties could discourage, soon learned to write, and
to wi'ite an excellent style. A good writer, a minutely accurate
artist, with a delicate and certain hand, he seemed, under the guid-
ance of Nature, his mother and mistress, less to learn than to
remember.

Provided with these weapons, he plunges into the desert, the
forest, and the pestiferous savannahs ; becomes the friends of buffiiloes
and the guest of bears ; lives upon ^vold fruits, under the splendid
ceUing of heaven, \\nierever he chances to observe a rare bird, he
halts, encamps, and is "at home." What, indeed, is to there hurry him
onward ? He has no house to recall him, and neither wife nor child
awaits him. He has a family, it is trae : that gi'eat family which he
observes and describes. And friends, he has them too : those which
have not yet learned to mistmst man, and which perch upon his tree,
and chatter with him.

And, 0 birds, you are right ; you have there a tnily loyal friend,
who will secure you many others, who will teach men to understand
you, being himself as a bird in thought and heart. One day, perhaps,
the traveller, penetrating into your solitudes, and seeing some of you
fluttering and sparkling in the sun, will be tempted with the hope of
spoil, but will bethink himself of Wilson. Why kill the friends of
Wilson ? And when this name flashes on his memory, he will lower
his gun.

WILSON, THE ORNITHOLOGIST.

125

I do not see, let me add, why we should extend to infinity our
massacre of birds, or, at least, of
these species which are represented
in our museums, or in the museums
painted by Wilson, and his disciple
Audubon, whose truly royal book,
exhibiting both race, and the egg,
the nest, the forest, the very land-
scape, is a rivalry with nature.

These gi'eat observers have one
speciality which separates them from
all others. Their feeling is so deli-
cate, so precise, that no generalities
coidd satisfy it ; they must always
examine the individual. God, 1
think, knows nothing of our classifi-
cations : he created such and such a
creature, and gives but little heed to
the imaginary lines with which we
isolate the species. In the same
manner, Wilson knew nothing of
birds in the mass; but such an in-
dividual, of such an age, with such
plumage, in such circumstances. He
knows it, has seen it, has seen it
again and again, and he will tell you
what it does, what it eats, how it
comports itself, and will relate certain
adventures, certain anecdotes of its
life. " I knew a woodpecker. T
have frequently seen a Baltimore."
WTien he uses these expressions, you
may wholly trust yourself to him ;
they mean that he has held close relations with them in a species of

126 THE HERONRIES OF AMERICA.

friendly and family intimacy. Would that we knew the men with
whom we transact business as well as Wilson knew the bird qua,
or the heron of the Carolinas !

It is easily understood, and not difficult to imagine, that when
this bird-man returned among men, he met with none that could
comprehend him. His peculiarly novel originality, his marvellous
exactness, his unique faculty of individualization (the onJy means
of re-making of re-creating^ the living being), were the chief obstacles
to his success. Neither publishers nor public cared for more than
noble, lofty, and vague generalities, in faithfid observance of Buffi)n's
precept : To generalize is to ennoble ; therefore, adopt the word
" general."

It required time, and, more than all, it required that this fertile
genius should after his death inspire a similar genius, the accurate and
patient Audubon, whose colossal work has astonished and subjugated
the public, by demonstrating that the true and Kving in representa-
tion of individuality is nobler and more majestic than the forced pro-
ducts of the generalizing art.

Wilson's sweetness of disposition, so unworthily misilnderstood,
shines forth in his beautiful preface. To some it may appear
infantine, but no innocent heart can be otherwise than moved
by it.

" On a visit to a friend, I found that his young son, about eight
or nine years of age, who had been brought up in the town, but was
then living in the country, had just collected, while wandering in the
fields, a fine nosegay of wild-flowers of eveiy hue. He presented it
to his mother, with the gTeatest animation, saying : ' Dear mamma,
see what beautiful flowers I have gathered ! Oh, I could pluck a
host of others which gi'ow in our woods, and are still more lovely !
Shall I not bring you some more, mamma ? ' She took the nosegay
with a smile of tenderness, silently admired the simple and touching
beauty of nature, and said to him, ' Yes, my son.' The child started
off" on the wings of happiness.

" I saw myself in that child, and was struck with the resemblance

WILSON, THE ORXITHOLOGIST.

127

If my native country receive with gracious indulgence the specimens
which I now humbly offer it, if it express a desire that / should bring
it some more, my highest ambition will be satisfied. For, as my
little friend said, our woods are full of them ; I can gather numerous
others which are still more beautiful." — (Philadelphia, 1808.)

>r

.i<'('0^J

-"^^s,,

"7 V

^

^-^ -

^7\ ^^'L

>l^-^.:I-^~:^\ iK-:

THE CSfflfiST.

A LADY of our family, wlio resided in

Louisiana, was nursing her young child. Every

night her sleep was troubled by the strange

sensation of a cold gliding object which sought

to draw the milk from her breast. On one occasion

she felt the same impression, and it aroused her. She

spiang up, summoned her attendants ; a light was

brought ; they search every comer, turn over the bed,

and at last discover the frightful nursling — a serpent of

gieat size and of a dangerous species. The horror which

she felt instantly dried up her milk.

Levaillant relates that at the Cape of Good Hope,
' in a circle of friends, and during a quiet conversation,
the lady of the house tui-ned pale, and uttered a terrible
cry. A serpent had crept up her legs, one of those
whose sting is death in a couple of minutes. With
gi-eat difficulty it was killed
In India, a French soldier, resuming his knapsack which he had
placed on the ground, discovered behind it the dangerous black

132 THE COMBAT.

serpent, the most venomous of his tribe. He was about to cut it in
two when a merciful Hindu interposed, obtained its pardon, and took
up the serpent. Stung by it, lie died immediately.

Such are the terrore of nature in those formidable climates. But
reptiles, now-a-days rare, are not the greatest curse. In all places
and at all times it is now the insect. Insects everywhere, and in
everything ; they possess an infinity of means for attacking you ;
they walk, swim, glide, fly ; they are in the air, and you breathe
them. InviMble, they make known their presence by the most
painful wounds. Recently, in one of our sea-ports, an official of the
customs opened a parcel of papers brought from the colonies a long
time previously. A fly furiously darted out of it ; it pursued, it
stung him ; two days afterwards he was a corpse.

The hardiest of men, the buccaneers and filibusters, declared that of
aU dangers and of all pains they dreaded most the wounds of insects.

Frequently intangible, invisible, irresistible, they are destruction
itself under an unavoidable form. How shall you oppose them when
they make war upon you in legions ? Once, at Barbadoes, the in-
habitants observed an immense army of gi-eat ants, wliich, impelled
by unknown causes, advanced in a serried column and in the same
direction against the houses. To kill them was only trouble lost.
There were no means of arresting their progress. At last an ingenious
mind fortunately suggested that trains of gunpowder should be laid
across their route, and set on fire. These volcanoes terrified them,
and the torrent of invasion gradually turned aside.

No mediaeval armoury, with all the strange weapons then made
use of; no chirurgical implement factory, with the thousands of
dreadful instniments invented by modem art, can be compared with
the monstrous armour of Tropical insects — their pincers, their nippers,
their teeth, then* saws, their horns, their augers, all their tools of
combat, of death, and of dissection, with which they come armed to the
battle, with which they labour, pierce, cut, rend, and finely partition,
with skill and dexterity equal to their furious b' ood-thirstiness.

Our grandest works may not defy the energetic force of these

THE TEOPICAL REGIONS. 133

terrible legions. Give them a ship of the Hue — what do I say ? a
town — to devour, and they charge at it with eager joy. In course
of time they have excavated under Yalentia, near Caraccas, vast
abysses and catacombs ; the city is now literally suspended. A few
individuals of this voracious tribe, unfortunately transported to
Rochelle, have set to work to eat up the place, and already more
than one edifice trembles upon timbers which are only externally
sound, and at the core are rotten.

What would be the fate of a man given up to the insects ? One
dares not think of it. An unfortunate wretch, while intoxicated,
fell down near a carcass. The insects which were devouring the
dead could not distinguish from it the living ; they took possession
of his body, entered at every avenue, filled all the natural ca^dties.
It was impossible to save him. He expired in the midst of frightful
convulsions.

In those lands of fire, where the rapidity of decomposition renders
every corpse dangerous, where all death threatens life, these terrible
accelerators of the disappearance of animal bodies multiply ad in-
Jinituni. A corpse scarcely touches the earth before it is seized,
attacked, disorganized, dissected. Only the bones are left. Nature,
endangered by her own fecundity, invites, stimulates, encourages
them by the heat, by the in-itation of a world of spices and acrid
substances. She makes them furious hunters, insatiable gluttons.
The tiger and the lion, compared with the \^ture, are mild, sober,
moderate creatures ; but what is the vulture in the presence of an
insect which, in four-and-twenty hours, consumes thrice its OAvn
weight ?

Greece personified nature under the calm and noble image of
Cybele chariot-drawn by Lions. India dreams of her god Siva, the
divinity of life and death, who incessantly winks his eye, never
gazing fixedly, because his single glance would reduce all the worlds
to dust. How weak these fancies of men in the presence of the
reality ! Wliat avail their fictions before the burning centre where,
by atoms or by seconds, life dies, is born, blazes, scintillates ?

134

THE COMBAT.

Who could sustain the tlmuderous flash without reeling and without

G^

terror ?

Just, indeed, and legitimate, is the
traveller's hesitancy at the entrance of
these fearful forests where Tropical Nature,
under forms oftentimes of great beauty,
wages her keenest strife. It is the place
to pause when one knows that the most
formidable defence of the Spanish fortresses
is found in a simple grove of cactus, which,
planted around them, speedily swarms with
serpents. You frequently detect there a
strong odour of musk, a nauseous, a sinister
odour. It tells you that you are treading
on the very dust of the dead : the \\T.'eck
of animals which possessed that peculiar
savour, tiger-cats, and crocodiles, vultures,
vipers, and rattle-snakes.

The peril is greatest, perhaps, in those
virgin-forests where everything js eloquent
of life, where nature's seething crucible
eternally boils and bubbles.

Here and there their living shadows
thicken with a threefold canopy — the
colossal trees, the entwining and interlacing
lianas, and herbs of thirty feet high with
magnificent leaves. At intervals, these
herbs sink into the ancient primeval slime ;
while, at the height of a hundred feet, the
lofty and puissant flowers break through
the deep night to display themselves in
/ the burning sun.

In the clearances — the narrow alleys where his rays penetrate —
there is a scintillation, an eternal murmuring, of beetles, buttei-flies,

THE TROPICAL REGIONS. • 135

humming-birds, and fly-catchers — gems animated and mobile, which
incessantly flutter to and fro. At night — a far more astonishing
scene ! — begins the fairylike illumination of shining fire-flies, which,
by thousands of millions, weave the most fantastic arabesques, dazzling
fantasias of li<?ht, mao;ical scrolls of fire.

With all tliis splendour there lurks in the lower levels an obscure
race, a hideous and foul world of caymans, of water-serpentf?. To the
trunks of enormous trees the fanciful orchids, the well-loved daughters
of fever, the children of a miasmatic atmosphere, quaint vegetable
butterflies, suspend themselves in seeming flight. In these murderous
solitudes they take their delight, and bathe in the putrid swamps,
drink of the death which inspires them with vitality, and, by the
caprice of their unheard-of colours, make sport of the intoxication of
nature.

Do not yield — defend yourself — let not the fatal charm bow down
your sinking head. Awake ! arouse ! under a hundred forms the
danger surrounds you. Yellow fever lurks beneath these flowers,
and the black vomito ; reptiles trail at your feet. If you gave way
to fatigue, a noiseless army of implacable anatomists would take
possession of you, and with a million lancets convei-t all your
tissues into an admirable bit of lacework, a gauze veil, a breath,
nothingness.

To this all-absorbing abyss of devouring death, of famished life,
what does God oppose to re-assure us ? Another abyss, not less
famished, thirsty of life, but less implacable to man. I see the Bird,
and I breathe !

What ! is it in you, ye living flowers, ye winged topazes and
sapphires, that I shaU find my safety ? Your saving vehemence it is,
excited to the purification of this superabundant and furious fecundity,
that alone renders practicable the entrance to this dangerous realm
of faery. Were you absent, jealous Nature would perform her mys-
terious labour of solitary fermentation, and not even the most daring
savant would venture upon observing her. Wlio am I here ? And
how shall I defend myself ? What power would be sufficient ? The

136

THE COMBAT.

elephant, the ancient mammoth, would perish defenceless against a
million of deadly darts. Who will brave them ? The eagle or tlie
condor ? No; a people far more mighty — the intrepid and tlie in-
numerable legion of fly-catchers.

Humming-birds, colibris, and their brothers of every hue, live
with impunity in these gleaming solitudes where danger lurks
on every side, among the most venomous insects, and upon those
mournful plants whose very shade kills. One of them (crested,
green and blue), in the Antilles, suspends his nest to the most
terrible and fatai of trees, to the spectre whose fatal glance seems to
freeze your blood for ever, to the deadly manchineal.

Wonder of wonders ! It is this paiToquet which boldly crops the
fruits of the fearful tree, feeds upon them, assumes their livery, and
appears, from its sinister green, to draw the metallic lustre of its
triumphant wings.

Life in these winged flames, the humming-bird and the colibri,
is so glowing, so intense, that it dares eveiy poison. They beat their
wings with such swiftness that the eye cannot count the pulsations ;
yet, meanwhile, the bird seems motionless completely inert and inactive.

THE TROPICAL REGIONS. 137

He maintains a continual cry of hour ! hour ! until, witli head bent,
he plunges the dagger of his beak to the bottom of the flowers,
exhausting their sweets and the tiny insects among them ; all,
too, with a motion so rapid that nothing can be compared to it — a
sharp, choleric, extremely impatient motion, sometime"s transported by
fury — against what ? against a great bird, which he pursues and
hunts to the death; against an already rifled blossom, which he cannot
forgive for not having waited for him. He rends it, devastates it,
and scatters abroad its petals.

Leaves, as we know, absorb the poisons in the atmosphere ;
flowers exhale them. These birds live upon flowers, upon these
pungent flowers, on their sharp and burning juices, in a word, on
poisons. From their acids they seem to derive their sharp cry
and the everlasting agitation of their angry movements. These
contribute, and perhaps much more directly than light, to enrich
them with those strange reflects which set one thinking of steel,
gold, precious stones, rather than of plumage or blossoms.

The contrast between them and man is violent. The latter,
throughout these regions, perishes or decays. Europeans who, on
the borders of these forests, attempt the cultivation of the cacao
and other colonial products, quickly succumb. The natives languish,
enfeebled and attenuated. That part of earth where man sinks
nearest the level of the beast is the scene of triumph of the bird,
where his extraordinary pomp of attire, luxurious and superabundant,
has justly won for him the name of bird of paradise.

It matters not ! Whatever their plumage, their hues, their
forms, this great winged populace, the conqueror and devoui-er of
insects, and, in its stronger species, the eager hunter of reptiles, sweeps
over all the land as man's pioneer, purifying and making ready his
abode. They swim intrepidly on this vast sea of death — this hissing,
croaking, crawling sea — on the terrible, miasmatic vapours, inhaling
and defying them.

It is thus that the gi'eat sanitaiy work, the time-old combat of

the bird against the inferior tribes which might long render the

9a

138

THE COMBAT,

.^^-^<^

^^^

With the first
enemy. Tlie

world uninhabitable by man, is continued throughout
the earth. Quadrupeds, and even man, take in it
but a feeble part. It is ever the war of the winged
Hercules.

To him, indeed, inhabited regions owe all their
security. In the furthest Africa, at the Cape, the
good serpent-eater defends man against the reptiles.
Peaceable in disposition and gentle in aspect, he seems
to engage without passion in his dangerous encounters.
The gigantic jabiru does not labour less in the
deserts of Guiana, where man as yet ventures not
to live. Their perilous savannahs, alternately inun-
dated and parched, a dubious ocean teeming in the
sunshine with a horrible population of monsters as
yet unkno^Ti, possess, as their superior inhabitant,
their intrepid scavenger, a noble bird of battle,
retaining some rehcs of the ancient weapons with
which the primeval birds were very probably pro-
vided in their struggle against the dragon. These are
a horn on the head, and a spur on each of the wings,
it stirs up, excites, and rouses out of the mud its
others serve as a guard and defence : the reptile

THE TROPICAL REGIONS.

139

which hugs and folds it in its embrace, at the
same time plunges into its own body these keen
darts, and by its constriction, its own actual
exertions, is poniarded.

This brave and beautiful bird, last-born of
the ancient worlds and a surviving witness to forgotten
encounters, which is born, lives, and dies in the
slime, in the primitive cloaca, has no stain nevertheless
of his unclean cradle. I know not what moral instinct
raises and supports him above it. His grand and
formidable voice, which sways the desert, announces from
afar the gi-avity and dignified heroism of the noble and
haughty purifier. The kamichi [Palamedea cornuta),
as he is called, is rare ; he forms a genus of himself,
a species which is not divided.

Despising the ignoble promiscuousness of the low
world in which he lives, he lives alone, with but one
mate. Undoubtedly, in his career of war, his mate is
also a companion-in-arms. They love, they fight to-
gether ; they follow the same destiny. Theii-s is that
soldierly marriage of which Tacitus speaks : " Sic vivendum, sic
pereundum," — "To life, to death." When this tender com-

140

THE COMBAT.

paiiionship, this consoling succour, fails the kamichi, he disdains to
protract his existence ; he rejoins the loved one which he cannot
survive.

f u i,in

4| |V^^)^£^^

' 1/'

PURIFICATION.

In the morning — not at the first blush of dawn,
but when the sun abeacly mounts the horizon — and
at the very moment when the cocoa-nut tree unfolds
its leaves, the iirubus (or little vultures), perched in
knots of forty or fifty upon its branches, open their
brilliant ruby eyes. Tlie toils of the day demand
them. In indolent Africa a hundred villaofes invoke
them ; in drowsy America, south of Panama or
Caraccas, they, swiftest of cleansers, must sweep out
and purify the town before the Spaniard rises, before
the potent sun has stirred the carcass and the mass

of rottenness into fermentation. If they failed a single day, the

country would become a desert.

When it is evening-time in America — when the unibu, his day's

work ended, replaces himself on the cocoa-nut tree — the minarets of

144

PURIFICATION.

Asia sparkle in the morning's rays. Not less punctual than their
American brothers, vultures, crows, storks, ibises, set out from their
balconies on their various missions : some to the fields, to destroy the
insect and the serpent ; others, alighting in the streets of Alexandria
or Cairo, hasten to accomplish their task of municipal scavengering.
Did they but take the briefest holiday the plague would soon be the
only inhabitant of the country.

Thus, in the two hemispheres, the great work of public health is
performed with solemn and wonderful regularity. If the sun is
punctual in fertilizing life, these scavengers — sworn in and licensed
by nature — are no less punctual in withdrawing from his rays the
shocking spectacle of death.

Seemingly they are not ignorant of the importance of their func-
tions. Approach them, and they will not retreat. \Mien they have
received the signal from their comrades the crows, which often precede

them and point out their prey, you will see the vultures descend in a
cloud from one knows not whence, as if from heaven ! Naturally

PURIFICATIOX. 145

solitary, and witliout commuiiication — mostly silent — they flock to
the banquet by the hundred, and nothing disturbs them. They
quaiTel not among themselves, they take no heed of the passer-by.
They imperturbably accomplish their functions in a stern kind of
gravity ; with decency and propriety ; the corpse disappears, the skin
remains. In a moment a frightful mass of putrid fennentation, which
man had never dared to draw near, has vanished — has re-entered the
pure and wholesome current of universal life.

It is strange that the more useful they are to us, the more odious
we find them. We are unwilling to accept them for what they are,
to regard them in their true role, as the beneficent cressets of living
fire through which nature passes everything that might coiTupt the
higher life. For this purpose she has provided them with an admir-
able apparatus, which receives, destroys, transforms, without ever
rejecting, wearying, or even satisfying itself Let them devour a
hippopotamus, and they are still famished. To the guUs (those
vultures of the sea) a whale seems but a reasonable morsel ! They
will dissect it and clear it away better than the most skilful whalers.
As long as aught of it remains they remain ; fire at them, and they
intrepidly return to it in the mouth of your guns. Nothing dislodges
the vulture on the carcass of a hippopotamus. LevaiUant killed one
of these birds, which, though mortally wounded, stiU plucked away
scraps of flesh. Was he starving ? Not he ; food was found in his
stomach weighing six pounds !

This is automatic gluttony, rather than ferocity. If their aspect is
sad and sombre, nature has favoured them for the most part with a
delicate and feminine ornament, the soft white down about their
neck.

Standing before them, you feel yourself in the presence of the
ministers of death ; but of death tranquil and natural, and not ol
murder. Like the elements, they are serious, grave, inaccusable, at
bottom innocent — rather, let us say, deserving. Though gifted with
a vital force which resumes, subdues, absorbs ever}i:hing, they are
subject, more than any other beings, to general influences ; are swayed

10

146 PURIFICATION.

by the conditions of atmosphere and temperature ; essentially hygro-
metrical, they are living barometers. The morning's humidity
burdens their heavy wings ; the weakest prey at that hour might
pass with impunity before them. So gi'eat is their subjection to ex-
ternal nature, that the American species, perched in uniform ranks on
the cocoa-nut branches, follow, as we have said, the exact hour when
the leaves fold up, retire to rest long before evening, and only awake
when the sun, already high above the horizon, re-opens the leaves of
the tree and their white, heavy eyelids.

These admirable agents of that beneficent chemistry which preserves
and balances life here below, labour for us in a thousand places where
we ourselves may never penetrate. We clearly discern their presence
and their services in our towns ; but no one can measure the full
extent of their benefits in those deserts where every breath of the
winds is death. In the fathomless forest, in the deep morasses, under
the impure shadow of mangoes and mangroves, where ferment the
corpses of two worlds, dashed to and fro by the sea, the gi-eat purify-
ing army seconds and shortens the action both of the waves and the
insects. Woe to the inhabited world, if their mysterious and unknown
toil ceased but for an instant !

In America these public benefactors are protected by the law.

Egypt does more for them ; ■ she reveres, she loves them. If the
ancient worship no longer exists, they receive from men as kindly an
hospitality as in the time of Pharaoh. Ask an Egyptian fellah why
he allows himself to be infested and deafened by birds ? why he so
patiently endures the insolence of the crow posted on his buffalo's
horn or his camel's hump, or gathering on the date-palms in flocks
and beating down the fruit ? — he will answer nothing. To the bird
everything is lawful. Older than the Pyi-amids, he is the ancient
inhabitant of the country. Man is there only through his instrument-
ality ; he could not exist without the persistent toil of the ibis, the
stork, the crow, and the vulture.

Hence arises an universal sympathy for the animal, an instinctive
tenderness for all life, which, more than anything else, makes the

PURIFICATION.

147

charm of the East. The West has its peculiar splendours — in sun and
climate America is not less dazzling ; but the moral attraction of Asia
lies in the sentiment of unity which you feel in a world where man
is not divorced from nature ; where the primitive alliance remains
unbroken ; where the animals are ignorant that they have cause to
dread the human species. Laugh at it if you will ; but there is a
gentle pleasure in observing this confidence — in seeing the birds come
at the Brahmin's call to eat from his very hand — in watching the apes
on the pagoda-roofs sleeping in domestic peace, playing with or suck-
ling their little ones in as much security as in the bosom of their
native forests.

"At Caii-o," remarks a traveller, " the tui-tle-doves know so well

vHt 'r*VJJ,i.,jL»a|| -i«'^>^

they are under the protection of the public, that they live in the
midst of the very clamour of the city. Every day I see them cooing

148 PURIFICATION.

on my window-sliutters, in a very narrow street, at the entrance of a
noisy bazaar, and at the busiest moment of the year, a little before
the Ramadan, when tlie ceremonies of marriage fiU the city day and
night with uproar and tumult. The level roofs of the houses, the
usual promenade of the prisoners of the harem and their slaves, are
in like manner haunted by a crowd of birds. The eagles sleep in
confidence on the balconies of the minarets."

Conquerors have never failed to turn into derision this gentleness,
this tenderness for animated nature. The Persians, the Romans in
Egypt, our Europeans in India, the French in Algeria, have often
outraged and stricken these innocent brothers of man, the object of his
ancient reverence. A Cambyses slew the sacred cow ; a Roman the
ibis or cat which destroyed unclean reptiles. But what means the
cow ? The fecundity of the country. And the ibis ? Its salubrity.
Destroy these animals, and the country is no longer habitable. That
which has saved India and Egypt through so many misfortunes, and
preserved their fertility, is neither the Nile nor the Ganges ; it is
respect for animal life, the mildness and the gentle heart of man.

Profound in meaning was the speech of the priest of Sais to the
Greek Herodotus : "You shall be children ever."

We shall always be so — we, men of the West — subtle and graceful
reasoners, so long as we shall not have comprehended, with a simple
and more exhaustive view, the reason of things. To be a child is to
seize life only by partial glimpses. To be a man is to be fully con-
scious of all its harmonious unity. The child disports himself, shatters,
and spurns ; he finds his happiness in undoing. And science in its
childhood does the same ; it cannot study unless it kills ; the sole use
which it makes of a living miracle is, in the first place, to dissect it.
None of us carry into our scientific pursuits that tender reverence for
life which nature rewards by unveiling to us her mysteries.

Enter the catacombs, where, to employ our haughty language, the
rude monuments sleep of a barbarous superstition ; visit the treasure-
stores of India and Egypt ; at each step you meet -wnth naive but not
the less profound intuitions of the essential mystery of life and death.

PURIFICATION.

149

Do not let the form deceive you ; do not look upon this as an arti-
ficial work, fabricated by a priestly hand. Under the strange com-
plexity and burdensome tyranny of the sacerdotal form, I see two
sentiments everywhere revealing themselves in a human and pathetic
manner : — ■

The effort to save the loved soul from the shipwreck of death ;

Tlie tender brotherhood of man and nature, the religious sympathy
for the dumb animal as the divine instrument in the protection of
human life.

The instinct of antiquity perceived what observation and science de-
clare : that the Bird is the agent of the grand univereal transition, and
of purification — the wholesome accelerator of the interchange of sub-
stances. Especially in burning countries, where every delay is a peril,
he is, as Egypt said, the barque of safety which receives the dead spoil,
and causes it to re-enter the domain of life and the world of purity.

The fond and gi\atefal Egyptian soul has recognized these benefits,
and wishes for no happiness which it cannot share with the animals,
its benefactors. It does not desire to be saved alone. It endeavours
to associate them in its immortality. It wills that the sacred bird
accompany it to the sombre realm, as if to bear it on its wings.

■»! W

DEiTH

V

BIRDS OF PREY. (THE RAPTORES).

It was one of my saddest hours when, seeking in nature
^i^\ a refuge from the thoughts of the age, I for the first time
"^ encountered the head of the viper. This occurred in a
/^ valuable museum of anatomical imitations. The head,
marvellously imitated and enormously enlarged, so as to remind one
of the tiger's and the jaguar's, exposed in its horrible form a some-
thino- still more horrible. You seized at once the delicate, infinite,
fearfully prescient precautions by which the deadly machine is so

151 DEATH.

potently armed. Not only is it provided with numerous keen-edged
teeth; not only are these teeth supplied with an ingenious reservoir
of poison which slays immediately; but their extreme fineness, which
renders them liable to fracture, is compensated by an advantage that
perhaps no other animal possesses; namely, a magazine of super-
numerary teeth, to supply at need the place of any accidentally
broken. Oh, what provision for killing ! What precautions that the
victim shall not escape ! ^^^lat love for this horrible creature ! I
stood by it scandalized, if I may so speak, and with a sick soul.
Nature, the gTeat mother, by whose side I had taken refuge, shocked
me with a maternity so cruelly impartial.

Gloomily I walked away, bearing on my heaj-t a darker shadow
than rested on the day itself, one of the sternest in winter. I had
come foi-tli like a child; I returned home like an orphan, feeling the
notion of a Providence dying away within me.

Our impressions are not less painful when we see in our galleries
the endless series of birds of prey, prowlers by day and night,
frightful masks of birds, phantoms which terrify the day itself One
is powerfully affected by observing their cniel weapons; I do not

refer to those terrible beaks which kill with a blow, but those talons,
those sharpened saws, those instiniments of torture which fix the
shuddering prey, protract the last keen pangs and the agony of
sufferinir.

BIRDS OF PEEY. 155

All! our globe is a barbarous world, though still in its youth; a
world of attempts and rude beginnings, given over to cruel slaveries —
to night, hunger, death, fear ! Death ? We can accept it ; there
is in the soul enough of hope and faith to look upon it as a passage,
a stage of initiation, a gate to better worlds. But, alas, was pain so
useful as to render it necessary to prodigalize it ? I feel it, I
see it, I hear it everywhere. Not to hear it, to preserve the
thread of my thoughts, I am forced to stop up my ears. All the
acti\'ity of my soul would be suspended, my nerves shattered by it ;
I shoidd effect nothing more, I should no longer move forward; my
life and powers of production would remain barren, annihilated by
pity !

" And yet is not pain the warning which teaches us to foresee and
to anticipate, and by every means in our power to ward off our dissolu-
tion ? This ciniel school is the stimulant and spur of prudence for all
liA^ng things — a powerful drawing back of the soul upon itself, which
otherwise would be enfeebled by happiness, by soft and weakening
impressions.

" May it not be said that happiness has a centrifugal attraction
which diffuses us wholly without, detains us, dissipates us, would
evaporate and restore us to the elements, if we wholly abandoned
ourselves to it ? Pain, on the contrary, if experienced at one point,
brings back all to the centre, knits closer, prolongs, ensures and
fortifies existence.

" Pain is in some wise the artist of the world which creates us,
fashions us, sculptures us with the fine edge of a pitiless chisel. It
limits the overflowing life. And that which remains, stronger and
more exquisite, enriched by its very loss, draws thence the gift of a
hicrher being."

These thoughts of resignation were awakened by one who was
herself a sufferer, and whose clear eye discerned, even before I myself
did, my troubles and my doubts.

As the individual, said she again, so is the world. Earth itself has
been benefited by Pain. Nature begot her through the violent

156

DEATH.

action of these ministers of death. Their species, rapidly growing
rarer and rarer, are the memorials, the evidences of an anterior stage
of the globe in which the inferior life swarmed, while nature laboured
to purge the excessive fecundity.

We can retrace in thought the scale of the successive necessities
of destruction which the earth was thus constrained to undergo.

Against the irrespirable air which at first enveloped it, vegetables
were its saviours. Against the suffocating and terrific density of
these lower vegetable forms, the rough coating which encrusted it,
the nibbling, gnawing insect, which we have since execrated, was the
sanitary agent. Against the insect, the frog, and the reptile mass,
the venomous reptile proved an useful expurgator. Finally^ when
the higher life, the winged life, took its flight, earth found a barrier
against the too rapid transports of her young fecundity in the power-
ful voracious birds, eagles, falcons, or vultures.

But these useful destroyers have diminished in numbers as they
have become less necessary. The swarms of small creeping animals
on which the viper principally whetted his teeth having wonderfully
thinned, the viper also grows rare. The w^orld of winged game being
cleared in its turn, either by man's depredations or by the disappear-
ance of certain insects on which the small birds lived, you see that

•- .tf ^ 6"-

the odious tyrants of the air are also decreasing; the eagle is seldom
met with, even among the Alps, and the exaggerated and enor-

BIRDS OF PREY. 157

mous prices which the falcon fetches, seems to prove that the
former, the noblest of the raptores, has now-a-days nearly disappeared.

Thus nature gravitates towards a less violent order. Does this
mean that death will ever diminish? Death! no; but pain surely.

The world little by little falls under the power of the Being who
alone understands the useful equilibrium of life and death, who can
resfulate it in such wise as to maintain the scale even between the
living species, to encourage them according to their merit or iimocence
— to simplify, to soften, and (if I may hazard the word) to moralize
death, by rending it swift, and freeing it from anguish.

Death was never our serious objection. Is it more than a simple
mask of life's transformations ? But pain is an objection, grave,
cruel, terrible. Therefore, little by little, it will disappear from the
earth. Its agents, the fierce executioners of the life which they
plucked out by torture, are already very rare.

Assuredly, when I survey, in the Museum, the sinister assemblage
of nocturnal and diurnal birds of prey, I do not much regret the
destruction of these species. Whatever pleasure our personal in-
stincts of violence, our admiration of strength, may cause us to take
in these winged robbers, it is impossible to misread in their deathhke
masks the baseness of their nature. Their pitifully flattened skulls
are sufficient evidence that, though greatly favoured with wing, and
crooked beak, and talons, they have not the least need to make use
of their intelligence. Their constitution, which has made them
swiftest of the swift, strongest of the strong, has enabled them to dis-
pense with address, stratagem, and tactic. As for the courage with
which one is tempted to endow them, what occasion have they to
display it, since they encounter none but inferior enemies? Enemies?
no ; victims ! When the rigour of the season, or hunger, drives their
young to emigrate, it leads to the beak of these dull tyrants count-
less numbers of innocents, very superior in every sense to their
murderers; it prodigalizes the birds which are artists, and singers,
and architects, as a prey to these vulgar assassins; and for the eagle
and the buzzard provides a banquet of nightingales.

158

DEATH.

The flattened skull is the degi^ading sign of these murderers. I
trace it in the most extolled, in those whom man has the most
flattered, and even in the noble falcon; noble, it is true, and I the
less dispute the justice of the title, because, imlike the eagle and
other executionei-s, it knows how to kill its prey at a blow, and
scorns to torture it.

These birds of prey, with their small brains, ofter a striking con-
trast to the numerous amiable and plainly intelligent species which
we find among the smaller birds. The head of the former is only a
beak; that of the latter has a face. What comparison can be made
between these brute giants and the intelligent, all-human bird, the
robin redbreast, which at this veiy moment hovers about me, perches
on my shoulder or my paper, examines my wi'iting, wanns himself at

BIRDS OF PREY.

159

the fire, or curiously peers through the window to see if the spring-
time will not soon return.

If tliere be any choice among the raptores, I should certainly

prefer — dare I say
the eagle. Among
have seen nothing
posing, as our five
(in the Jardin des
gether like so many
domed with superb
delicate white down,
mantles of gray,
exiles, who seem to
selves the vicissi-
the political events
them from their
What real difier-
the eagle and the
passionately loves
living flesh, very

it? — the vulture to
the bird -world I
so grand, so im-
Algerian vultures
Plantes), posted to-
Turkish pachas, a-
cravats of the most
and draped in noble
A solemn divan of
discuss among them-
tudes of things and
which have di'iven
native country,
ence exists between
vulture? The eagle
blood, and prefers
rarely eating the

dead. The vulture seldom kills, and directly benefits life by restoring
to its service and to the grand cun-ent of vital circulation the dis-
organized objects which would associate with others to their dis-
organization. The eagle lives upon murder only, and may justly be
entitled the minister of Death. On the contrary, the vulture is the
servant of Life.

Owing to his strength and beauty, the eagle has been adopted as
an emblem by more than one warrior race which lived, like himself,
by rapine. The Persians and the Romans chose him. We now as-
sociate him with the lofty ideas which these great empires originate.
Grave people — even an Aristotle — have accredited the absurd fable
that he daringly eyed the sun, and put his offspring to the test, by
making them also gaze upon it. Once started on this glorious road,
the philosophers halted no more. Buftbn went the furthest. He

IGO

DEATH.

eulogizes the eagle for liis teiivperance. He does not eat at all, says he.

The truth is, that when his prey is large, he feasts himself on the spot,

and carries but a small portion to
his family. The king of the air,
says he again, disdains small ani-
mals. But observation points to a
directly opposite conclusion. The
ordinary eagle attacks with eagerness
the most timid of beings, the hare;
the spotted eagle assails the duck.
The booted eagle has a preference for
field mice and house mice, and eats
them so greedily that he swallows
them without killing them. The
bald-headed eagle, or pygargo, will
frequently slay his own young, and
often drives them fi-om the nest be-
fore they can supjDort themselves.

Near Havre I have observed one
instance of truly royal nobility, and,
above all, of sobriety, in an eagle.
A bird, captured at sea, but which
has fallen into far too kindly hands
in a butcher's house, is so fforged
with an abundance of food obtained
without fighting, that he appears to
reofret nothins^. A Falstaff of an
eagle, he gi-ows fat, and cares no
longer for the chase, or the plains
of heaven. If he no longer fixedly
eyes the sun, he watches the kitchen,
and for a titbit allows the children
to drag him by the tail.
If rank is to be decided by strength, the first place must not

m:^^^:^^:xg. v^

BIRDS OF PREY. 161

be given to the eagle, but to the bird which figures in the " Thou-
sand and One Nights " under the name of Roc, the condor, the giant
of gigantic mountains, the Cordilleras. It is the largest of the
vultures — is, fortunately, the rarest — and the most destructive, as it
feeds only on live prey. Wlien it meets with a large animal, it so
gorges itself with meat that it is unable to stir, and may then be
killed with a few blows of a stick.

To judge these species truly we must examine the eyrie of the
eagle, the rude, ill-constructed platform which serves for its nest ;
compare this rough and clumsy work — I do not say with the delicate
chef-d'oeuvre of a chaffinch's nest — but with the constructions of
insects, the excavations of ants, where the industrious workman
varies his art to infinity, and displays a genius so singular in its
foresight and resources.

The traditional esteem which man cherishes for the courage of the
great Raptores is much diminished when we read, in Wilson, that
a tiny Ijird, a fly-catcher, such as the purple martin, will hunt the
great black eagle, pursue it, harass it, banish it from its district, give
it not a moment's repose. It is a truly extraordinary spectacle to see
this little hero, adding all his weight to his strength, that he may
make the greater impression, rise and let himself drop from the clouds
on the back of the large robber, mount witliout letting go, and prick
him forward with his beak in lieu of a spur.

Without going so far as America, you may see, in the Jardin des
Plantes, the ascendancy of the little over the gi'eat, of mind over
matter, in the singular tete-a-tete of the gypaetus and the crow. The
latter, a very feeble animal, and the feeblest of birds of prey, which
in his black garb has the air of a pedagogue, labours hard to civilize
his brutal fellow-prisoner, the gypaetus. It is amusing to observe
how he teaches him to play — humanizes him, so to speak — by a hun-
dred tricks of his own invention, and refines his rude nature. Tliis
comedy is performed with special distinction when the crow has a
reasonable number of spectators. It has appeared to me that he disdains
to exhibit his savoir-faire before a single eye-witness. He calculates

11

162

DEATH.

upon their assistance, earns their respect in case of need. I have seen
him dart back with his beak the little pebbles which a child had
flung at him. Tlie most remarkable pastime which he teaches to his
big friend is, to make him hold by one end a stick which he himself
draws by the other. This show of a stmggle between strength and
weakness, this simulated equality, is well adapted to soften the bar-
barian, and though at first he gives but little heed to it, he afterwards
yields to continued urgency, and ends by throwing himself into the
sport with a savage good temper.

In the presence of this repulsively ferocious figure, armed with
invincible talons and a beak tipped with iron, which would kill at
the first blow, the crow has not the least fear. With the security of
a superior mind, before this heavy mass he goes, he comes, he wheels

about, he snatches its prey before its eyes; the other gi-owls, but too
late; his tutor, far more nimble, "svith his black eye, metallic and

BIRDS OF PREY.

163

lustrous as steel, lias seen the forward movement; he leaps away; if
need be, he climbs a branch or two higher; he growls in his turn —
he admonishes his companion.

This facetious personage has in his pleasantry the advantage due to
the seriousness, gravity, and sadness of his demeanour. I saw one
dail}^, in the streets of Nantes, on the threshold of an alley, which,
in his demi-captivity, could only console himself for his clipped wings
by playing tricks with the dogs. He suffered the curs to pass
unmolested ; but when his malicious eye espied a dog of handsome

figure, worthy indeed of his courage, he hopped behind him, and, by
a skilful and unperceived manoeuvre, leapt upon his back, gave him,
hot and dry, two stabs with his strong black beak: the dog fled,
howling. Satisfied, tranquil, and serious, the crow returned to his
post, and one could never have supposed that so grim-looking a fellow
had just indulged in such an escapade.

It is said that in a state of freedom, strong in their spirit of
association, and in their numbers, they hazard the most audacious
games, even to watching the absence of the eagle, stealing into his
redoubtable nest, and robbing it of the eggs. And, what is mere
difficult to believe, naturalists pretend to have seen great troops of
them, which, when the eagle is at home, and defending his family,
deafen him with their cries, defy him, entice him forth, and contrive,
though not without a battle, to carry oft' an eaglet.

1G4 DEATH.

Such exertions and such danger for this miserable prey ' If the
thing be true, Ave must suppose that the prudent repubHc, frequently-
troubled or harassed by the tyrant of the country, decrees the
extinction of his race, and believes itself bound by a great act of
devotion, cost what it may, to execute the decree.

Their sagacity is shown in a thousand ways, especially in the
judicious and well-weighed choice of their abode. Those which I
observed at Nantes, on one of the hills of the Erdre, passed over my
head every morning, and returned every evening. Evidently they
had their town and country houses. By day they perched on the
cathedral towers to make their observations, feiTeting out (eventant)
what good things the city might have to offer. At close of day, they
regained the woods, and the well-sheltered rocks where they love to
pass the night. These are domiciliated people, and no mere birds of
passage, Attached to their family, especially to their mates, to whom
they are scrupulously loyal, their pecvdiar dwelling-place should be the
nest. But the dread of the great birds of night decides them to sleep
together in twenties or thirties — a sufficient number for a combat, if

such should arise. Their special object of hate and horror is the owl;
when day breaks, they take their revenge for his nocturnal misdeeds :

BIRDS OF PKEY. 165

tlie}^ hoot him; they give him chase; proiiting by his embarrassment,
they persecute him to death.

There is no form of association by which they do not know how
to proht. That wliich is sweetest — the family — does not induce them
to forget, as you may see, the confederacy for defence or the league
for attack. On the contrary, they associate themselves even with
their superior rivals, the vultures, and call, precede, or follow them,
to feed at their expense. They unite — and this is a stronger illustra-
tion— with their enemy the eagle; at least, they surround him to
profit by his combats, by the fray in which he triumphs over some
great animal. These shrewd spectators wait at a little distance until
the eagle has feasted to his satisfaction, and fforged himself with
blood; when this takes place, he flies away, and the remainder falls
to the crows.

Their evident superiorit}' over so great a number of birds is due
to their longevity and to the experience which their excellent memory
enables them to acquire and profit by. Yery diflerent to the majority
of animals, whose duration of life is proportionable to the duration of
their infancy, they reach maturity at the end of a year, and live, it is
said, a century

The great variety of their food, which includes every kind of
animal or vegetable nutriment, every dead or living prey, gives them
a wide acquaintance Avith things and seasons, haiwests and hunts.
They interest themselves in everything, and observe eveiything. The
ancients, who lived far more completely than ourselves in and with
nature, found it no small profit to follow, in a hundred obscure things
where human experience as yet affords no light, the directions of so
prudent and sage a bird.

With due submission to the noble Raptores, the crow, which
frequently guides them, despite his "inky suit" and uncouth visage,
despite the coarseness of appetite imputed to him, is not the less the
superior genius of the great species of which he is, in size, already a
diminution.

But the crow, after all, represents only utilitarian pradence, the

166

DEATH.

wasdom of self-interest. To an-ive at the higher orders, the heroes of
the -svinged race, the sublime and impassioned artists, we must reduce
the bird in size, and lower the material to exalt the mental and moral
development. Nature, like so many mothers, has shown a weakness
for her smallest offspring.

|aiit ^p.(iott(l

THE L3CH?-TIJE i3£HT,

n A

THE LIGHT.

THE NIGHT.

"Light! more light!" Such were the last words of
Goethe. This utterance of expiring genius is the general
cry of Nature, and re-echoes from world to world. Wliat
was said by that man of power — one of the eldest sons of

God is said by His humblest childi-en, the least advanced in

MJ\ the scale of animal life, the molluscs in the depths of ocean;
' Ify ■ they will not dwell where the light never penetrates. The
^W flower seeks the light, turns towards it; without it, sickens. Our
iffu fellow-workers, the animals, rejoice like us, or mourn like us,
ji j according as it comes or goes. My grandson, but two months
H* old, bursts into tears when the day dechnes.
I "This summer, when walking in my garden, I heard and I

saw on a branch a bird singing to the setting sun; he inclined him-
self towards the light, and was plainly enchanted by it. I was equally
charmed to see him; our pitiful caged birds had never inspired me with
the idea of that intelligent and powerful creature, so little, so full of

172 THE LIGHT.

passion. I trembled at his song. He bent his head behind him,
his swollen bosom; never singer or poet enjoyed so simple an ecstasy.
It was not love, however (the season was past), it was clearly the
glory of the day which raptured him — the charm of the gentle sun !

"Barbarous is the science, the hard pride, which disparages to
such an extent animated nature, and raises so impassable a barrier
between man and his inferior brothers !

" With tears I said to him : ' Poor child of light, which thou
reflectest in thy song, truly thou hast good cause to hymn it ! Night,
replete with snares and dangers for thee, too closely resembles death.
Would that thou mightst see the light of the morrow ! ' Then, passing
in spirit from his destiny to that of all living beings which, since the
aim profundities of creation, have so slowly risen to the day, I said,
like Goethe and the little bird : ' Light, light, 0 Lord, more light 1 ' "
— (MiCHELET, The People, p. 62, edit. 1S4G.)

w

':r4

The world of fishes is the world of silence. Men say, "Dumb as
a lish."

The world of insects is the world of night. They are all light-
shunners. Even those, which, like the bee, labour during the day-
time, prefer the shades of obscurity.

The world of birds is the world of light — of song.

All of them live in the sun, fill themselves with it, or are inspired
1 )y it. Those of the South carry its reflected radiance on their wings ;
those of our colder climates in their songs; many of them follow it
from land to land.

"See," says St. John, "how at morning time they hail the rising

THE NIGHT.

173

sun, and at evening faithfully congregate to watch it setting on our

Scottish shores. Towards evening,

the heath-cock, that he may see

it longer, stands on tiptoe and

balances himself on the branch of

the tallest willow." . -:

Light, love, and song, have for '^'»*J:

them but one meaning. If you i^r^fe

would have the captive nightingale '^"^^""^^

sing when it is not the season of l^\

his loves, cover up his cage, then
suddenly let in the light upon him,
and he recovers his voice. The
unfortunate chaffinch, blinded by
barbarous hands, sings with a
despairing and sickly animation, ^^

creating" for himself the lig-ht of , ' ''"
harmony with liis voice, becoming a "^-7:

sun unto himself in his internal lire.

I would willingly believe that
this is the chief inspiration of the
bird's song in our gloomy climates,
where tlie sun appears only in vivid
flashes. In comparison with those
brilliant zones where he never quits
the horizon, our countries, veiled
in mist and cloud, but o-lowincr at
intervals, have exactly the effect of
the cage, first covered, an<I then
exposed, of the imprisoned night-
ingale. They provoke the strain,
and, like light, awaken bursts of
harmony.

Even the bird's flight is influenced by it. Flight depends on the

174 THE LIGHT.

eye quite as much as on the wing. Among species gifted with a keen
and delicate vision, like the falcon, which from the loftiest heights of
heaven can espy the worm iji a thicket — Hke the swallow, which
from a distance of one thousand feet can perceive a gnat — flight is
sure, daring, and charming to look at in its infallible certainty. Far
otherwise is it with the myopes, the short-sighted, as you may see
by their gait ; they fly with caution, grope about, and are afraid of
falling.

The eye and the wing — sight and flight — ^that exalted degree
of puissance which enables you incessantly to embrace in a glance,
and to overleap, immense landscapes, vast countries, kingdoms — which
permits you to see in complete detail, and not to contract, as in a
geographical chart, so grand a variety of objects — to possess and to
discern, almost as if you were the equal of God; — oh, what a source
of boundless enjoyment ! what a strange and mysterious happiness,
scarcely conceivable by man !

Observe, too, these perceptions are so strong and so vivid that
they grave themselves on the memory, and to such a degree that even
an inferior animal like a pigeon retraces and recognizes every little
accident in a road which he has only traversed once. How, then,
mil it be with the sage stork, the shrewd crow, the intelligent
swallow ?

Let us confess this superiority. Let us regard without envy those
blisses of vision which may, perhaps, one day be ours in a happier
existence. This felicity of seeing so much — of seeing so far — of
seeing so clearly — of piercing the infinite with the eye and the
wing, almost at the same moment, — to what does it belong ? To that
life which is our distant ideal. A life in the fulness of light, and
vjithout shadoio !

Already the bird's existence is, as it were, a foretaste of it. It
would here prove to him a divine source of knowledge, if, in its
subhme freedom, it were not burdened by the two fjitalities wliich
chain our globe to a condition of barbarism, and render futile all our
aspirations.

THE NIGHT.

175

^^'^V

First, the fatal need of the stomach, which shackles all ^
i of us, but which especially persecutes that living flame, that a
devouring fire, the bird, which is forced incessantly to
renew itself, to seek, to wander, to forget, condemned, without hope
of relief, to the barren mobility of its too changeful impressions.

The other fatal necessity is that of night, of slumber, hours of
shadow and ambush, when his wing is broken or captured, or, while
defenceless, he loses the power of flight, strength, and light.

When we speak of light, we mean safety for all creatures.

It is the guarantee of life for man and the animal ; it is, as it
were, the serene, calm, and reassuring smile, the privilege of Nature.
It puts an end to the sombre terrors which pursue us in the shadows,
to the not unfounded fears, and to the torment also of cruel dreams —
to the troublous thoughts which agitate and overthrow the soul.

In the security of civil association which has existed for so long
a period, man can scarcely comprehend the agonies of savage life
during these hours that Nature leaves it defenceless, when her terrible
impartiality opens the way to death no less legitimate than life. In
vain you reproach her. She tells the bird that the owl also has a
right to live. She replies to man : " I must feed my lions."

Read in books of travels the panic of unfortunate castaways lost
in the solitudes of Africa, of the miserable fugitive slave who only
escapes the barbarity of man to fall into the hands of a barbarous
nature. Wliat tortures, as soon as at sunset the lion's ill-omened
scouts, the wolves and jackals, begin to prowl, accompanying him at
a distance, preceding him to scent his prey, or following him like
ghouls ! Tliey whine in your ears : " To-morrow we shall seek th}^
bones 1" But, O hon-or ! see here, at but two paces distant ! He

176 THE LIGHT.

sees you, watches you, sends a deep roar from the cavernous recesses
of his throat of brass, sums up his living prey, exacts and lays claim
to it ! The horse cannot be held still ; he trembles, a cold sweat
pours over him, he plunges to and fro. His rider, crouching between
the watch-fires, if he succeeds in kindling any, with difficulty pre-
serves sufficient streng-th to feed the rampart of light which is his
only safeguard.

Night is equalh' terrible for the birds, even in our climates, where it
would seem less dangerous. AMiat monsters it conceals, what frig-ht-
ful chances for the bird lurk in its obscurity ! Its nocturnal foes have
this characteristic in common — their approach is noiseless. The
screech-owl flies with a silent wing, as if wi^apped in tow (comme
e.towpee de ouate). The weasel insinuates its long body into the nest
without disturljing a leaf The eager polecat, athirst for the warm
]ife-blo(jd, is so rapid, that in a moment it bleeds both parents and pro-
geny, and slaughters a Avhole family.

It seems that the bird, when it has little ones, enjoys a second
siglit for these dangers. It has to protect a family far more feeble
and more helpless than that of the quadruped, whose young can walk
as soon as born. But how protect them ? It can do nothing but
remain at its post and die; it cannot fly away, for its love has broken
its wings. All night the narrow entry of the nest is guarded by the
father, who sinks with fatigue, and opposes danger with feeble beak
and shaking head, \\liat will this avail if the enormous jaw of the
serpent suddenly appears, or the horrible eye of the bird of death,
immeasurably enlarged by fear ?

Anxious for its young, it has little care for itself In its season
of solitude Nature spares it the tortures of prevision. Sad and
dejected rather than alarmed, it is silent, it sinks down and hides its
little head under its wings, and even its neck disappears among the
plumes. This position of complete self-abandonment, of confidence,
which it had held in the egg — in the happy maternal prison, where
its security was so perfect — it resumes every evening in the midst of
perils and without protection.

THE NIGHT.

177

Heavy for all creatures is the gloom of evening, and even for the
protected. The Dutch painters have seized and expressed this truth
very forcibly in reference to the beasts grazing at liberty in the
meadows. The horse of his own accord draws near his companion,
and rests his head upon him. The cow, followed by her calf, returns
to the fence, and would fain find her way to the byre. For these
animals have a stable, a lodging, a shelter against, nocturnal snares.
The bird has but a leaf for its roof !

How great, then, its happiness in the morning, when terrors
vanish, when the shadows fade away, when the smallest coppice
brightens and grows clear ! What chattering on the edge of every
nest, what lively conversations ! It is, as it were, a mutual felicita-
tion at seeing one another again, at being still alive '. Tlien the songs
commence. From the fuiTow the lark mounts aloft, with a loud
hymn, and bears to heaven's gate the joy of earth.

As with the bird, so with man. Every line in the ancient Vedas
of India is a hymn to the light, the guardian of life — ^to the sun which

12

178

THE LIGHT.

every day, by unveiling the world, creates it anew and preserves it.
We revive, we breathe again, we traverse our dwelling-places, we
regain our families, we count over our herds. Nothing has perished,
and life is complete. No tiger has sui-prised us. No horde of beasts
of prey have invaded us. The black serpent has not profited by our
slumbers. Blessed be thou, O sun, who givest us yet another day !

All animals, says the Hindu, and especially the wisest, the
elephant, the Brahmin of creation, salute the sun, and praise it grate-
fully at dawn; they sing to it from their own hearts a hymn of
thankfulness.

But a single creature utters it, pronounces it for all of us, sings it.
Who ? One of the weak — which feai-s most keenly the night, and
hails with eagerest joy the morning — which lives in and by the light
— whose tender, infinitely sensitive, extended, penetrating vision,
discerns all its accidents — and which is most intimately associated
with the decline, the eclipses, and the resurrection of light.

The bird for all nature chants the morning hymn and the bene-
diction of the day. He is her priest and her augur, her divine and
innocent voice.

m?M MD W3ifiE--i3£!lllT3eiS,

MIGRATIONS.

r

One of Nature's confidants, a sacred soul, as simple as
profound, the poet Virgil, saw in the bird, as the ancient
Italian wisdom had seen in it, an augur and a prophet of
the changes of the skies : —

" Nul, sans otre averti, neprouva les orages —
La grue, avec effroi, s'elan9ant des vallees,
Fnit ces noires vapeurs de la terre exhalees—
L'hirondelle en volant effleure le rivage;
Tremblante pour ses ceufs, la fournii demenage.
Des lugubres corbeaux les noires legions
Fendent Fair, qui fremit sous leurs longs bataillons—
Vois les oiseaux de mer, et ceux que les prairies
Nourrissent pres des eaux sur des rives fleuries.
De lenr sejour liumide on les voit s'approchor,
Offrir leur tete aux flots qui battent le rooher,
Promener sur les eaux leur troupe vagabonde,
Se plonger dans leur sein, reparaitre sur I'onde,
S'y replonger encore, et, par cent jeux divers,
Annoncer les torrents suspendus dans les airs.
Seule, errante a pas lents sur I'aride rivage,
La corneille enrouee appelle aussi I'orage.

182 STORHr AND WINTER.

Le soir, la jeune fille, en tournaiit son fuseau,

Tire encore de sa lampe un presage nouveau,

Lorsque la meche en feu, dont la clarte s'emousse,

Se couvre en petillant de noirs flocons de mousse.

**«;»»

Mais la securite reparait a son tour —

L'alcyon ne vient plus sur I'humide rivage,

Aux tiedeurs du soleil etaler son plumage —

L'air s'eclaircit enfin ; du sommet des montagnes,

Le brouillard aflfaisse descend dans les campagnes,

Et le triste hibou, le soir, au haut des toits,

En longs gumissements ne traine plus sa voix.

Les corbeaux meme, instruits de la fin de I'orage,

Folatrent a I'envi parmi I'epais feuillage,

Et, d'un gosier moins rauque, annon^ant les beaux jours,

Vont re voir dans leurs nids le fruit de leurs amours."

'• The Georgics,'' translated by Delille.*

A being eminently electrical, the bird is more en rapport than
any other with numerous meteorological phenomena of heat and
magnetism, whose secrets neither our senses nor our appreciation can
arrive at. He perceives them in their birth, in their early beginnings,
even before they manifest themselves. He possesses, as it were, a
kind of physical prescience. What more natural than that man,
whose perception is much slower, and who does not recognize them

* We subjoin Dryden's vereion of tbe above passage ("' GeonjicsJ' Book L) :—

" Wet weather seldom hurts the most unwise,
So plain the signs, such prophets are the skies :
The waiy crane foresees it first, and sails
Above the storm, and leaves the lowly vales ;
The cow looks up. and from afar can find
The change of heaven, and snuffs it in the wind.
The swallow skims the river's watery face.
The frogs renew the croaks of their loquacious race. . . .
Besides, the several sorts of watery fowls,
That swim the seas, or haunt the standing pools;
The swans that sail along the silver flood.
And dive with stretching necks to search their food,
Then lave their back with sprinkling dews in vain,
And stem the stream to meet the promised rain.
The crow, with clamorous cries, the shower demands.
And single stalks along the desert sands.
The nightly virgin, while her wheel she plies,
Foresees the storm impending in the skies.

MIGRATIONS. 183

nnti] after the event, should inten'ogate this instiTictive precursor
which announces them ? This is the principle of auguries. And there
is no truer wisdom than this pretended "folly of antiquity."

Meteorology, especially, may derive from hence a gieat advantage.
It will possess the surest means. And already it has found a guide
in the foresight of the birds. Would to Heaven that Napoleon, in
September 1811, had taken note of the premature migi-ation of the
birds of the North ! From the storks and the cranes he might have
secured the most trustworthy information. In their precocious
departure, he might have divined the imminency of a severe and
terrible winter. They hastened towards the South, and he — he
remained at Moscow !

In the midst of the ocean, the weary bird which reposes for a
night on the vessel's mast, beguiled afar from his route by this
moving asylum, recovers it, nevertheless, without difficulty. So
complete is his sympathy with the globe, so exactly does he know
the true realm of light, that, on the following morning, he
commits himself to the breeze without hesitation ; the briefest con-
sultation with himself suffices. He chooses, on the immense abyss,
uniform and without other path than the vessel's track, the exact
course which will lead him whither he wishes to go. Tliere, not as

Wlien sparkling lamps their sputtering light advance,
And in the sockets oily bubhles dance.

" Then, after showers, 'tis easy to descry,
Returning suns, and a serener sky;
The stars shine smarter, and the moon adorns,
As with unborrowed beams, her sharpened horns ;
The filmy gossamer now ilits no more,
Nor halcyons bask on the short sunny shore :
Their litter is not tossed by sows unclean,
But a blue draughty mist descends upon the plain.
And owls, that mark the setting sun, declare
A star-light evening, and a morning fair. . . .
Then thrice the ravens rend the liquid air,
And croaking notes proclaim the settled fair.
Then, round their airy palaces they fly
To greet the sun : and seized with secret joy.
When storms are over-blown, with food repair
To their forsaken nests, and callow care."

184 STORM AND WINTER.

upon land, exists no local observation, no landmark, no guide ; the
currents of the atmosphere alone, in sympathy with those of water —
perhaps, also, some invisible magnetic currents — pilot this hardy
voyager.

How strange a science ! Not only does the swallow in Europe
know that the insect which fails him there awaits him elsewhere, and
goes in quest of it, travelling upon the meridian ; but in the same
latitude, and under the same climates, the loriot of the United States
understands that the clieny is ripe in France, and depai*ts without
hesitation to gather his harvest of our fruits.

It would be wrong to believe that these migrations occur in their
season, without any definite choice of days, and at indeterminate
epochs. We ourselves have been able to observe, on the contrary, the
exact and lucid decision which regulates them ; not an hour too soon
or too late.

Wlien living at Nantes, in October 1851, the season being still
exceptionally fine, the insects numerous, and the feeding-ground of the
swallows plentifully provided, it was our happy chance to catch sight
of the sage republic, convoked in one immense and noisy assembly,
deliberating on the roof of the church of St. Felix, which dominates
over the Erdre, and looks across the Loire. Wliy was the meeting
held on this particular day, at this hour more than at an}^ other ?
We did not know ; soon afterwards we were able to understand it.

Bright was the morning sky, but the wind blew from La Vendue.
My pines bewailed their fate, and from my afllicted cedar issued a
low deep voice of mourning. The ground was strewn with fruit,

MIGRATIONS. 185

which we all set to work to gather. Gradually the weather grew
cloudy, the sky assumed a dull leaden gi"ay, the wind sank, all was
death-like. It was then, at about four o'clock, that simultaneously
arrived, from all points, from the wood, from the Erdre, from the city,
from the Loii'e, from the Sevre, infinite legions, darkening the day,
which settled on the church roof, with a myriad voices, a myriad
cries, debates, discussions. Though ignorant of their language, it was
not difl&cult for us to perceive that they differed among themselves.
It may be that the youngest, beguiled by the warm breath of autumn,
would fain have lingered longer. But the wiser and more experienced
travellers insisted vipon departure. They prevailed ; the black masses,
moving all at once like a huge cloud, winged then* flight towards the
south-east, probably towards Italy. They had scarcely accomplished
three hundred leagues (four or five hours' flight) before all the
cataracts of heaven were let loose to deluge the earth ; for a moment
we thought it was a Flood. Sheltered in our house, which shook with
the furious blast, we admired the wisdom of the winged soothsayers,
which had so prudently anticipated the annual epoch of migration.

Clearly it was not hunger that had driven them. With a beau-
tiful and still abundant nature around them, they had perceived and
seized upon the precise hour, without antedating it. The morrow
would have been too late. Tlie insects, beaten down by the tempest
( )f rain, would have been undiscoverable ; all the life on which they
subsisted would have taken refuge in the earth.

Moreover, it is not famine alone, or the forewarning of famine,
that decides the movements of the migrating species. If those birds
which live on insects are constrained to depart, those which feed on
wild berries might certainly remain. What impels them ? Is it the
cold ? Most of them could readily endure it. To these special reasons
we must add another, of a loftier and more general character — it is
the need of light.

Even as the plant unalterably follows the day and the sun, even
as the mollusc (to use a previous illustration) rises towards and prefers
to live in the brighter regions— even so the bird, with its sensitive

12 A

186

STORM AND WINTER.

eye, grows melancholy in the shortened days and gathering mists of
autumn. That decline of light, which is sometimes dear to us for
moral causes, is for the bird a gTief, a death. Light ! more light !
Let us rather die than see the day no more ! This is the true pur-
port of its last autumnal strain, its last cry on its departure in October.
I comprehended it in their farewells.

Their resolution is ti-uly bold and courageous, when one thmks
on the tremendous journey they must achieve, twice every year, over
mountains, and seas, and deserts, under such diverse climates, by
variable winds, through many perils, and such tragical adventures.
For the light and hardy voiliers, for the church-martin, for the keen
swallow which defies the falcon, the enterprise perhaps is trivial.
But other tribes have neither their strength nor their wings ; most
of them are at this time heavy with abundant food ; they have
passed through the glowing time of love and maternity ; the female
has finished that grand work of nature — has given birth to, and
brought up her callow brood ; her mate, how he has spent his vigour

MIGRATIONS. 187

in song ! These two, then, have consummated life ; a viiiue has
gone out from them ; an age already separates them from the fresh
energy of their spring.

Many would remain, but a goad impels thgm forward. Tlie
slowest are the most ardent. The French quail will traverse the
Mediterranean, will cross the range of Atlas ; sweeping over the
Sahara, it will plunge into the kingdoms of the negro ; tliese, too, it
will leave behind ; and, finally, if it pauses at the Cape, it is because
there the infinite Austral ocean commences, which promises it no nearer
shelter than the icy wastes of the Pole, and the very winter which
exiled it from Egypt.

What gives them confidence for such enterprises ? Some may
trust to their arms, the weakest to their numbers, and abandon
themselves to fate. The stock-dove says : " Out of ten or a hundred
thousand the assassin cannot slay more than ten, and doubtlessly I
shall not be one of the victims." They seize their opportunity ; the
flying cloud passes at night ; if the moon rise, against her silver
radiance the black wings stand out clear and distinct ; they escape,
confused, in her pale lustre. The valiant lark, the national bird of
our ancient Gaul and of the invincible hope, also trusts to his
numbers ; he sets out in the day-time, or rather, he wanders from
province to province ; decimated, hunted, he does not the less give
utterance to his song.

But the lonely bird, which has neither the support of numbers
nor of strength, what will become of him ? Wliat wilt thou do, poor
solitary nightingale, which, like others of thj race, nuist confront this
gTeat adventure, but without assistance, without comrades? Thou, what
art thou, friend ? A voice ! The very power which is in thee will
be thy betrayal. In thy sombre attire, thou miglit well pass unseen
by blending with the tints of the discoloured woods of autumn. But
see now ! The leaf is still purple ; it wears not the dull dead brown
of the later months.

Ah, why dost thou not remain ? why not imitate the timorou.s-
ness of tliose birds which in such myriads fly no furthei- than

188

STORM AND WINTER.

PuA'ence ? There, sheltered behind a I'oek, thou shalt find, I assure
thee, an Asiatic or Afiican winter. The gorge of Ollioules is worth
all the valleys of Syria.

"No; I must^ depart. Others may tarry; for they have only to
gain the East. But me, my cradle summons me : I must see again
that glowing heaven, those luminous and sumptuous ruins where my
ancestors lived and sang ; I must plant my foot once more on my
earliest love, the rose of Asia ; I must bathe mj^self in the sunshine.
There is the mystery of life, there quickens the flame in which my
song shall be renewed ; my voice, my muse is the light."

Thus, then, he takes wing ; but I think his heart must throb as
he draws near the Alps, Avhen their snowy peaks announce his

^5 ^---v.

approach to the terror-haunted gate on whose rocks are posted the
cruel children of day and night, the vulture, the eagle — all the hooked
and talon-armed robbers, athirst for the warm blood of life — the
accursed species which inspire the senseless poetry of man— some,
nohle murderers, which bleed quickly and drain the flowing tide ;
others, ignoble murderers, which choke and destroy ; — in a word, all
the hideous forms of murder and death.

I imagine to myself, then, that the poor little musician whose
voice is silenced — not his ingegno, nor his delicate thought — having

MIGEATIO-NS. 189

no friend to consult, will lialt to consider well before entering upon
the long ambush of the pass of Savoy. He pauses at the threshold, on
a friendly roof, well known to myself, or in the hallowed groves of
the Charmettes,* deliberates and says : " If I pass during the day, they
will all be there ; they know the season ; the eagle will pounce
upon me ; I die. If I pass by night, the great horn-owl (due), the
common owl {Jiihoii), the entire host of horrible phantoms, with eyes
enlarged in the darkness, will seize me, and cany me off to their young.
Alas ! what shaU I do ? I must endeavour to avoid both night and
day. At the gloomy hour of dawn, when the cold, raw air chills in liis
eyrie the great fierce beast, which knows not how to build a nest, I may
fly unperceived. And even if he see me, I shall be leagues away before
he can put into motion the cumbrous machinery of his frozen \vings."

The calculation is judicious, but nevertheless a score of accidents
may disturb it. Starting at midnight, he may encounter in the face,
during his long flight across Savoy, the east wind, which engulfs and
delays him, neutralizes his exertions, and fetters his pinions. Heavens!
it is morning now. Those sombre giants, already clothed in October
in their snowy mantles, reveal upon their vast expanse of glittering
white a black spot, which moves with terrible rapidity. How gloomy
are they already, these mountains, and of what evil augury, di-aped
in the long folds of their winter shrouds ! Motionless as are their
peaks, they create beneath them and around them an everlasting
agitation of violent and antagonistic currents, which struggle with
one another so furiously that at times they compel the l)ird to tarry.
"If I fly in the lower air, the torrents which hurl through the
shadows with their clanging floods, will snare me in their whirling
vapours. And if I mount to the cold and lofty realms, which kindle
with a light of their own, I give myself up to death ; the frost will
seize and slacken my wings."

An eflbrt has saved him. With head bent low, he plunges, he
falls into Italy. At Susa or towards Turin he builds a nest, and
strengthens his pinions. He recovers himself in the depth of the
* The favourite haunt of Jean Jacqiies Rousseau, on the bank of I^ake Leman.

190 STORM AND WINTER.

gigantic Lombard corbeille, that great nursery of fruits and flowers
where Virgil listened to his song. The land has in nowise changed ;
now, as then, the Italian, an exile from his home, the sad cultivator of
another's fields,* the duriis arator, pursues the nightingale. The
useful insect-devourer is proscribed as an eater of gi-ain. Let him
cross then, if he can, the Adriatic, from isle to isle, despite the winged
corsairs, which keep watch on the very rocks ; he will amve perhaps
in the land ever consecrated to birds — in genial, hospitable, bountiful
Egj^pt — where all are spared, nourished, blessed, and kindly welcomed.

Still happier land, if in its blind hospitality it did not also shelter
tlie murderer. The nightingale and dove are gladly entertained, it is
true, but no less so the eagle. On the terraces of sultans, on the bal-
conies of minarets, ah, poor traveller, I see those flashing dreadful
eyes which dart their gaze this way. And I see that they have
already marked thee !

Do not remain here long. Thy season will not last. Tlie de-
structive wind of the deseit will dry up, and destroy, and sweep
away thy meagre nourishment. Not a gnat will be left to sustain
thy wing and thy voice. Bethink thyself of the nest which thou
hast left in our woods, remember thy European loves. The sk}^ was
gloomy, but there thou madest for thyself a sky of thine own. Love
was around thee ; every soul thrilled at thy voice ; the purest throbbed
for thee. There is the real sun, there the fairest Orient. True light
is where one loves.

■* This was written before tlie annexfitiou of Lombanlv to the new Italian kin'^dom.

ICHATJOBS-THE SWULLOW,

MIGRATIONS : CONTINUED.

THE SWALLOW.

Undoubtedly the swallow has seized upon
our dwellings without ceremony ; 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

13

194 MIGRATIONS.

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 behavioui*, 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 .■^aid, " Sister swallows, can you not be silent?"

Theirs is the hearth. Wliere 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 dis-
turbed by masons, it is still retaken possession of, re-occupied by these
faithfid 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
nevei*theless 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 ; tliis revolving flight, this inces-
santly returning movement, has always attracted our eyes and heart,
tlirowing us into a reverie, into a world of thought.

We see her fliglit clearly, but never, or scarcely evei", her little

THE SWALLOW

l'.t5

black face. Who, tlien, art thou, thou who always concealest thyself,
who never showest me auffht

^^>

^«SS^

^>..

but thy trenchant wings —
scythes rapid as that of Time ?
But Time goes forward without
pause ; thou, thou always re-
turnest. 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.

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 t'le 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 co'mpanions, industrious travellers, followed the -swallow's

196

MIGRATIONS.

life, except that on tlieir 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 Ruckert,
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 : —

^^

" De la jeunesse, de la jeunesse,

Un chant me revient tonjours —
Oh! que c'est loin! Oh! que cest loin

Tout ce qui fut autrefois ;

" Ce que chantait, ce que chantait
Celle qui ramene le printemps,
Ilasant le village de I'aile, rasant le village de I'aile.
Est-ce bien ce qu'elle chante encore?

" ' Quand je partis, quand je partis,
Etaient pleins Tarmoire et le cotfre.
Quand je revins, quand je revius,
Je ne trouvai plus que le vide.'

" 0 mon foj^er de famille,
Laisse-moi seulement une fois
M'asseoir a la place sacree
Et m'envoler dans les songes!

" Elle revient bien I'hirondelle,
Et I'armoire video se remplit.
JIais le vide du cccur reste, mais reste le vide du cceur.
Et rien ne le remplira.

" Elle rase pourtant le village,
Elle chante comme autrefois —
' Quand je partis, quand je partis,
Coffre, armoire, tout etait plein.
Quand je revins, quand je revins
Je ne trouvai plus que le vide.' "

THE SWALLOW.

197

Imitated: —

From childhood gay, from childliood 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,

Cotfer and barn will brim once more ;
Tut 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 ; 1 ,

When I came back, when 1 came back, v

I found a piteous lack of store."

198 MIGRATIONS.

The swallow, caught in the morning, and closely examined, is
seen to be a strange and ugly bird, we confess ; but this fact per-
fectly well agrees with what is, par excellence, the hircl — the being
among all beings born for flight. To this object Nature has sacrificed
everything ; she has laughed at form, thinking only of iniovenient ;
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 flj'ing ; she drinks, she bathes while flying ;
while flying, she feeds her young.

If she does not equal in accviracy 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 infinitiim. 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 o^vn. Who, like her, can change in the
very moment of springing, and turn abruj^tly ? 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 SWALLOW.

199

tlie reverse of all other beings ; movement alone affords him repose.
\\1ien he dai-ts 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 fatahty of gravitation has re-
sumed possession of him ; the chief among
birds seems sunk to a reptile.

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 con-
strained 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-2')ode, "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 tender-
ness 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

f

/y

200 MIGRATIONS.

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.

Libertd ! molto e desiato bene ! I revolved these words in my
heart on the great piazza of Turin, where we never wearied of watch-
ing the flight of innumerous swallows, hearing a thousand little
joyous cries. On their descent from the Alps they found there con-
venient habitations aU prepared for their reception, in the apertures
left by the scafibld-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

THE SWALLOW.

201

shot from a bow. Uiilike man, who is incessantly called back to
eartlj, 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 ovei-shadowed 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.

,.i ;-

; V'-l^^ .

nmimm m rm temperate zsm.

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
h) with our labours, and lightening them by their songs ? ^
'k Wliy is that happy spectacle of alliance and harmony,
^j^ which is the end of nature, presented only in the sj
■^ ^ 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 willinglj'", 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
thinkinar to suckle mo.

206 HARMONIES OF THE TEMPERATE ZONE.

This milder nature was made for me, is my legitimate spouse — I
recognize her. And, above all, she resembles me ; like me, she is
gi-ave, 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 fniit 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 gi-een 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 hai'monizes with our
thoughts and refreshes our hearts.

On this first layer of humble yielding herbage, which has no pre-
tensions to mount higher, stands out in bold contrast the strong indi-
viduality of the robust trees, so diflerent 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 Ger-
many 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

HARMONIES OF THE TEMPERATE ZONE.

207

and associated with his labours, endows them with the eternity of
the works of nature.

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, endur-
ing 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 vv^ith song, love, and
youth.

208

HARMONIES OF THE TEMPERATE ZONE.

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 skj^

Then, then. Nature speaks to aU — her potent voice troubles even
the soul of sages. And why not ? Is she not holy ? And tliis sur-
prising 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 irladness — is it not, as it were, a return of God ?

HARMONIES OF THE TEMPERATE ZONE. 209

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 ver-
dure resi)onded 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, 0 ever-
lasting 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 I

^^ ^-^^"^^V

V-

^cAi-O;

■XU^

Man, bird, all natui-e, utter the same desire. We exist through
change.

To these forcible alternations of heat, cold, fog, and sun, melan-

14

210 HARMONIES OF THE TEMPERATE ZONE.

clioly and joyaimce, we owe the tempered, the powerful personality of
our West. Rain wearies us to-day ; fine weather will come witli tlie
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 thnbre, 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 potits."

5«A

ST

•' - ( '/ ,

WE mm m mm immmn m

j

THE BIRD

AS THE LABOURER OF MAN

The " miserly agriculturist," is the accurate and
kf,;^ forcible expression of Virgil. Miserly, and blind, in
truth, for he proscribes the birds which destroy in-
sects and protect his crops.

Not a grain will he spare to the bird which, during

; ) ^S' ^^ ^^le winter rains, hunted up the future insect, sought
' out the nests of the larvte, examined them, turned over
evciy leaf, and daily destroyed myriads of fature cater-
pillars ; but sacks of corn to the adult insects, and whole
fields to the gi'asshoppers which the bird would have
combated !

"With his eyes fixed on the fuiTOw, on the present
moment, without sight or foresight; deaf to the gi-and
haiinony 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

214 THE BIRD

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 ^vath the starling, the pro-
tector of the maize. The spaiTOw 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 dis-
ciplined, 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 larvae, multipled a,d
injinitur)i, pushed so far their subten'anean 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, aU 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 — onost frequently as its guest — the
parasite which undermines and cankers it.

Inert and defenceless life, especially vegetable, deprived of loco-
motion, would succumb to it but for the stronger support of the inde-
fatigable enemy of the parasite, the merciless pursuer, the winged
conqueror of the monsters.

The war rages xvithout 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

AS THE LABOUKER OF MAN.

215

tenible destroyers of plant-life, carry off the superfluous. Thev
there a necessity.

They ravage among —^^fe" • ■--'.-*-.•' -•*^.
the prodigious J-^' ^" „ ,/ ^

abundance of spon-
taneous 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 gar-
ner in his place, devour his labour and
its harvest ; they attack even his
hfe.

Do not say, " Winter is on my side ;
it will check the foe." Winter does but
slay the enemies which would perish
of themselves. It kills especially the
ephemera, whose existence was alrea ;y
measured by that of the flower, or the
leaf with which it was bound up. But,
before dying, the prescient atom assures
the safety of its posterity ; it finds for it
an asylum, conceals and carefully deposits
its future, the germ of its reproduction.
As eggs, as larvae, or in their own shapes,
living, mature, armed, these invisible
creatures sleep in the bosom of the earth,
awaiting their opportunity. Is she im-
movable, this earth ? In the meadows
I see her undulate — the black miner,
the mole, continues her labours. At a
higher elevation, in the dry gi-ounds,
stretch the subten-anean gTanaries,

where the philosophical rat, on a good pile of corn, passes the season
in patience.

216 THE BIRD

All this life breaks forth at spring-time. From high, from low,
on the right, on the left, these predatory tribes, e'chelonned by legions
which succeed one another and relieve one another each in its month,
in its day — the immense, the iiTesistible conscription of nature — will
march to the conquest of man's works. The division of labour is
perfect. Each has his post marked out, and will make no mistake.
Each will go straight to his tree or his plant. And such will be their
tremendous numbers, that not a leaf but will have its legion.

WTiat wilt thou do, poor man ? How wilt thou multiph' thyself?
Hast thou wings to pursue them ? Hast thou even eyes to see them ?
Thou mayest kill them at thy pleasure ; their security is complete :
kill, annihilate millions ; they live by thousands of millions ! "VMiere
thou triumphest by sword and fire, burning up the plant itself, thou
hearest all around the light whirring of the great army of atoms,
which gives no heed to thy victory, and destroys unseen.

Listen. I will give thee two counsels. Weigh them, and adopt
the wiser.

The first remedy for this, if you resolve upon fighting your foe, is to
poison everything. Steep your seeds in sulphate of copper ; put your
barley under the protection of verdigris. This the foe is unprepared
for ; it disconcerts him. If he touches it, he dies or sickens. You,
also, it is true, are scarcely flourishing ; your adventurous stratagem
may help the plagues which devastate our era. Happy age 1 The
benevolent labourer poisons at the outset ; this copper-coloured corn,
handed over to the baker, ferments with the sulphate ; a simple
and agreeable means of " raising" the light paie, to which, perhaps,
people would object.

No ; adopt a better course than this. Take your side. Before
so many enemies it is no shame to fall back. Let things go, and fold
your arms. Rest, and look on. Be like that brave man who, on
the eve of Waterloo, wounded and prostrate, contrived to lift himself
up and scan the horizon ; but he saw there Blucher, and the great
cloud of the black army. Then he fell back, exclaiming, " They are
too many !"'

AS THE LABOUEER OF MAN. 217

And bow much more right have you to say so ! You are alone
against the universal conspiracy of life. You also may exclaim, " They
are too many !"

You insist. See here these fields so full of inspiring hope ; see
the humid pastures where I might please myself with watching the
cattle lost amoncj the thick herbage. Let us lead thither the herds !

They are expected, Witlioiit them what would become of those
livino; clouds of insects which love nothino; but blood ? The blood of
the ox is good ; the blood of man is better. Enter ; seat yourself in
theii" midst ; you will be well received, for you are their banquet.
These darts, these horns, these pincers, will find an exquisite delicacy
in your flesh ; a sanguinary orgie will open on your body for the
frantic dance of this famished host, which will not relax at least from
want ; you shall see more than one fall away, and die of the
intoxicating fountain which he had opened with his dart. Wounded,
bleeding, swollen with pufied-up sores, hope for no repose. Others
will come, and again others, for ever, and without end. For if the
climate is less severe than in the zones of the South, in revenge, the
eternal rain — that ocean of soft wann water incessantly flooding our
meadows — hatches in a hopeless fecundity those nascent and gTcedy
lives, which are impatient to rise, to be born, and to finish then- career
by the destruction of superior existences.

I have seen, not in the marshes, but on the western heights, those
pleasant verdurous hills, clothed -with woods or meadows — I have
seen the plu%aal waters repose for lack of outlet ; and then, when
evaporated by the sun's rays, leave the earth covered with a rich and
abundant animal production — slugs, snails, insects of a myriad species,
aU people of tenible appetite, born -with sharp teeth, with formidable
apparatus, and ingenious machines of destruction. Powerless against
the irruption of an unexpected host which crawled, stirred, ascended,
penetrated, had almost eaten up ourselves, we contended with them
through the agency of some brave and voracious fowls, which never
counted their enemies, and did not criticise, but swallowed them.
These Breton and Vendean fowls, inspired with the genius of their

218

THE BIKD

coimtiy, made their campaign so much the more successfully, because
each waged war in its 0"vvti manner. The blacl\ the gray, and the
egg-layer (such were their military titles), marched together in close
array, and recoiled not a step ; the dreamer or pliilosopher prefeiTed
skirmishing by himself (choiianner), and accomplished much more
work. A superb black cat, the companion of their solitude, studied
daily the track of the field mouse and the lizard, hunted the wasp,
devoured the Spanish fly, always at some distance in advance of
the respectful hens.

-'■^ \ip^:^j.A,

One word more in reference to them, and one regret. Our business
being finished, we prepared for our departure. But what would become
of ihe'ffh ? Given to a frienii, they would assuredly be eaten. We
deliberated long. Then, coming to a vigorous decision, according to
the ancient creed of savage tribes, who believed that it was sweetest
to die by the hands of those we love, and thought that by eating
their heroes they themselves became heroic, we made of them, not
without lamentation, a funereal banquet.

It is a traly grand spectacle to see descend — one might almost say
from heaven — against this fiightful swarming of the universal
monster-liirth which awakens in the spring, hissing, whin'ing, croak-
ing, buzzing, in its huge hunger, the universal saviour, in a hundred

AS THE LABOURER OF MAX.

219

forms and a hundred legions, differing in arms and character, but
all endowed with wings, all sharing a seeming privilege of ubi-
quity.

To the universal presence of the insect, to its ubiquity of numbers,
responds that of the bird, of his swiftness, of his wing. The gi-eat
moment is that when the insect, developing itself through the heat,

4 / V' hv 7^.^i/

ATT ^ ^-'l '"J^'^vi

V

meets the bird face to face; the bird multiplied in numbers ; the bird
which, having no milk, must feed at this very moment a numerous
family with her living prey. Every year the world would be en-
dangered if the bird could suckle, if its aliment were the work of an
individual, of a stomach. But see, the noisy, restless brood, by ten,
twenty, or thirty little bills, cry out for their prey; and the exigency
is so great, such the maternal ardour to respond to this demand, that the
desperate tomtit, unable to satisfy its score of children mth three
hundred catei'pillars a day, will even invade the nests of other birds
and pick out the brains of their young.

From our windows, which opened on the Luxemburg, we observed
every winter the commencement of this useful war of the bird against
the insect. We saw it in December inaugurate the year's labour.
The honest and respectable household of the thinish, which one might
call the leaf- lifter {tourne-feuilles), did their work by couples; when
the sunshine followed rain, they visited the pools, and Ufted the

220 THE BIRD.

leaves one by one, with skill and conscientiousness, allowing nothing
to pass which had not been attentively examined.

Thus, in the gloomiest months, when the sleep of nature so closely
resemljles death, the bird continued for us the spectacle of life. Even
among the snow, the thrush saluted us when we arose. During our
gi'ave winter walks we were always accompanied by the wi'en, with
its golden crest, its short, quick song, its soft and flute-like recall.
The more familiar spaiTOWs appeared on our balconies; punctual to
the hour, the}" knew that twice a-day their meal would be ready for
tljem, "without any peril to their freedom.

For the rest, the honest labourers, on the arrival of spring, scrupled
to ask our aid. As soon as their yovmg were able to fly, they joy-
ously brought them to our windows, as if to thank and bless us.

-^:^^me^'

k / J^v'i

•^ "--.' c

LSEOor-fHE weoDPiCiEe.

■Wfcr

LABOUR.

THE WOODPECKER.

Among the calumnies of which birds
have been made the victims, none is more
absurd than to say, as it has been said, that
the woodpecker, when buiTOwing among the
trees, selects the robust and healthy trunks,
those that offer the greatest difficulties, and
must increase his toil. Common sense plainly
shows that the poor animal, living upon
worms and insects, will seek the infirm, the
rotten trees, those offering the least resistance,
and promising, moreover, the most abun-
dant prey. The persistent hostility which
he wages against the destructive tribes
that would corrupt the vigorous trunk,
is a signal service rendered to man. The
State owes him, if not the appointment,
at least the honorary title, of Conservator
of the Forests. But what is the fact ? That for all his rewwl,
icnorant officials have often set a price upon his head !

224 LABOUR.

But the woodpecker would be no true type of the workman if he
were not calumniated and persecuted. His modest guild, spi-ead over
the two worlds, serves, teaches, and edities man. His garb varies ;
but the common sign by which he may be recognized is the scarlet
hood with which the good artisan generally covers his head, his
firm and solid skull. His special tool, which is at once pickaxe and
auger, chisel and plane, is his square-fashioned bill. His nervous
limbs, armed with strong black nails of a sure and firm grasp, seat
him securely on his branch, where he remains for whole days, in an
awkward attitude, striking always from below upwards. Except in
the morning, when he bestirs himself, and stretches his limbs in every
direction, like all superior workmen, who allow a few moments' pre-
paration in order not to interrupt themselves afterwards, he digs and
digs throughout a long day with singular perseverance. You may
hear him still later, for he prolongs his work into the night, and thus
gains some additional hours.

His constitution is well adapted for so laborious a life. His
muscles, always stretched, render his flesh hard and leathery. The
vesicle of the gall, in him very large, seems to indicate a bilious dis-
position, eager and violent in work, but otherwise by no means choleric.

Necessarily the opinions which men have pronounced on this
singular being are widely different. They have judged this gi-eat
worker well or ill, according as they have esteemed or despised work,
according as they themselves have been more or less laborious, and
have regarded a sedentary and industrious life as cursed or blessed
by Heaven.

It has often been questioned whether the woodpecker was gay or
melancholy, and various answers have been given — perhaps all equally
good — according to species and climate. I can easily believe that
Wilson and Audubon, who chiefly refer to the golden-winged wood-
pecker of the Carolinas, on the threshold of the Ti'opics, have found
him very lively and restless ; this woodpecker gains his livelihood
without toil in a genial country, rich in insects ; his curved elegant
beak, less rugged than the beak of our species, seems to indicate that he

THE WOODPECKER.

225

works in less rebellious woods. But the woodpecker of France and
Germany, compelled to pierce the
bark of our ancient European oaks,
possesses quite a different instrument
— a hard, strong, and heavy bill. It
is probable that he devotes more
hours to his toil than his American
congener. He is, as a labourer,
bound by hard conditions, working
more and earning less. In dry
seasons especially, his lot is wretched;
his prey flies fi-om him, and retires to
an extreme distance, in search of
moisture. Therefore he invokes the
rain, with constant cry: "Plieu!
Plieu .' " It is thus that the common
people intei-pret his note ; in Bur-
gundy he is called The Miller's Pro-
curer; woodpecker and miller, if the
rain should not descend, would stand
stiU and run the risk of starving.

One eminent ornithologist, Tous-
senel, an excellent and ingenious
observer, seems to me mistaken in
his judgment of the woodpecker's
character, when he pronounces him a
lively bird. For on what grounds ?
On the amusing curvets in which he
indulges to gain the heart of his love.
But who among us, or among more
serious beings, in such a case, does
not do the same ? He calls him also
a tumbler and a clown, because at his appearance he wheeled round
rapidly. For a bird whose powers of flight are very limited, it was

15

226 LABOUR.

perhaps the wisest course to adopt, especially in the presence of such
an admirable shot. And this proved his good sense. A vulgar
sportsman, the woodpecker, which knows the coarseness of his flesh,
would have suffered to approach him. But in the presence of such a
connoisseur and so keen a friend of birds, he had gTcat cause for fear,
lest he should be impaled to adorn his collection.

I beg this illustrious wiiter to consider also the moral habitudes and
disposition which would be acquii'ed from such continuous toil. The
imjpillonne counts for nothing here, and the leng-th of such working-
days far exceeds the convenient limit of what Fourier calls agi-eeable
labour. The woodpecker toils alone and on his own account ; un-
doubtedly he makes no complaint ; he feels that it is for his interest
to work hard and to work lonof. Firm on his robust legs, though in
a painful attitude, he remains at his post all day, and even far mto
the night. Is he happy ? I believe so. Gay 1 I doubt it. Melan-
choly ? By no means. The passionate toil which renders us so
grave, compensates by driving away sorrow.

The unintelligent artisan, or the poor over-wi'ought slave, whose
only idea of happiness lies in immobility, would not fail to see in a
life of such assiduity the malediction of Fate. The artisans of the
German towns assert that he is a baker, who, in the indolent ease of
liis counting-house, starved the poor, deceived them, sold them false
weight. And now, as a punishment, he works, they say, and must
work until the day of judgment, living on insects only.

A poor and unmeaning explanation ! I prefer the old Italian
fable : Picus, son of Time or Saturn, was an austere hero, who
scorned the deceitful love and illusions of Circe. To avoid her,
he took to himself winffs, and flew into the forest. If he bears no
longer a human figure, he has — what is better — a foreseeing and
prophetic genius; he knows that which is to come, he sees that
which is to be.

A very grave opinion upon the woodpecker is pronounced by the
Indians of North America. Tliese heroes discern very clearly that the
woodpecker himself was a hero. Tliey are partial to wearing the head

THE WOODPECKER.

227

of one which they name "the wiry-billed woodpecker," and believe that
his ardour and courage will pass into them. A well-founded belief,
as experience has sho"s\m. The puniest heart must feel strengthened
which sees ever present before it this eloquent symbol, saying : "I
shall be like it in strength and constancy."

Only it should be noted that, if the woodpecker be a hero, he is
the peaceful hero of labour. He asks nothing more. His beak,
which might be very formidable, and his powerful spurs, are never-
theless prepared for everything else but combat. His toil so completely
absorbs him, that no competition could stimulate him to fight. It
engulfs him, requires of him all the exertion of his faculties.

Varied and complex is his work. At first the skilful forester, full
of tact and experience, tests his tree with his hammer — I mean his

228 LABOUR.

beak. He listens, as the tree resounds, to what it has to say, to
what there is within it. The process of auscultation, but recently
adopted in medicine, has been the woodpecker's leading act for some
thousands of years. He interrogates, sounds, detects by his ear the
cavernous voids which the substance of the tree presents. Such an
one, sound and vigorous in appearance, which, on account of its
gigantic size, has been marked out for the shipwright's axe, the wood-
pecker, by his peculiar skill, condemns as worm-eaten, rotten, sure to
fail in the most fatal manner possible, to bend in construction, or
to spring a leak and so produce a wi'eck.

The tree thoroughly tested, the woodpecker selects it for himself,
and establishes himself upon it ; there he will exercise his art. The
trunk is hollow, therefore rotten, therefore populous ; a tribe of
insects inhabits it. You must strike at the gate of the city. The
citizens in wild tumult attempt to escape, either through the walls of
the city, or below, through the drains. Sentinels should be posted ;
but in their default the solitary besieger watches, and from moment
to moment looks behind to snap up the passing fugitives, making use,
for this pui-pose, of an extremely long tongue, wliicli he darts to and
fro like a miniature sei'pent. The uncertainty of the sport, and the
hearty appetite which it stimulates, fill him with passion ; his glance
pierces through bark and wood ; he is present amidst the terrors and
the counsels of his enemies. Sometimes he descends very suddenly,
in alarm lest a secret issue should save the besieged.

A tree externally sound, but rotten and corrupt within, is a
terrible image for the patriot who dreams over the destinies of cities.
Rome, at the epoch when the republic begun to totter, feeling itself
like to such a tree, trembled one day as a woodpecker alighted on
the tribunal in open forum, under the very hand of the prsetor. The
people were profoundly moved, and revolved the gloomiest thoughts.
But the augurs, who had been summoned, arrived : if the bird escaped
with impunity, the republic would perish ; if he remained, he threat-
ened only him who held the bird in his hand — the prsetor. This
magistrate, who was ^lius Tubero, killed the bird immediately,

THE WOODPECKER. 229

died soon afterwards, and the republic endured six centuries
longer.

This is gi-and, not ridiculous. It endured through this noble
appeal to the citizen's devotion. It endured through this silent
response given to it by a great heart. Such actions are fertile ; they
make men and heroes ; they prolong the life of states.

To return to our bird : this workman, this solitary, this sublime
prophet does not escape the universal law. Twice a-year he grows
demented, throws off his austerity, and, shaU it be said, becomes
ridiculous. Happy he among men who plays the fool but twice
a-year !

Ridiculous ! He is not so because he loves, but because he loves
comically. Gorgeously arrayed, and in his finest plumage, relieving
his somewhat sombre garb by his beautiful scarlet grecque, he whirls
round his lady-love ; and his rivals do the same.

But these innocent workers, designed for the most serious labours
— strangers to the arts of the fashionable world, to the gi-aces of the
humming-birds — know not in what way to manifest their duty, and
present their very humble homage but by the most uncouth cur-
vettings. Uncouth at least in our opinion ; they are scarcely so in
the eyes of the object of these attentions. They please her, and this
is all that is needed. The queen's choice declared, no battle can
take place. Admirable are the manners of these good and worthy
workmen. The others retire aggrieved, but with delicacy cherisli
religiously the right of liberty.

Do the fortunate suitor and his fair one, think you, air their idle
loves wandering through the forests ? Not at all. They instantly
begin to work. " Show me thy talents," says she, " and let me see
that I have not deceived myself." What an opportunity for an
artist ! She inspires his genius. From a carpenter he becomes a
joiner, a cabinet-maker ; from a cabinet-maker, a geometer ! The
regularity of forms, that divine rhythm, appears to him in love.

It is exactly the renowned history of the famous blacksmith of
Anvers, Quintin Matsys, who loved a painter's daughter, and who, to

230

LABOUR.

win her love, became the greatest painter of Flanders in the sixteenth

century.

" Of Vulcan swart, love an Apelles made."
(D"un noir Vulcain, ramonx fit un Appelle).

Tlius, one morning the woodpecker develops into the sculptor.
With severe precision, the perfect roundness which the compass might
give, he hollows out the graceful vault of a superb hemisphere.
The whole receives the polish of marble and ivory. All kinds of
hygienic and strategic precautions are not wanting. A narrow wind-
ing entry, whose slope inclines outwards that the water may not
penetrate, favours the defence ; it suffices for one head and one
courageous bill to close it.

Wliat heart could resist all these toils ? Who w^ould not accept
this artist, this laborious purveyor for domestic wants, this intrepid
defender ? Who would not believe herself able to accomplish in

^ oO \ ^^^^'-"•

safety, behind the generous rampart of this devoted champion, the
delicate mystery of maternity ?

So she resists no longer, and behold the pair installed ! There is

THE WOODPECKER. 231

wanting now but a nuptial chant (Hymen ! 0 Hymenese !) It is not
the woodpecker's fault if Nature has denied to hi^ genius the muse of
melody. At least, in his harsh voice one cannot mistake the im-
passioned accents of the heart.

May they be happy ! May a young and amiable generation
spring into life, and mature under their eyes ! Birds of prey shall
not easily penetrate here. Only gi-ant that the serpent, the fiightful
black serpent, may never visit this nest ! Oh, that the child's rough
hand may not cruelly crush its sweet hope ! And, above all, may
the ornithologist, the friend of birds, keep afar from this spot !

If persevering toil, ardent love of family, heroic defence of liberty,
could impose respect and arrest the cruel hand of man, no sportsman
would touch this noble bird. A young naturalist, who smothered
one in order to impale it, has told me that he sickened of the brutal
struggle, and suffered a keen remorse ; it seemed to him as if he had
committed an assassination.

Wilson appears to have felt an analogous impression. " The first
time," says he, " that I observed this bird, in North Carolina, I
wounded him slightly in the wing, and when I caught him he gave
a cry exactly like an infant's, but so loud and lamentable that my
frightened horse nearly threw me off. I carried him to Wilming-ton :
in passing through the streets, the bird's prolonged cries drew to the
doors and windows a crowd of people, especially of women, fiUed with
alarm. I continued my route, and, on entering the court of the
hotel, met the master of the house and a crowd of people, alarmed
at what they heard. Judge how this alarm increased when I asked
for what was needed both by my child and myself. The master
remained pale and stupid, and the others were dumb with astonish-
ment. After having amused myself at their expense for a minute
or two, I revealed my woodpecker, and a burst of universal laughter
echoed around. I ascended with it to my chamber, where I left it
while I paid attention to my horse's wants. I returned at the end
of an hour, and, on opening the door, heard anew the same terrible
cry, which this time appeared to originate in giief at being discovered

232 LABOUR.

in his attempts to escape. He had climbed along the window almost
to the ceiling, immediately above which he had begun to excavate.
The bed was covered vnth. large pieces of plaster, the laths of the
ceiling were exposed for an area of nearly fifteen square inches, and
a hole through which you could pass your thumb was already
formed in the skylight ; so that, in the space of another hour, he
would certainly have succeeded in effecting an opening. I fastened
round his neck a cord, which I attached to the table, and left him —
I wanted to preserve him alive — while I went in search of food. On
returning, I could hear that he had resumed his labours, and on my
entrance saw that he had nearly destroyed the table to which he
had been fastened, and against which he had directed all his wratli.
When I wished to take a sketch, he cut me several times with his
beak, and displayed so noble and so indomitable a courage that I
was tempted to restore him to his native forests. He lived with me
nearly three days, refusing all food, and I was present at his death
with sincere regi-et."

.^^^,{ .^l\j

There is no one who will not have remarked that

birds kept in a cage in a drawing-room never fail, if

dsitors arrive and the conversation grows animated,

to take a part in it, after their fashion, by chattering

or singing.

It is their universal instinct, even in a condition
of freedom. They are the echoes both of God and of
man. They associate themselves with all sounds and
voices, add their own poesy, their wild and simple
rhythms. By analogy, by contrast, they augment
^- and complete the grand effects of nature. To the
hoarse beating of the waves the sea-bird opposes his shrill strident
notes ; with the monotonous murmuring of the agitated trees the tiirtle-
dove and a hundred birds blend a soft sad cadence ; to the awakening

236 THE SONG.

of the fields, the gaiety of the country, the lark responds with his
song, and bears aloft to heaven the joys of earth.

Thus, then, everywhere, above the vast instrumental conceii of
nature, above her deep sighs, above the sonorous waves which escape
from the divine organ, a vocal music springs and detaches itself —
that of the bird, almost always in vivid notes, which strike sharply
on this solemn base with the ardent strokes of a bow.

Wino-ed voices, voices of fire, ansfel voices, emanations of an
intense life superior to ours, of a fugitive and mobile existence, which
inspires the traveller doomed to a well-beaten track with the serenest
thoughts and the dream of libei-ty.

Just as vegetable life renews itself in spring by the return of the
leaves, is animal life renewed, rejuvenified by the return of the birds,
by their loves, and by their strains. There is nothing like it in the
southern hemisphere, a youthful world in an inferior condition, which,
still in travail, aspires to find a voice. That supreme flower of life
and the soul. Song, is not yet given to it.

The beautiful, the sublime phenomenon of this higher aspect of
the world occurs at the moment that Nature commences her voiceless
concert of leaves and blossoms, her melodies of March and April, her
symphony of May, and we all vibrate to the glorious harmony ; men
and birds take up the strain. At that moment the smallest become
poets, often sublime songsters. They sing for their companions whose
love they wish to gain. They sing for those who hearken to them,
and more than one accomplishes incredible efforts of emulation.
Man also responds to the bird. The song of the one inspires the
other with song. Harmony unknown in tropic climes ! The dazzling
colours which there replace this concord of sweet sounds do not create
such a mutual bond. In a robe of sparkling gems, the bird is not
less alone.

Far different from this favoured, dazzling, glittering being are
the birds of our colder countries, humble in attire, rich in heart, but
almost paupers. Few, very few of them, seek the handsome gardens,
the aristocratic avenues, the shade of great parks. They all live

THE SONG.

287

with the peasant. God has distributed them everywhere. Woods
and thickets, clearings, fields, vineyards, humid meadows, reedy pools,
mountain forests, even the peaks snow-crowned — he has allotted each
winged tribe to its particular region — has deprived no country, no
locality, of this harmony, so that man can wander nowhere, can
neither ascend so high, nor descend so low, but that he will be greeted
with a chorus of joy and consolation.

Day scarcely begins, scarcely does the stable-bell ring out for
the herds, but the wag'tail appears to conduct, and fi-isk and
hover around them. She mingles with the cattle, and familiarly
accompanies the hind. She knows that she is loved both by man
and the beasts, which she defends against insects. She boldly plants
herself on the head of the cow, on the back of the sheep. By day
she never quits them ; she leads them homeward faithfully at
evening.

The water-wagtail, equally punctual, is at her post ; she flutters
round the washerwomen ; she hops on her long legs into the water,
and asks for crumbs ; by a strange instinct of mimicry she raises and
dips her tail, as if to imitate the motion of beating the linen, to do
her work also and earn her pay.

The bird of the fields before all others, the labourer's bird, is the
lark, his constant companion, which he encounters eveiywhere in his
painful furrow, ready to encourage, to sustain him, to sing to him of

238

THE SONG.

hope. Espoir, hope, is the old device of us Gauls; and for this reason
we have adopted as our national bird that humble minstrel, so poorly
clad, but so rich in heart and song.

Nature seems to have treated the lark with harshness. Owing to

the arrangement of her claws, she
__ cannot perch on the trees. She
rests on the ground, close to the

poor hare, and with no other

shelter than the furrow. How
precarious, how riskful a life, at
the time of incubation ! What
cares must be hers, what inqui-

etudes ! Scarcely a tuft of gi-ass conceals the mother's fond treasure
from the dog, the hawk, or the falcon. She hatches her eggs in haste ;
with haste she trains the trembling brood. WTio would not believe
that the ill-fated bird must share the melancholy of her sad neighbour,
the hare ?

THE SONG. 239

This animal is sad, and fear consumes her.

" Get animal est triste et la crainte le ronge."

La Fontaine.

But the contrary has taken place by an unexpected marvel of
gaiety and easy forgetfulness, of lightsome indifference and truly
French carelessness ; the national bird is scarcely out of peril before
she recovers all her serenity, her song, her indomitable glee. Another
wonder : her perils, her precarious existence, her cruel trials, do not
harden her heart ; she remains good as well as gay, sociable and
trustful, presenting a model (rare enough among birds) of paternal
love ; the lark, like the swallow, will, in case of need, nourish her
sisters.

Two things sustain and animate her : love and light. She makes
love for half the year. Twice, nay, thrice, she assumes the dangerous
happiness of maternity, the incessant travail of a hazardous educa-
tion. And when love fails, light remains and re-inspires her.
The smallest gleam suffices to restore her song.

She is the daughter of day. As soon as it dawns, when the
horizon reddens and the sun breaks foi-th, she springs from her furrow
like an arrow, and bears to heaven's gate her hymn of joy. Hallowed
poetry, fi-esh as the dawn, pure and gleeful as a childish heart !
That powerful and sonorous voice is the reapers' signal. " We must
start," says the father; "do you not hear the lark?" She follows
them, and bids them have courage ; in the hot sumiy hours invites
them to slumber, and drives away the insects. Upon the bent head
of the young girl half awakened she pours her floods of harmony.

" No throat," says Toussenel, " can contend with that of the lark
in richness and variety of song, compass and velvetiness of thnhve,
duration and range of sound, suppleness and indefatigability of the
vocal chords. Tlie lark sings for a whole hour without half a second's
pause, rising vertically in the air to the height of a thousand yards,
and stretching from side to side in the realm of clouds to gain a yet
loftier elevation, without losing one of its notes in this immense flight.
"What niohtinofale could do as much ?"

;!40

THE SONG.

This hymn of light is a benefit bestowed on the world, and you
will meet with it in every country which the sun illuminates. There
are as many different species of larks as there are different countries :
wood-larks, field-larks, larks of the thickets, of the marshes, the larks
of the Crau de Provence, larks of the chalky soil of Champagne, larks
of the noi-thern lands in both hemispheres ; jou will find them, more-
over, in the salt steppes, in the plains of Tai-tary withered by the
north wind. Preserving reclamation of kindly nature ; tender con-
solations of the love of God !

THE SONG. 241

But autumn has arrived. Wliile the lark gathers behind the plough
the harvest of insects, the giiests of the northern countries come to
visit us : the thrush, punctual to our vintage-time ; and, haught}^
under his crown, the wren, the imperceptible " King of the North."
From Norway, at the season of fogs, he comes, and, under a gigantic
fir-tree, the little magician sings his mysterious song, until the extreme
cold constrains him to descend, to mingle, and make himself popular
among the httle troglodytes which dwell with us, and charm our cot-
tages by their limpid notes.

The season grows rough ; all the birds draw nearer man. The
honest bullfinches, fond and faithful couples, come, with a short
melancholy chirp, to solicit help. The winter-warbler also quits his
bushes ; timid as he is, he gi'ows sufficiently bold towards evening to
raise outside our doors his trembling voice with its monotonous,
plaintive accents.

" When, in the first mists of October, shoi-tly before winter, the
poor proletarian seeks in the forest his pitiful provision of dead wood,
a small bird approaches him, attracted by the noise of his axe ; he
hovers around him, and taxes his wits to amuse him by singing in
a very low voice his softest lays. It is the robin redbreast, which a
charitable fairy has despatched to tell the solitary labourer that there
is still some one in nature interested in liim.

" When the woodcutter has collected the brands of the preceding
day, reduced to cinders; when the chips and the dry branches crackle
in the flames, the robin hastens singing to enjoy his share of the
warmth, and to participate in the woodcutter's happiness.

" \\nien Nature retires to slumber, and folds herself in her mantle
of snow ; when one hears no other voices than those of the birds of
the North, which define in the air their rapid triangles, or that of the
north wind, which roars and engulfs itself in the thatched roof of the
cottages, a tiny flute-like song, modulated in softest notes, protests
still, in the name of creative work, against the universal weakness,
lamentation, and lethargy."

Open your windows, for pity's sake, and give him a few crumbs,

16

242 THE SONG.

a handful of grain. If he sees friendly faces, he will enter the room ;
he is not insensible to warmth ; cheered by this brief breath of
summer, the poor little one returns much stronger into the
winter.

Toussenel is justly indignant that no poet has sung of the robin.*
But the bird himself is his own bard ; and if one could transcribe his
little song, it would express completely the humble poesy of his life.
The one which I have by my side, and which flies about my study,
for lack of listeners of his own species, perches before the glass, and,
without disturbing me, in a whispering voice utters his thoughts to
the ideal robin which he fancies he sees before him. And here is
their meaning, so far as a woman's hand has succeeded in preserv-
ino; it : —

" Je suis le eompagnon
Du pauvre bucheron.

" Je le suis en automne,
Au vent des premiers froids,
Et c'est moi qui lui dnnne
Le dernier chant des bois.

" II est triste, et je chante
Sous mon deuil mele d'or.
Dans la brume pesante
Je vois I'azur encor.

" Que ce chant te releve
Et te garde I'espoir !
Qu'il te berce d'un reve,
Et te ramene au soir !

" Mais quand vient la gelee,
Je frappe a ton carreau.

* It is unnecessary to remind the reader that this is true only of French, poets
Translator.

THE SONG.

248

I am tlie com]>anion
Of tlie poor woodcutter.

I follow liim in autumn,

When the first chill breezes plain ;

And I it is who warble

The woodlands" last sweet strain.

He is sad, and then I sing
Under my gilded shroud,
And 1 see the gleam of azure
Glint through the gathering cloud.

Oh, may the song inspiring
Eevive Hojie's tiame again,
And at even guide thee homeward
By the magic of its sti-ain I

But when the streams are frozen,
I tap at thy window-pane —
Oh. on the bird take pity,
Not a leaf, not a herb remain !

244

THE SONG.

It is thy aixtumn comrade
Who makes appeal to thee ;
By heaven, by all forsaken,
Woodman, oh, pity me !

Yes, in these days of famine
Tlie little pilgrim keep;
On dainty crumbs regale him,
By the fireside let him sleep 1

For I am the companion
Of the poor -woodcutter !

,.-^..,u,

^3

,5- •J-v

T^IE SEST,

/■

I AM writing opposite a gi'acefal collection of
' nests of French birds, made for me by a friend, I
am able thus to appreciate, to verify the descriptions
of authors, to improve them, perhaps, if the very
limited resources of style can give any just idea of
a wholly special art, less analogous to our-s than
one would be tempted to believe at the first glance.
Nothing in this branch of study can supply the
place of actual sight of the objects. You must see
and touch ; you will then perceive that all compari-
son is false and inaccurate. These things belong
to a world apart. Shall we say above, or beloiu the
works of man ? Neither the one nor the other ;
but essentially different, and whose supposed simi-
larities (or relations) are only external.

218 THE NEST.

Let US recollect, at the outset, that this charming object, so much
more delicate than words can describe, owes everything to art, to skill,
to calculation. The materials are generally of the rudest, and not
always those which the artist would have preferred. The instruments
are very defective. The bird has neither the squirrel's hand nor the
beaver's tooth. Having only his bill and his foot (which by no
means serves the purpose of a hand), it seems that the nest should be
to him an insoluble problem. The specimens now before my eyes are for
the most part composed of a tissue or covering of mosses, small flexible
branches, or long vegetable filaments ; but it is less a tveaving than
a condensation; a felting of materials, blended, beaten, and welded
together with much exertion and perseverance ; an act of gi-eat
labour and energetic operation, for which the bill and the claw would
be insufficient. The tool really used is the bird's own body — his
breast — with which he presses and kneads the materials until he has
rendered them completely pliable, has thoroughly mixed them, and
subdued them to the general work.

And within, too, the implement which determines the circular
form of the nest is no other than the bird's body. It is by con-
stantly turning himself about, and ramming the wall on every side,
that he succeeds in shaping the circle.

Thus, then, his house is his very person, his form, and his im-
mediate effort — I would say, his suffering. The result is only obtained

by a constantly repeated pressure of his breast. There is not one of
these blades of srass but which, to take and retain the form of a

AECHITECTUKE OF BIKDS.

249

curve, has been a thousand and a thousand times pressed against his
bosom, his heart, certainly with much disturbance of the respiration,
j perhaps with much palpitation.

V It is quite otherwise with the habitat of the quadruped.

[^ He comes into the world clothed ; what need has he of a nest ?

JY'C Thus, then, those animals which build or burrow labour for

^K^ themselves rather than for their young. A skilful miner is

J,f the mountain rat, in his oblique tunnel, which saves him from

the winter gale. The squirrel, with hand adroit, raises the

pretty turret which defends him from the rain. The gi-eat

engineer of the lakes, the beaver, foreseeing the gathering of

the waters, builds up several stages to which he may ascend at

pleasure ; but all this is done for the individual. The bird

builds for her family. Carelessly did she live in her bright leafy

i^^ bower, exposed to every enemy ; but the moment she was no

\l \ J. longer alone, the hoped for and anticipated maternity made

her an artist. The nest is a creation of love.

Thus, the work is imprinted with a force of
extraordinary will, of a passion singularly persever-
ing. You see in it especially this fact, that it is not,
like our works, prepared from a model, which
settles the plan, conducts and regulates the
labour. Here the conception is so thoroughly
in the artist, the idea so clearly defined, that,
without frame or carcase, without preliminary
support, the aerial ship is built up piece by
piece, and not a hitch disturbs the ensemble.
All adjusts itself exactly, symmetricall}^, in
/dr--^^ perfect harmony ; a thing in-
^^»^^"- finitely difficult in such a de-

^

250

THE NEST.

ficiency of tools, and in tins rude effort of concentration and kneading
by the mere pressure of the breast. The mother does not trust to
the male bird for all this ; but she employs him as her purveyor.
He goes in quest of the materials — grasses, mosses, roots, or branches.
But when the ship is built, when the interior has to be arranged —
the couch, the household furniture— the matter becomes more difficult.
Care must be taken that the former be fit to receive an egg peculiarly
sensitive to cold, every chilled point of which means for the little
one a dead limb. That little one will be born naked. Its stomach,
closely folded to the mother's, will not fear the cold ; but the back,
still bare, will only be warmed by the bed ; the mother's
precaution and anxiety are, therefore, not easily satisfied.
The husband brings her some horse-hair, but it is
liard ; it will only serve as an under-stratum, a sort
elastic mattress. He brings hemp, but that is too
cold ; only the silk or silky fibre of certain
plants, wool or cotton, are admissible ; or better
still, her own feathers, her own down, which
she plucks away, and deposits under the nursling.
It is interesting to watch the male bird's skil-
ful and furtive search for materials ; he is ap-
prehensive lest you should learn, by watching
him with your eyes, the track to his nest.
Frequently, if you look at him, he will take a
different road, to deceive you. A hundred
ingenious little thefts respond to the mother's
desire. He will follow the sheep
to collect a little wool. From the
poultry-yard he will gather the drop-
ped feathers of the mother hen. If
the farmer's wife quit for a
moment her seat in the porch,
and leave behind her distaff
or ball of thread, he ,-.-^— •— - .

ARCHITECTURE OF BIRDS.

251

1,1 ililllF ~7

will spy his opportunity, and go ofF the richer for a thread or
two.

Collections of nests are very recent, not numerous, and, as yet,
not rich. In that of Rouen, however, which is remarkable for its
arrangement ; in that of Paris, where many very curious specimens
may be examined ; you can distinguish already the different industries
which create this master-piece of the nest. AVhat is the chronology,
the gradual growth of it ? Not from one art to another (not from
masonry to weaving, for example) ; but in each separate art, the birds
which abandon themselves to it are more or less successful, according
to the intelligence of the species, the abundance of material, or the
exigency of climate.

Among the burrowing birds, the booby, and the penguin, whose
young, as soon as born, spring into the sea, content themselves with
hollowing out a rude hole. But the bee-eater, the sea-swallow, which
must educate their young, excavate under the ground a dwelling which
is admirably proportioned, and not without some geometrical design.
They furnish it, moreover, and strew it with soft yielding substances
on which the fledg-lino- will be less sensitive to the hardness or freshness
of the humid soil.

Among the building-birds, the flamingo, which raises a pyramid of
mud to isolate her eggs from the inundated earth, and, while standing
erect, hatches them under her long legs, is contented with a rude,

252 THE NEST.

rough work. It is, moreover, a stratagem. The true mason is the
swallow, which suspends her house to ours.

The marvel of its kind is, perhaps, the wonderful carpentry which
the thrush executes. The nest, very much exposed under the moist
shelter of the vines, is made externally of moss, and amid the sur-
rounding verdure escapes the eye; hut look within: it is an admirable
cupola, neat, polished, shining, and not inferior to glass. You may
see yourself in it as in a mirror.

The rustic art, appropriate to the forests, of timber- work, joining,
wood-carving, is attempted on the lowest scale by the toucan, whose
bill, though enormous, is weak and thin : he attacks only worm-
eaten trees. The woodpecker, better armed, as we have seen, accom-
plishes more : he is a true carpenter ; until love inspires him, and he
becomes a sculptor.

Infinite in varieties and species is the guild of basket-makers and
weavers. To note the starting-point, the advance, and the climax
of an industiy so varied, would be a prolonged labour. '

The shore birds plait, to begin with, but very unskilfully. Why
should they do better? So warmly clothed by nature with an
unctuous and almost impermeable coat of plumage, they have little
need to allow for the elements. Their great art is the chase ; always
lank, and insufficiently fed, the piscivora are controlled by the wants
of a craving stomach.

The very elementary weaving of the herons and storks is already
outstripped, though to no great extent, by the basket-makers of the
woods, the jay, the mocking-bird, the bullfinch. Their more numerous
brood impose on them more arduous toil. They lay down rude enough
foundations, but thereupon plant a basket of more or less elegant
design, a web of roots and dry twigs strongly woven together. The
cistole delicately interlaces three reeds or canes, whose leaves, mingled
with the web, form a safe and mobile base, undulating as the bird
rocks. The tomtit suspends her purse-like cradle to a bough, and
trusts to the wind to nurse her progeny.

The canary, the goldfinch, the chaffinch, are skilful fetters. The

ARCHITECTURE OF BIRDS.

253

latter, restless and suspicious, attaches to the finished nest, with much
skill and address, a quantity of white lichens, so that the spotted
appearance of the whole completely misleads the seeker, and induces
him to take this charming and cunningly disguised nest for an acci-
dent of vegetation, a fortuitous and natural object.

.^v. ^^

Glueing and felting play an important part in the work of the
weavers. It would be a mistake to separate these arts too widely.
The humming-bird consolidates its little house with the gum of trees.
Most birds employ saliva. Some — a strange thing, and a subtle
invention of love !— here make use of processes for which their organs
are least adapted. An American starling contrives to sew the leaves
with its bill, and does so very adroitly.

A few skilful weavers, not satisfied with the bill, bring into play
their feet. The chain prepared, they fix it with their feet, while the
beak inserts the weft. They become genuine weavers.

In fine, skill never fails them. It is very astonishing, but

254

THE XEST.

implements ore wanting. They are strangely ill-adapted for the
work. Most insects, in comparison, are wonderfidly furnished with
arms and utensils. But these are true workmen, are born workmen.
The bird is so but for a time, through the inspiration of love. .

;.^^-X-^^__-

^-?

Tf]£ COMMaSffiES ©F EJEflS.

THE COMMUNITIES OF BIRDS.

ESSAYS AT A REPUBLIC. ^

The more I reflect upon it, the more clearly 1 per-
ceive that the bird, unlike the insect, is not an industrial
animal. He is the poet of nature, the most independent
of created beings, with a sublime, an adventurous, but
on the whole an ill-protected existence.

Let us penetrate into the wild American foi'ests, and

examine the means of safety which these isolated beings

'{'H i i} invent or possess. Let us compare the bird's resources, the

^'^^ efforts of his genius, with the inventions of his neighbour,

man, who inhabits the same localities. The difference does

honour to the bird; human invention is always acting on the

' hawk, the bird has built only a nest.

For decency, warmth, and elegant gracefidness. the nest is in every
respect superior to the Indian's wigwam or the Negro's hut, whicli,
frequently, in Africa, is nothing but a baobab hollo^^■ed by time.

17

258

THE COxMMUXITIES OF BIRDS.

The negro has not yet invented the door ; his hut remains open.
Against the nocturnal forays of wild beasts, he ohstnicts the entrance
with thorns.

Nor does the bird know how to close his nest. What shall be
its defence ? A great and terrible question.

He makes the entry narrow and tortuous. If he selects a natural
nest, as the wryneck does, in the hollow of a tree, he contracts the
opening by skilful masonry. Many, like the |)ine-pine, build a double
nest in two apartments : the mother sits in the alcove ; in the vesti-
bule watches the father, an attentive sentinel, to repulse invasion.

What enemies has he to fear ■ Serpents, men or apes, squirrels !
And what do I say ? The birds themselves ! This people, too, has
its robbers. His neighbours sometimes assist a feeble bird to recover
his property, to ex])el by force the unjust usurper. Naturalists assure
us that the rooks (a kind of crow) carry further the spirit of justice.
They do not pardon a young couple who, to complete their establish-
ment the sooner, rob the materials — " the movables" — of another nest.

v; i rr.- ^

Tliey assemble in a troop of eight or ten to rend in fragments the
nest of the criminals, and completely destroy that house of theft. And
iniiiished thieves are driven afar, and foi'ced to bcirin all over a^ain.

ESSAYS AT A REPUBLIC. 259

Is there not here an idea of property, and of tlie sacred rights of
labour ?

Where shall they find securities, and how assure a coniniencenient
of public order? It is curious to know in what -way the birds have
resolved the question.

Two solutions presented themselves. Tlie first was that of associ-
iit'ion — the organization of a government which should concentrate
force, and by the reunion of the weak form a defensive power. The
second (but miraculous ? impossible ? imaginative ?) woidd have been
the realization of the aerial city of Aristophanes, — the construction of
a dwelling-place guarded by its lightness from the unwieldy brigands
of the air, and inaccessible to the approaches of the brigands of the eaith
— the himter, the serpent.

These two things — the one diflicult, the other apparently im-
possible— the bird has realized.

At first, association and government. Monarchy is the inferior
venture. Just as the apes have a king to conduct each band, several
species of birds, especially in dangerous emeigencies, a])pear to follow
a chief.

The ant-eaters have a king ; so have the birds of paradise. The
tyrant, an intrepid little bird of extraordinary audacity, affords his
protection to some larger species, which follow and confide in him. It
is assei-ted that the noble hawk, repressing its instincts of prey for
certain species, allows the trembling families which trust in his
generosity to nestle under and around him.

But the safest fellowship is that between equals. The ostrich, the
penguin, a crowd of species, unite for this purpose. Several kinds,
associating for the purpose of travel, form, at the moment of emigration,
into temporary republics. We know the good luiderstanding, the
republican gravity, the perfect tactic of the storks and cranes. Others,
smaller in size or less completely armed^ — in climates, moreover, where
nature, cruelly prolific, engenders without pause their formidable foes —
place their abodes close together, but do not mingle them, and under a
common roof, living in separate partitions, form veritable hives.

260

THE COMMUNITIES OF BIRDS

&

>

¥^r

^

itM"i

N

^

r^

The description given by Paterson appeared fabulous , but it has
been confirmed by Levaillant, who frequently encountered in Africa,

_- studied, and investigated the strange

community. The engraving given in

the " Ai'chitecture of Birds" enables the

'^ reader more readily to comprehend his

' narration. It is the image of an im-

mense umbrella planted on a tree, and

shading under its common roof more

than three hundred habitations. " I

caused it to be brought to me," says

Levaillant, " by several men, who set it

on a vehicle. I cut it with an axe,

and saw that it was in the main a mass

*. of Booschmannie grass, without any

\ \J^ ^ ' mixture, but so strongly woven together

1 1^^ ' t.hat it was impossible for the rain to

^ penetrate. This is only the framework
of the edifice ; each bird constructs for
himself a separate nest under the com-
mon pavilion. The nests occupy only tlie
leverse of the roof; the upper part remains
empty, without, however, being useless ; for,
raised more than the remainder of the pile,
it gives to the whole a sufficient inclination,
and thus preserves each little habitation.
In two words, let the reader figure to him-
self a gTcat oblique and iiTCgular roof, whose
edge in the interior is garnished with nests ranged
close to one another, and he will have an exact
idea of these singular edifices.

" Each nest is three or four inches in dia-
meter, which is sufficiently large for the bird ;
but as they are in close contact around the roof, they appear to the

/

N

ESSAYS AT A EEPUBLIO. 261'

eye to form but a single edifice, and are only separated by a small
opening whicb serves as an entry to the nest ; and one enti-ance
frequently is common to three nests, one of which is placed at the
bottom, and the others on each side. It has 320 cells, and will hold
640 inhabitants, if each contains a couple, which may be doubted.
Every time, however, that I have aimed at a swarm, I have killed the
same number of males and females."

A laudable example, and worthy of imitation ! I wish I could
but believe that the fraternity of those poor little ones was a suffi-
cient protection. Their number and their noise may sometimes alarm
the enemy, disturb the monster, make him take another direction.
But if he should persist ; if, strong in his scaly skin, the boa, deaf to
their cries, mounts to the attack, invades the city at the time when
the fledglings have as yet no wings for flight, their numbers then can
but multiply the victims.

There remains the idea of Aristophanes, the aerial city— to isolate
it from earth and water, and build in the air.

This is a stroke of genius. And to carry it out is needed the
miracle of the two foremost powers in the world- — love and fear.

Of the most vi\dd fear ; of that which freezes your blood : if,
peering through a hole in a tree, the black flat head of a cold reptile
rises and hisses in your face, though you are a man, and a brave man,
you tremble.

How much more must the little, feeble, disarmed creature, sur-
prised in its nest, and unable to make use of its wings — how much
more must it tremble, and sink panic-stricken !

The invention of the aerial city took place in the land of ser-
pents.

Africa, the realm of monsters, in its horrible arid wastes, sees
them cover the earth. Asia, on the burning shore of Bombay, in her
forests where the mud ferments, makes them swarm, and fatten, and
swell with venom. In the Moluccas they are innumerable.

Thence came the inspiration of the Loxia peyisllis (the gi'osbeak
of the Philippines). Such is the name of the great artist.

262

THE COMMUNITIES OF BIRDS.

He chooses a bamboo growing close to the water. To the branches
of this tree he deHcately suspends some vegetable fibres. He knows
beforehand the weight of the nest, and never eiTS. To the threads
he attaches, one by one (not supporting himself on anything, but
working in the air) some sufficiently strong grasses. The task is
long and fatiguing ; it presupposes an infinite amount of patient
courage.

The vestibule alone is nothing less than a cylinder of twelve to
fifteen feet, which hangs over the water, the opening being below, so
that one enters it ascending. The upper extremity may be compared
to a srourd or an inflated ba!.,' like a chemist's retort. Sometimes five
o)- six hundred nests of this kind hang to a single tree.

Such is my city of the air ; not a dream and a phantasy, like that
of Aristophanes, but actual, realized, and answering the three condi-
tions : security both on the side of land and water, and inaccessibility
to the robbers of the air through its narrow openings, where one can
only enter Ijy ascending with gi-eat difficulty.

Now, that which was said to Columbus when he defied his guests
to make an egg stand upright, you perhaps will say to the ingenious
bird in reference to his suspended city. You will observe, " It was
very simple." To which the bird will reply, like Columbus, " Why did
you not discover it?"

Eflocaf neK.

^. ,i

■^ Behold, then, the nest made, and protected by
every prudential means which the mother can devise,
fehe rests upon lier perfected work, and dreams of the
now guest which it shall contain to-morrow.

At this hallowed moment, ought not we, too,
to leflect and ask ourselves what it is this mother's
heait contains ?

A soul ? Shall we dare to say that this ingenious
architect, this tender mother, has a soul ?

Many persons, nevertheless, full of sense and sym-
pathy, will denounce, will reject this very natural idea
as a scandalous hypothesis.

Their heart would incline them towards it ; their
mind leads them to repel it ; their mind, or at least
their education, the idea which, from an early age, has been impressed
upon them.

266 EDUCATION.

Beasts are only macliines, meclianical automata ; or if we think
we can detect in them some glimmering rays of sensibility and
reason, those are solely the effect of instinct. But what is instinct?
A sixth sense — I know not what — which is undefinaLle, which has
been implanted in them, not acquired by themselves — a blind force
which acts, constructs, and makes a thousand increnious things, with-
out their being conscious of them, without their personal activity
counting for aught.

If it is so, this instinct would be invariable, and its works immov-
ably regular, which neither time nor circumstances would ever change.

Indifferent minds — distracted, busy about other matters — which
have no time for observation, accept this statement upon parole.
Why not ? At the first glance certain actions and also certain works
of animals appear almost regular. To come to a different conclusion,
more attention, perliaps, is needed, more time and study, than the
question is fairly worth.

Let us adjourn the dispute, and see the object itself. Let us
take the humblest example, an individual example ; let us appeal to
our eyes, our own observation, such as each one of us can make with
the most vulgar of the senses.

Perhaps the reader will permit me here to introduce, in all
honesty and simpleness, the journal of my canary, Jonquille, as it was
written hour by hour from the birth of her first child ; a journal of
remarkable exactness, and, in short, an authentic register of birth.

" It must be stated, at the outset, that Jonquille was born in a
cage, and had not seen how nests were made. As soon as I saw her
disturbed, and became aware of her approaching maternity, I frequently
opened her door, and allowed her freedom to collect in the room the
materials of the bed the little one would stand in need of. She gathered
them up, indeed, but without knowing how to employ them. She
put them together, and stored them in a corner of her cage. It was
very evident that the art of construction was not innate in her, that
(exactly like man) the bird does not know until it has learned.

EDUCATION. 267

" I gave her the nest ready made, at least the little basket which
forms the framework and walls of the structure. Then she made the
mattress, and felted the interior coating, but in a very indifferent
manner. Afterwards slie sat on her egg for sixteen days witli a
perseverance, a fervour, a maternal devotion which w^ere astonishing,
scarcely rising for a few minutes in the day from her fatiguing posi-
tion, and only when the male was ready to take her place.

" At noon on the sixteenth day the shell was broken in tw^o, and
we saw, struggling in the nest, a pair of little wings without feathers,
a couple of tiny feet, a something which struggled to rid itself entirely
of its envelopment. The body was one large stomach, round as a ball.
The mother, with great eyes, outstretched neck, and fluttering wings,
from the edcre of the basket looked at her child, and looked at me
also, as if to say : ' Do not come near!'

" Except some long down on the wrings and head, it was com-
pletely naked.

" On this first day she only gave it some drink. It opened, how-
ever, already a bill of good proportions.

" From time to time, that it might breathe the more easily,
she moved a little, then replaced it under her wing, and rubbed it
gently.

" The second day it ate but a very light beakful of chickweed,
well prepared, brought in the first place by the father, received by
the mother, and transmitted by her with short, quick chirps. In
all probability this was given rather for medicinal purposes than as
food.

" So long as the nursling has all it requires, the mother permits
the male bird to fly to and fro, to go and come, to attend to his
occupations. But as soon as it asks for more, the mother, with her
sweetest voice, summons the purveyor, who fills his beak, arrives in
all haste, and transmits to her the food.

" The fifth day the eyes are less prominent ; on the sixth, in the
morning, feathers stretch along the wdngs, and the back grows darker ;
on the eighth it opens its eyes when called, and begins to stutter :

268

EDUCATION.

the father ventures to nourish it. The mother takes some
relaxation, and frequently absents herself. She often perches
on the rim of the nest, and lovingly contemplates her off-
spring. But the latter stirs, feels the need of movement. Poor
mother ! in a little while it will escape thee.

" In this first education of the still passive and elementary life,
as in the second (and active, that of flight), of which I have already
spoken, one fact, evident and clearly discernible at every moment,
was, that everything was proportioned with infinite prudence
to the condition least foreseen, a condition essentially variable, the
nursling's individual strength ; the quantity, quality, and mode of
preparation of the food, the cares of warmth, friction, cleanliness,
were all ordered with a skill and an attention to detail, modified
according to circumstance, such as the most delicate and provident
woman could hardly have surpassed.

" When I saw her heart throbbing violently, and her eye kindling
as she gazed on her precious treasure, I exclaimed : ' Could I do
otherwise near the cradle of my son ?' "

Ah, if she be a machine, what am I myself? and who will then
prove that I am a person ? If she has not a soul, who will answer
to me for the human soul ? To what thereafter shall we trust ? And
is not all this world a dream, a phantasmagoria, if, in the most

EDUCATION.

269

individual actions, actions the most plainly reasoned over and calcu-
lated upon, I am to conclude there is nothing but a lack of reason, a
mechanism, an "automatism," a species of pendulum which sports
with life and thought ?

Note that our observations were made on a captive, who worked
in fatal and })redetermined conditions of dwelling-place, nourishment,
kc. But how, if her action had been more evidently chosen, willed,
ajid meditated ; if all this had transpired in the freedom of the forests,
or she had had cause to disquiet herself about many other circum-
stances which captivity enabled her to ignore ? I am thinking
especially of the anxiety for security, which, for the bird in savage
life, is the foremost of all cares, and which more than anything else
exercises and develops her free genius.

This first initiation into life, of which I have just given an
example, is followed by what I shall call the professional education ;
every bird has a vocation.

This education is more or less arduous, according to the medium
and the circumstances in which each species is placed. That of
fishing, for instance, is simple enough for the penguin, which, in her

ij , *"

■ uJ'-i^"'^tL-'''J>;'#i?^.--'^-"""-^n^"''

clumsiness, finds it difficult to conduct her brood to the sea ; its great
nurse attends the little one, and offers it the food all ready ; it

270 EDUCATION.

has but to open its bill. With the duck, this education or training;
is more complex. I observed one summer, on a lake in Normandy,
a duck, followed by her brood, giving them their first lesson. The
nurslings, riotous and greedy, asked but for food. The mother, yield-
ing to their cries, plunged to the bottom of the water, reappearing
with some small worm or little fish, which she distributed impartially,
never-giving twice in succession to the same duckling !

In this picture the most touching figure was the mother, whose
stomach undoubtedly was also craving, but who retained nothing for
herself, and seemed happy in the sacrifice. Her visible desire was to
accustom her family to do as she did, to dive under the water in-
trepidly to seize their prey. With a voice almost gentle, she implored
this action of courageous confidence. I had the happiness of seeing
the little ones plunge in, one after another, to the depth of the black
abj'ss. Their education was just on the eve of completion.

This is but a simple training, and for one of the inferior vocations.
There remains to speak of that of the arts : of the art of flight, the
art of sosig, the art of architecture. Nothing is more complex than
the education of certain singing birds. The perseverance of the
father, the docility of the young, are worthy of all admiration.

And this education extends beyond the family-circle. The night-
ingales, the chafiinches, while still young or unskilful, know how to
listen to, and profit by, the superior bird which has V>een allotted to
them as their instructor. In those Russian palaces where flourishes
the noble Oriental partiality for the bulbul's song, yo\i see everywhere
these singing-schools. The master nightingale, in his cage suspended
in the centre of a saloon, has his scholars ranged aroimd him in their
respective cages. A certain sum })er hoiu- is paid for each bird
brought here to learn his lesson. Before the master sings they chatter
and gossip among themselves, salute and recognize one another. But
as soon as the mighty teacher, with one imperious note, like that of
a sonorous steel bell, has imposed silence, you see them listen with a
sensible deference, then timidly repeat the strain. The master com-
placently returns to the principal passages, corrects, and gently sets

EDUCATION.

271

them right. A few then grow bolder, and, by some felicitous chords,
essay to supply the harmony to the dominant melody.

An education so delicate, so varied, so complex, is it that of a
machine, of a brute reduced to instinct ? Who can refuse in this to
acknowledge a soul ?

Open your eyes to the evidence. Thi'ow aside your prejudices,
your traditional and derived opinions. Preconceived ideas and dog-
matic theories apart, you camiot ofiend Heaven by restoring a soul
to the beast.* How much grander the Creator's work if he has
created persons, souls, and wills, than if he has constructed
machines !

Dismiss your pride, and acknowledge a kindred in which there
is nothing to make a devout mind ashamed. What are these ? They
are your brothers.

What are they ? embryo souls, souls especially set apart for
certain functions of existence, candidates for the more general and
more widely harmonic life to which tlie human soul has attained.

When will they anive thither ? and how ? (xod has reserved to
himself these mysteries.

All that we know is this : tliat he summons them — them also — -
to mount higher and yet higher.

* The reader must not identify the translator witli those opinions, wliich, however, he
did not feel at liberty to modify or omit.

272 EDUCATION.

They are, without metaphor, the little children of Nature, the
nurslings of Providence, aspiring towards tlie light in order to act
and think ; stumbling now, they by Degrees shall advance much
further.

" 0 pauvre enfantelet! du fil de fes pensees
I/eclievelet nest encore debrouille."

Poor feeble cliild ! not yet of thy tliouglit's thread
Is the entangled skein unravelled.

Souls of children, in truth, but far gentler, more resigned, more
patient than those of human children. See with what silent good
humour most of them (like the horse) support blows, and wounds,
and ill-treatment ! They all know how to endure disease and suffer
death. They retire apart, surround themselves with silence, and lie
down in concealment ; this gentle patience often supplies them with
the most efficacious remedies. If not, they accept their destiny, and
pass away as if they slept.

Can they love as deeply as we love ? How shall we doubt it,
when we see the most timid suddenly become heroic in defence of
their young and their family ? The devotedness of the man who
braves death for his children you will see exemplified every day in
the martin, which not only resists the eagle, but pursues him with
heroical ardour.

Would you wish to observe two things wonderfully analogous ?
Watch on the one side the woman's delight at the first step of her
infant, and on the other the swallow at tlie first flight of her little
nursling.

You see in both the same anxiety, the same encouragements,
examples, and counsels, the same pretended security and lurking fear,
the trembling "Take courage, nothing is more easy;" — in truth, the
two mothers are inwardly shivering.

The lessons are curious. The mother raises herself on her wings;
the fledgling regards her intently, and also raises himself a little ;
then you see her hovering — he looks, he stirs his wings. All this

EDUCATION.

273

goes well, for it takes place in the nest— the difficulty begins when
he essays to quit it. She calls him, she shows him some little dainty
tit-bit, she promises him a reward, she attempts to draw him forth
with the bait of a fly.

Still the little one hesitates. And put yourself in his place.
You have but to move a step in the nurser}^, between your nurse
and your mother, where, if you fell, you would fall upon cushions.
This bird of the church, which gives her first lesson in flying from
the summit of the spire, can scarcely embolden her son, perhaps can
scarcel}^ embolden herself at the decisive moment. Both, I am sure
of it, measure more than once with their glances the abyss beneath,
and eye the ground. I, for one, declare to you, the spectacle is
moving and sublime. It is an urgent need that he should trust his
mother, that she should have confidence in the wing of the little one
who is still a novice. From both does Heaven require an act of
faith, of courage. A noble and a sublime starting-point ! But he
has trusted, he has made the leap, he will not fall. Trembling, he
floats in air, supported by the paternal breath of heaven, by the re-
assuring voice of his mother. All is finished. Thenceforth he Avill
fly regardless of the wind and the storm, strong in that first great
trial wherein he flew in faith.

[Note. — The Swallow's Flight. According to Wilson, the swallow's ordinary tlight
averages one mile per minute. He is engaged in flying for ten hours daily. Now, as his
life is usually extended to a space of ten years, he flies, in that period, 2,190,000 miles, or
nearly eighty-eight times the circumference of the globe.

18

274

EDUCATION.

The swallow, as Sir Humphrey Davy observes, cheers the sense of sight as much as the
nightingale does the sense of hearing. He is the glad prophet of the year, the
harbinger of its brightest season, and lives a life of free enjoyment amongst the loveliest
forms of nature.

There is something peculiarly beautiful in his rapid, steady, well-balanced flight, —

" "Which, ere a double pulse can beat.
Is here and there witli motion fleet,
As Ariel's wing could scarce exceed ;
And, full of vigour as of speed,
Forestalls the dayspring's earliest gleam,
Xor fails with evening's latest beam."

To all nations he is welcome, and by all the poets has been celebrated with fond eulugiuni.
— Trandator.'\

^*oJ^^^

/"O

s^^^'^^lt^i'^rt

"'Si"' t'^!^^-

THE ii£Hf3«l3Al£.

The celebrated Pre'-aux-Clercs, now known as the

Marche Saint Germain, is, as everybody knows, on Sundays,

the Bird Market of Paris. The place has more than one

claim on our curiosity. It is a vast menagerie, frequently

renewed — a shifting, strange museum of French ornithology.

On the other hand, such an auction of living beings,

of captives many of whom feel their captivity, of slaves

whom the auctioneer exposes, sells, and values more or less

1 j^ adroitly, indirectly reminds one, after all, of the markets of

t|j, the East, the auctions of human slaves. The winged

iV slaves, without understanding our languages, do not the

1 less vividly express the thought of servitude ; some, born in

I this condition, are resigned to it ; others, sombre and silent,

dream ever of fi-eedom. Not a few appear to address themselves to

you, seem desirous of arresting the passer-by's attention, and ask only

for a good master. How often have we seen an intelligent goldfinch,

an amiable robin, regarding us with a mournful gaze, but a gaze b}^

no means doubtful in its meaning, for it said : "Buy me !"

278 THE NIGHTINGALE

One Sunday in summer we paid a visit to this mart, which we
shall never forget. It was not well stocked, still less harmonious ;
the season of moulting and of silence had begun. We were not the
less keenly attracted by and interested in the naive attitude of a few
individuals. Ordinarily their song and their plumage, the bird's two
principal attributes, preoccupy us, and prevent us from observing
their lively and original pantomime. One bird, the American mock-
ing-bird, has a comedian's genius, distinguishing all his songs by a
mimicry strictly appropriate to their character, and often very ironical.
Our birds do not possess this singular art ; but, without skill, and
unknown to themselves, they express, by significant and frequently
pathetic movements, the thoughts which traverse their brain.

On this particular day, the queen of the market was a black-
capped warbler, an ai-tist-bird of great value, set apart in the display
from the other birds, Hke a peerless jewel. She fluttered, svelte
and chai-ming ; all in her was gi^ace. Accustomed to captivity by a
long training, she seemed to regret nothing, and could only communi-
cate to the soul happy and gentle impressions. She was plainly a
being of perfect geniality, and of such harmony of song and move-
ment, that in seeing her move I thought I heard her sing.

Lower, very much lower, in a narrow cage, a bird somewhat
larger in size, very inhumanly confined, gave me a curious and quite
opposite impression. This was a chaffinch, and the first which I had
seen blind. No spectacle could be more painful. The man who
would purchase by such a deed of cruelty this victim's song, must have a
nature alien to all harmony, a barbarous soul. His attitude of laboui-
and torture rendered his song very painful to me. The worst of it is
that it was human; it reminded one of the turns of the head and the
ungracious motions of the shoulders which short-sighted persons, or
men become blind, indulge in. Such is never the case with those
born blind. With a violent but continual effbi-t, grown habitual, the
head inclined to the right, with empty eyes he sought the light. The
neck was outstretched, to sink acjain between the shoulders, and
swelled out to gain new strength — the neck short, the shoulders

ART AND THE INFINITE.

279

bent. This unhappy virtuoso, whose song, like liimself, was dis-
sembled and deformed, had been a mean image of the ugliness of the
slave-artist, if not ennobled by that indomitable effort to pursue the
light, seeking it always on high, and ever centering his song in the
invisible sun which he had treasured up in his soul.

Moderately capable of profiting by instruction, this bird lepeats,
with a marvellous metallic timbre, the song of his native wood, and
preserves the pai-ticular accent of the country in which he was born;
there being as many dialects of chaffinches as there are different
districts. He remains faithful to his own ; he sings only his cradle-
song, and that with an uniform rate, but with a wild passion and an
extraordinary emulation. Set opposite a rival, he will repeat it eight
hundred successive times ; occasionally he dies of it. I am not
astonished that the Belgians enthusiastically celebrate the combats of
this hero of the national song, the chorister of their forest of Ardennes,
decreeing prizes, crowns, even triumphal arches, to those acts of
supreme devotion in which life is yielded for victory.

Still lower down than the chaffinch, and in a very small and wretched
cage, peopled pell-mell with half-a-dozen birds of very different sizes,
I was shown a prisoner which I had not distinguished, a young night-

280 THE NIGHTINGALE.

ingale caught that very morning. The fowler, by a skilful Machia-
velism, had placed the little captive in a world of very joyous slaves,
quite accustomed to their confinement. These were young troglodytes,
recently born in a cage ; he had rightly calculated that the sight of
the sports of innocent infancy sometimes beguiles great grief

Great evidently, nay, overpowering, was his, and more impressi-ve
than any of those sorrows which we express by tears. A dumb
agony, pent up within himself, and longing for the darkness. He
had withdrawn into the shade as far as might be, to the bottom of
the cage, half hidden in a small eating-trough, making himself large
and swollen with his slightly-bristling feathers, closing his eyes, never
opening them even when he was disturbed, shaken by the frolicsome and
careless pastimes of the young turbulents, which frequently drove one
another against him. Plainly he would neither see, nor hear, nor eat,
nor console himself These self-imposed shadows were, as I clearly
saw, an effort, in his cruel suffering, not to be, an intentional suicide.
With his mind he embraced death, and died, so far as he was able,
by the suspension of his senses and of all external activity.

Observe that, in this attitude, there was no indication of malicious,
bitter, or choleric feeling, nothing to remind one of his neighbour, the
morose chaffinch, with his attitude of violent and torturing exertion.
Even the indiscretion of the young birdlings which, without care or
respect, occasionally threw themselves upon him, could call forth no
mark of impatience. He said, obviously : " What matters it to one
who is no more?" Although his eyes were closed, I did not the
less easily read him. I perceived an artist's soul, all tenderness and
all light, without rancour and without harshness against the barbarity
of the world and the ferocity of fate. And it was through this that
he lived, through this that he could not die, because he found within
himself, in his great sorrow, the all-powerful cordial inherent in his
nature : internal light, song. In the language of nightingales, these
two words convey the same meaning.

I comprehended that he did not die, because even then, despite
himself, despite his keen desire of death, he could not do otherwise

ART AND THE INFINITE. 281

Mian sing. His heart chanted a voiceless strain, which I heard per-
fectly well : —

" Lascia che io pianga !
La Liberia."

Liberty ! — Suffer me to weep !

I had not expected to find here once more that song which, in the
old time, and by another mouth (a mouth which shall never again be
opened), had already pierced my heart, and left a wound which no
time shall efface.

I demanded of his custodian if he were for sale. The shrewd
fellow replied that he was too young to be sold, that as yet he did
not eat alone ; a statement evidently untrue, for he was not that year's
bird ; but the man wished to keep him for disposal in the winter,
when, his voice returning, he would fetch a higher price.

Such a nightingale, born in freedom^ which alone is the true
nightingale, bears a very different value to one born in a cage : he
sings quite difierently, having known liberty and nature, and regret-
ting both. The better part of the great ai-tist's genius is suffering.

Artist ! I have said the word, and I will not unsay it. This is
not an analogy, a comparison of things having a resemblance : no, it
is the thing itself

The nightingale, in my opinion, is not the chief, but the only
one, of the winged people to which this name can be justly given.

And why ? He alone is a creator ; he alone varies, enriches,
amplifies his song, and augments it by new strains. He alone is
fertile and diverse in himself; other birds are so by instruction and
imitation. He alone resumes, contains almost all ; each of them, of
the most brilliant, suggests a couplet to the nightingale.

Only one other bird, like him, attains sublime results in the
bold and simple — I mean the lark, the daughter of the sun. And
the nightingale also is inspired by the light ; so that, when in cap-
tivity, alone, and deprived of love, it suffices to unloose his song.
Confined for a while in darkness, then suddenly restored to the day,
he runs riot with enthusiasm, he bursts into hymns of joy. This

282

THE NIGHTINGALE.

difference, nevertheless, exists between the two birds : the lark never
sings in the night ; hers is not the nocturnal melody, the hidden
meaning of the grand effects of evening, the deep poesy of the
shadows, the solemnity of midnight, the aspirations before dawn
— in a word, that infinitely varied poem which translates and
reveals to us, in all its changes, a gi-eat heart brimful of tenderness.
The lark's is the lyrical genius ; the nightingale's, the epic, the
drama, the inner struggle, — from thence, a light aparb. In deep
darkness, it looks into its soul, into love ; soaring at times, it
would seem, beyond the individual love into the ocean of love
infinite.

And will you not call him an artist ? He has the artist's tem-
perament, and exalted to a degi-ee which man himself rarely attains.
All which belongs to it^ — all its merits, all its defects — in him are
superabundant. He is mild and timid, mistrustfvd, but not at all
cunning. He takes no heed to his safety, and travels alone. He is
burningly jealous, equalling the chaffinch in fieiy emulation. " He
will break his heart to sing," says one of his historians.* He listens ;
he takes up his abode, especially where an echo exists, to listen and

reply. Nervous to an excess, one sees him in captivity sometimes
sleeping long through the day with perturbing dreams ; sometimes

* Everj-bodj' knows the beautiful story of the '• Musician's Duel" — the rivalry between
a nightingale and a flute-player — as told by Ford and Crashaw. — Translator.

ART AND THE INFINITE. 283

struggling, starting up, and wildly battling. He is subject to ner-
vous attacks and epilepsy.

He is kindly — he is ferocious. Let me explain myself. His
heart is full of tenderness for the weak and little. Give him orphans
to watch over, he will take charge of them, and clasp them to his
heart ; a male, and aged, he nourishes and tends them as carefully as
any mother-bird. On the other hand, he is exceediiigly cruel towards
his prey, is greedy and voracious ; the flame which burns inly, and
keeps him almost always thin, makes him constantly feel the need of
recruitment, and it is also one of the reasons that he is so easily
ensnared. It is enough to set your bait in the morning; especially
in April and May, when he exhausts himself by singing throughout
the night. In the morning, weakened, frail, avid, he pounces blindly
on the snare. Moreover, he is very curious, and, in order to examine
a novel object, will expose himself to be caught.

Once captured, if you do not take the precaution to tie his wings,
or rather to cover the interior and pad the upper part of the cage, he
will kill himself by the frantic fury of his movements.

This violence is on the surface. At bottom, he is gentle and
docile : it is these qualities which raise him so high, and make him
in truth an artist. He is not only the most inspired, but the most
tractable, the most "civilizable," the most laborious of birds.

It is a charming sight to see the fledglings gathered round their
father, listening to him attentively, and profiting by his lessons to
form the voice, to correct their faults, to soften their novice-like
roughness, to render their young organs supple.

But how much more curious it is to see him training himself,
judging, perfecting himself, paying especial attention when he ven-
tures on new themes ! This steadfast perseverance, which springs
from his reverence for his art and from a kind of inward religion, is
the morality of the artist, his divine consecration, which seals him as
one apart — distinguishes him from the vain improvisatore, whose
unconscientious babble is a simple echo of nature.

Thus love and light are undoubtedly his point of departure ; but

284

THE NIGHTINGALE.

art itself, the love of the beautiful, confusedly seen in glimpses, and
very keenly felt, are a second ahment, which sustains his soul, and
supplies it with a new inspiration. And this is boundless — a day
opened on the infinite.

fc* ^S'f^i^j^ ^<il

The true greatness of the artist consists in overshooting his mark,
in doing more than he willed ; and, moreover, in passing far beyond
the goal, in crossing the limits of the possible, and looking beyond —
beyond.

Hence arise great sorrows, an inexhaustible source of melancholy ;
hence the sublime folly of weeping over misfortunes which he has
never experienced. Other birds are astonished, and occasionally
inquire of him what is the cause of his grief, what does he regret.
Wlien free and joyous in his forest-home, he does not the less Touch-
safe for his reply the strain which my captive chanted in his
silence :

" Lascia che io pianga !"
Suffer me, suffer me to weep !

friE iSEHTsieaiE.

;, The hours of silence are not barren for the niglitin-

gale He gathers his ideas and reflects ; he broods over
the songs wliich he has heard or has himself attempted ;
he modifies and improves them with perfect tact and taste,
i'oi the false notes of an ignorant master he substitutes
ingenious and harmonious variations. The imperfect strain
which he has learned, but has not repeated, he then repro-
duces , but made indeed his own, appropriated by his own
genius, and converted into a nightingale's melody.

"Do not be discouraged," says a quaint old writer,

" if the young bird be not willing to repeat your lesson,

and continue to warble ; soon he will show you that he

has not forgotten the lessons received in autumn and

winter — a fit season for oneditation, Giving to the length of the

nights ; he will repeat them in the spring-time."

It is very interesting to follow, during the winter, the nigh tin-

288 THE NIGHTINGALE.

gale's thouglits, in his darkened cage, wi-apped round with a green
cloth, which partially deceives his gaze, and reminds him of his forest.
In December he begins to dream aloud, to descant, to describe in
pathetic notes the things passing before his mind — the loved and
absent objects. Mayhap he then forgets that migration has been for-
bidden him, and thinks he has arrived in Africa or in Syria, in lands
lighted by a more generous sun. It may be that he sees this sun ;
sees the rose reblossom, and recommences for her, as say the Persian
poets, his hymn of impossible love, — " 0 sun ! 0 sea ! 0 rose .'" —
(RilcJcert.)

For m3'self, I believe simply that this noble and pathetic hymn,
with its lofty accent, is nought else but himself, his life of love and
combat, his nightingale's drama. He beholds the woods, the beloved
object which transfigures them. He sees her tender vivacity, and
the thousand gi-aces of the winged life which we are unable to per-
ceive. He speaks to her ; she answers him. He takes upon himself
two characters, and, to the full, sonorous voice of the male, replies in
soft, brief utterances. What then ? I doubt not that already the
rapturousness of his life breaks upon him — the tender intimacy of the
nest, the little lowly dwelling which would have been his Eden.
He believes in it ; he shuts his eyes, and completes the illusion.
The egg is hatched ; his Yule-tide miracle disclosed ; his son issues
forth — the future nightingale, even at its birth sublimely melodious.
He listens ecstatically, in the night of his gloomy cage, to the future
song of his offspring.

And all this, to be sure, passes before him iu a poetical confusion,
where obstacles and strife break up and disturb love's festival. No
happiness here below is pure. A third intervenes. The captive in
his solitude grows irritated and eager ; he struggles visibly against
his unseen adversary — tJiat other, the unworthy rival which is present
to his mind.

The scene is developed before him, just as it would have transpired
in spring, when the male birds returning, towards March or April, and
before the re-appearance of the hens, resolve to decide among them-

THE NIGHTINGALE. 289

selves their great duel of jealousy. For when the latter arrive,
all. must be calm and peaceful ; there should prevail nothing but
love, tranquillity, and tenderness. The battle endures some fifteen
days ; and if the female birds return sooner, the effort grows deadly.
The story of Roland is literally realized ; he sounded his ivory horn,
even to the extinction of strength and life. These, too, sing until
their last breath — until death : they will triumph or die.

If it be true, as we are assured, that the lovers are two or three
times more numerous than the lady-loves, you may conceive the
violence of this burning emulousness, in which, perhaps, lurks the
first spark and the secret of their genius.

The fate of the vanquished is terrible — worse than death. He is
constrained to fly ; to quit the province, the country ; to sink into
the comrade of the lower races of birds ; while his song is degraded
into a patois. He forgets and disgraces himself; becomes vulgarized
among this vulgar people ; little by little gro\ving ignorant of his own
tongue, of theirs, of any tongue. We sometimes discover among
these exiles birds which preserve only the external likeness of the
nightingale.

Though the rival is expelled, nothing as yet is done. The victor
must please, must subdue her. Oh ! bright moment, soft inspiration
of the new song which shall touch that little proud Wild-heart, and
compel it to abandon liberty for love ! The test imposed by the hen-
bird in other species is assistance in building or excavating the nest ;
that the male may show he is skilful, and will take his offspring to his
heart. The effect is sometimes admirable. The woodpecker, as we have
seen, is elevated from a workman into an artist, and from a carpenter
into a sculptor. But, alas ! the nightingale does not possess this
talent ; he knows not how to do anything. The least among the
small birds is a hundred times more adi'oit with his bill, his wing,
his claw. He has only his voice which he can make use of ; there
his power breaks forth, there he will be irresistible. Others may dis-
play their works, but his work is himself; he shows, he reveals him-
self, and he appears sublime and gi-and.

19

290 THE NIGHTINGALE.

I have never heard him at this solemn moment without thinking
that not only should he touch her heart, l)ut transform, emioble,
and exalt her, inspire her with a lofty ideal, with the enchanted
di'eam of a glorious nightingale which shall be hereafter the offspring
of their love.

Let us resume. So far, we have particularized three songs.

The drama of the battle-song, with its alternations of envy, pride,
bravado, stern and jealous fury.

The song of solicitation, of soft and tender entreaty, but mingled
with haughty movements of an almost imperious impatience, wherein
genius is visibly astonished that it still remains unrecognized, is irri-
tated at the delay, and laments it ; returning quickly, however, to
its tone of reverent pleading.

Finally comes the song of triumph : " I am the conqueror, I am
loved, the king, the divinity, and the creator." In this last word
lies all the intensity of life and love ; for it is she, above all,
that creates, mirroring and reflecting his genius, and so transforming
herself that henceforth thei'e is not in her a movement, a breath, a
flutter of the wings, which does not owe its melodiousness to him,
rendered \dsible in this enchanted grace.

Thence spring the nest, the egg, the infant. All these are an em-
bodied and living song. And this is the reason that he does not stir
from her for a moment, during the sacred labour of incubation. He
does not remain in the nest, but on a neighbouring branch, slightly
elevated above it. He knows marvellously well that his voice is
most potent at a distance. From this exalted position, the all-
powerful magician continues to fascinate and fertilize the nest; he
co-operates in the great mystery, and still inspires with song, and
heart, and breath, and will, and tenderness.

This is the time that you should hear him, should hear liim in
his native woods, should participate in the emoticms of this powerful
fecundity, the most proper perhaps to reveal, to enable us to com-
prehend here below the great hidden Deity which eludes us. He
recedes before us at every step, and science does no more than put

THE NIGHTINGALE.

291

Behold,"

a little further back the veil wherein he conceals himself,
said Moses, " behold him who passes,
I have seen him by the skirts." " Is
it not he," said Linne, "who passes?
I have seen him in outline." And
for myself, I close my eyes; I per-
ceive him with an agitated heart, I
feel him stirring within me on a
night enchanted by the voice of the
nightingale.

Let us draw near ; it is a lover :
yet keep you distant, for it is
a god. The melody, now vibrating
with a glowing appeal to the senses,
anon grows sublime and amplified
by the efiects of the wind; it is a
strain of sacred harmony which
swells through all the forest. Near
at hand, it is occupied with the
nest, their love, the son which will
be born; but afar, another is the be-
loved, another is the son: it is
Nature, mother and daughter, eternal
love, which hymns and glorifies it-
self; it is the infinite of love which
loves in all things and sings in all :
these are the tendernesses, the can-
ticles, the songs of gratitude, which
go up from earth to heaven.
* * * *

" Child, I have felt this in our
southern fields, during the beauti-
ful starry nights, near my father's
house. At a later time, I felt it more keenly, especiall}^ in the

292 THE XIGHTIXGALE.

vicinity of Nantes, in the lonesome vineyard of which I have spoken
in a preceding page. The nights, less sparkling, were lightly veiled
mth a warm haze, through which the stars discreetly sent their tender
glances. A nightingale nestled on the ground, in a spot but half con-
cealed, under my cedar tree, and among the periwinkle-flowers. He
began towards midnight, and continued until dawn ; happily, mani-
festly proud, in his solitary vigil, and filling the majestic silence with
his voice. No one interrupted him except, near morning, the cock,
a creature of a different world, a stranger to the songs of the spirit,
but a punctual sentinel, who felt himself conscientiously compelled
to indicate the hour and warn the workman.

" The other persisted for some time in his strain, seeming to say,
like Juliet to Romeo: 'No, it is not the day.'

" His stationing himself near us showed that he feared nothing,
that he knew how profound a security he might enjoy by the side of
two hermits of work, veiy busy, very benevolent, and not less
occupied than "the winged solitary in their song and their dream.
We could watch him at our ease, either fluttering about ^ii famille.
or maintaining a rivalry in song "udth a haughty neighbour who
sometimes came to brave him. In course of time we became, I
think, rather agi'eeable to him, as assiduous auditors, amateurs, per-
haps connoisseurs. The nightingale feels the want of appreciation
and applause; he plainly has a great regard for man's attentive ear,
and fully comprehends his admiration.

" Once more I can see him, at some ten or fifteen paces distant,
hopping forward in accordance with my movements, preserving the
same interval between us, so as to keep always out of reach, but at
the same time to be heard and admired.

"The attire in which you are clothed is by no means a matter
of indifference to him. I have observed that birds in general do not
like black, and that they are afraid of it. I was dressed quite to his
fancy, in white shaded with lilac, with a straw hat ornamented with
a few blossoms. Every minute I could see him fix upon me his black
eye, of a singular vivacity, Avild and gentle, sometimes a little proud,

THE NIGHTINGALE.

293

which said plainly, ' I am free, and I have wings ; against me thou
canst do nothing. But I am very willing to sing for thee.'

" We had a succession of severe storms at breeding-time, and on
one occasion the thunder rolled near us. No scene can be more
affecting than the approach of these moments: the air fails; fish rise
to the surface in order to breathe a little ; the flower bends languidly ;
everything suffers, and tears floAV unbidden. I could see clearly that
Ills feelings were in unison with the general distress. From his
bosom, oppressed like mine, broke a kind of hoarse sob, like a
wild cry.

" But the wind, which had suddenly risen, now plunged into our
woods; the loftiest trees, even the cedar, bent. Torrents of rain
dashed headlong, all was afloat. What became of the poor little nest,
exposed on the ground, with no other shelter than the periwinkle's
leaf? It escaped; for when the sun reappeared, I saw my bird
flying in the purified air, gayer than ever, with liis heart full of
song. All the world of wings then hymned the light ; but he more
loudly than any. His clarion voice had returned. I saw him be-
neath my window, his eye on fire and his breast swollen, intoxi-

294

THE NIGHTINGALE.

eating hmxself with the same happiness that made my heart
palpitate.

" Tender alUance of souls! Why does it not everywhere exist,
between us and our winged brothers, between man and the universal
livino- nature ? "

C fl S C :L a § HJ H

}

vviiv'?-'^

At the very moment that I am about to pen the conchision of
this book, our illustrious master arrives from his great autumnal
sport. Toussenel brings me a nightingale.

I had requested him to assist me with his advice, to guide me in
choosing a singing nightingale. He does not wi'ite, but he comes ;
he does not advise, he looks about, finds, gives, realizes my dream.
This, of a truth, is friendship.

Be welcome, bird, both for the sake of the cherished hand which
brings thee, and for thy OAvn, for thy hallowed muse, the genius
which dwells within thee !

Wilt thou sing readily for me, and, by thy puissance of love and
calm, shed harmony on a heart troubled by the cruel history of men ?

It was an event in our family, and we established the poor artist-
prisoner in a window-niche, but enveloped with a curtain; in such
wise that, being both in solitude and yet in society, he might
gradually accustom himself to his new hosts, reconnoitre the locality,
and assure himself that he was under a safe, a peaceful, and benevo-
lent roof.

No other bird lived in this saloon. Unfortunately, my familiar
robin, which flies freely about my study, penetrated into the apart-

298 CONCLUSION.

ment. We had troubled ourselves the less about him, because he saw
daily, without any emotion, canaries, bullfinches, nightingales ; but
the sight of the nightingale threw him into an incredible transport of
fury. Passionate and intrepid, without heeding that the object of
his hate was twice his own size, he pounced on the cage with bill
and claws; he would fain have killed its inmate. The nightingale,
however, uttered cries of alarm, and called for help with a hoarse and
pitiful voice. The other, checked by the bars, but clinging with his
claws to the frame of an adjacent picture, raged, hissed, crackled (the
popular word petillait alone expresses his short, sharp cry), piercing
him with his glances. He said, in effect: —

" King of song, what dost thou here? Is it not enough that in
the woods thy imperious and absorbing voice should silence all our
lays, hush our strains into whispers, and singly fill the desert ?
Yet thou comest hither to deprive me of the new existence which I
have found for myself, of this artificial grove where I perch all the
winter, a grove whose branches are the shelves of a library, whose
leaves are books ! Thou comest to share, to usurp the attention of
which I was the object, the reverie of my master, and my mistress's
smile ! Woe to thee ! I luas loved ! ''

The robin does, in reality, attain to a very high degree of famili-
arity with man. The experience of a long winter proves to me that
he much prefers human society to that of his own kind. In our
absence he shares in the small talk of the birds of the aviary; but as

CONCLUSION. 299

soon as we arrive, he abandons them, and comes curiously to place
himself before us, remains with us, seems to say, " You are here,
then ! But where have you been ? And why have you absented
yourself so long from home ? "

The invasion of the robin, which we soon forgot, was not for-
gotten, it appears, by his timorous victim. The unfortunate nightingale
fluttered about ever afterwards with an air of alarm, and nothing
could reassure him.

Care was taken, however, that no one should approach him. His
mistress had charged herself with the necessary attentions. The
peculiar mixture which alone can nourish this ardent centre of life
(blood, hemp, and poppy), was conscientiously prepared. Blood and
flesh, these are the substance; hemp is the herb of intoxication; but
the poppy neutralizes it. The nightingale is the only creature which
it is necessary to feed incessantly with sleep and dreams.

But all was in vain. Two or three days passed in a violent
agitation, and in abstinence through despair-. I was melancholy, and
filled with remorse. I, a friend of freedom, had nevertheless a
prisoner, and a prisoner who would not be consoled ! It was not
without some scruples that I had formed the idea of procuring a
nightingale; for the mere sake of pleasure, I should never have come
to* such a decision. I knew well that the very spectacle of such a
captive, deeply sensible of its captivity, was a permanent source of
sorrow. But how should I set him free? Of all questions, that of
slavery is the most difficult; the tyrant is punished by the impos-
sibility of finding a remedy for it. My captive, before coming into
my possession, had been two years in a cage, and had neither wings
nor the impulse of industry to seek his own food; but had it been
otherwise, he could return no more to the free birds. In their proud
commonwealth, whoever has been a slave, whoever has languished
in a cage and not died of grief, is pitilessly condemned and put to
death.

We should not easily have escaped from this dilemma, if song
had not come to our assistance. A soft, almost monotonous strain,

300 CONCLUSION.

sung at a distance, especially just before evening, appeared to in-
fluence and win upon him. If we did but look at him, he listened less
attentively, and grew disturbed; but if we turned aside our gaze, he
came to the brink of the cage, stretched out his long, fawn-like neck
(of a charming mouse-like gray), raised every now and then his head,
his body remaining motionless, with a keen inquiring eye. With
evident avidity, he tasted and enjoyed this unexpected pleasure, with
e'ratefal recollection, and delicate and sensitive attention.

This same avidity he felt a minute aftei-wards for his food. He
was fain to live, he devoured the poppy, forgetfulness.

A woman's songs, Toussenel had told me, are those which affect
them most; not the vivacious aria of a wayward damsel, but a soft,
sad melody. Schubert's " Serenade " had a peculiar influence upon
our nightingale. He seemed to feel and recognize himself in that
German soul, as tender as it was profound.

His voice, however, he did not regain. When transported to my
house, he had begun his December songs. The emotions of the
journey, the change of locale and of persons, the inquietude which he
had experienced in his new condition, and, above all, the ferocious
welcome, the robin's assault, had too deeply moved him. He
grew tranquil, asked no more of us ; but the muse, so rudely
interrupted, was thenceforth silent, and did not awake until
spring.

Meanwhile, he certainly knew that the person who sang afar ofi'
wished him no evil ; he apparently supposed her to be a nightingale
of another form. She might without difficulty approach, and even
put her hand in his cage. He regarded intently what she did, but
did not stir.

It became a curious question to me, who had not contracted with
him this musical alliance, to know if he would also accept me. I
showed no indiscreet eagerness, knowinof that even a look, at certain
moments, vexes him. For many days, therefore, I kept my attention
fixed on the old books or papers of the fourteenth century, without
observing him. But he, he would examine me very curiously when

CONCLUSION.

301

I was alone. Be it understood, however, that when his mistress was
present, he entirely forgot me, I was annulled !

Thus he grew accustomed to see me daily without any uneasiness,
as an inoffensive, pacific being, with little of movement or noise about
me. The fire in the grate, and near the fire this peaceable reader,
were, during the absences of the prefeiTed individual, in the still and
almost solitary hours, his objects of contemplation.

I ventured yesterday, being alone, to approach him, to speak to
him as I do to the robin, and he did not grow agitated, he did not
appear disturbed ; he listened quietly, with an eye full of softness. I
saw that peace was concluded, and that I was accepted.

This morning I have with my own hand placed the poppy seed
in the cage, and he is not the least alarmed. You will say : " Wlio
gives is welcome." But 1 assert that our treaty was signed yesterday,
before I had given him anything, and was perfectly disinterested.

See, then, in less than a month, the most nervous of artists,
the most timid and mistrustful of beings, grows reconciled with the
human species.

A curious proof of the natural union, of the pre-existent alliance
which prevails between us and these creatures of instinct, which we
call inferior.

This alliance, this eternal fact, which our bmtality and our
ferocious intelligences have not yet been able to rend asunder, to
which these poor little ones so readily return, to which we shall

302 CONCLUSION.

ourselves return, when we shall be truly men, is exactly the con-
clusion this book has aimed at, and which I was about to write,
when the nightingale entered, and the father with the nightin-
gale.

The bird himsell" has been, in that facile amnesty which he has
granted to us, his tyrants, my living conclusion.

Those travellers who have been the first to penetrate into lands
hitherto untrodden by man, unanimously report that all animals,
mammals, amphibians, birds, do not shun them, but, on the contrary,
rather approach to regard them with an air of benevolent curiosity,
to which they have responded with musket-shots.

Even to-day, after man has treated them so ci'uelly, animals,
in their times of peril, never hesitate to draw near him.

The bird's ancient and natural foe is the serpent ; the enemy of
quach'upeds is the tiger. And their protector is man.

From the furthest distance that the wild dog smells the scent of
the tiger or the lion, he comes to press close to us.

And so, too, the bird, in the horror which the sei-j^ent inspires,
especially when it threatens his callow brood, finds a language of the
most forcible character to implore man's help, and to thank him if he
kills his enemy.

ik--

mr^^

^\

For this reason the humming-bird loves to nestle near man.
And it is probably from the same motive that the swallows and the

CONCLUSION. 303

storks, in times fertile in reptiles, have acquired the habit of dwelling
among us.

Here an observation becomes essential. We often construe as a
sign of mistrust the bird's flight and his fear of the human hand.
This fear is only too well founded. But even if it did not exist, the
bird is an infinitely nervous and delicate creature, which suffers if
simply touched.

My robin, which belongs to a very robust and friendly race of
birds, which continually draws near us, as near as possible, and
which assuredly has no fear of his mistress, trembles to fall into her
band. The rustling of his plumes, the derangement of his down, all
bristling when he has been handled, he keenly dislikes. The sight,
above all, of the outstretched hand about to seize him, makes him
recoil instinctively.

When he lingers about in the evening, and does not return into
his cage, he does not refuse to be replaced within it ; but sooner than
see himself caught, he turns his back, hides in a crease or fold of the
gown where he well knows he must infallibly be taken.

All this is not mistrust.

The art of domestication will make no progress if it occupies
itself only with the services which tamed animals may render
to man.

It ought to proceed in the main from the consideration of the
service which man may render the animals ;

Of his duty to initiate all the tenants of this world into a gentler,
more peaceable, and superior society.

In the barbarism in which we are still plunged, we know of only
two conditions for the animal, absolute liberty or absolute slavery ;

304 CONCLUSION.

but there are many forms of demi-servitude which the animals them-
selves would willingly accept.

The small Chili falcon (cernicula), for example, loves to dwell
with his master. He goes alone on his hunting expeditions, and
faithfully returns every evening with what he has captured, to eat it
en famille. He feels the want of being praised by the father, flattered
by the dame, and, above all, caressed by the children.

I.'

Man, formerly protected by the animals, while he was indifferently
armed, has gradually risen into a position to become their protector,
especially since he has had powder, and enjoyed the possibility of
shooting down from a distance the most formidable creatures. He has
rendered birds the essential service of infinitely diminishing the number
of the robbers of the air.

He may render them another, and not a less important one- — that
of sheltering at night the innocent species. Night ! sleep ! complete
abandonment to the most frightful chances ! Oh ! harshness of
Nature ! But she is justified, inasmuch as she has planted here
below the far-seeing and industrious being who shall more and more
become for all others a second providence.

" I know a house on the Indre," says Toussenel, " where the
greenhouses, open at even, receive every honest bird which seeks an
asylum against the dangers of the night, where he who has delayed
till late knocks with his bill in confidence. Content to be immured

CONCLUSION.

305

during the night, secure in the loyalty of their host, they fly away
happy in the morning, and repay him for his hospitality with the
spectacle of their joy and their unrestricted strains."

I shall exercise great caution in speaking of their domestication,
since my friend, M. Isidore Geoffrey Saint Hdaire, reopens in so
praiseworthy a manner this long- forgotten question.

An allusion will suffice. Antiquity in this special branch has
bequeathed us the admirable patrimony which has supported the
human race : the domestication of the dog, the horse, and the ass ; of
the camel, the elephant, the ox, the sheep, the goat, and poultry.

What progress has been made in the last two thousand years ?
What new acquisition ?

Two only, and these unquestionably trivial : the importation of
the turkey and the China pheasant.

No direct eflbrt of man has accomplished so much for the welfare of
the globe as the humble toil of the modest auxiliaries of human life.

To descend to that which we so foolishly despise, to the poultry-
yard, when one sees the millions of eggs which the ovens of Egypt
hatch, or with which our Normandy loads the ships and fleets that
every year traverse the Channel, one learns to appreciate how the
small agencies of domestic economy produce the greatest results.

20

30G CONCLUSION.

If France did not possess the horse, and some person introduced
it, such a conquest would be of greater benefit to her than the
conquest of the Rhine, of Belgium, of Savoy ; the horse alone would
be worth three kingdoms.

But here now is an animal which represents in itself the horse,
the ass, the cow, the goat ; which combines all their useful qualities,
and which yields moreover an incomparable wool ; a hardy, robust
animal, enduring cold with wonderful vigour. You understand, of
course, that I refer to the lama, which M. Isidore Geoffrey Saint
Hilaire exerts himself, with so laudable a perseverance, to naturalize
in France. Everything seems leagued in his despite : the fine flock
at Versailles has perished through malice ; that of the Jardin des
Plantes will perish through the confined area and dampness of the
locality.

The conquest of the lama is ten times more important than the
conquest of the Crimea.

But again, this sjDecies of transplantation needs a generosity of
means, a combination of precautions, let us say a tenderness of edu-
cation, which are rarely found united.

One word here — -one small fact — whose bearing is not small.

A great writer, who was not a man of science, Bernardin de
Saint Pierre, had remarked that we should never succeed in trans-
planting the animal unless we imported along with him the plant to
which he was especially partial. This observation fell to the gi'ound,
like so many other theories which excite the philosophical smile, and
which men of science name poetry.

But it has not been made in vain, for an enlightened amateur
had formed here, in Paris, a collection of living birds. However
constant his attentions, a very rare she-parrot which he had obtained
remained obstinately barren. He ascertained in what kind of plant
she made her nest, and commissioned a person to procure it for him.

CONCLUSION.

307

It could not be got alive ; he received it leafless and branchless ; a
simple dead trunk. It mattered not ; the bird, in this hollow trunk
discovered lier accustomed place, and did not fail to make therein
her nest. She laid eggs, she hatched them, and now her owner has a
colony of young ones.

To re-create all the conditions of abode, food, vegetable environ-
ment, the harmonies of every kind which shall deceive the exile into
a forgetfuluess of his country, is not only a scientific question, but a
task of ingenious invention.

To determine the limit of slavery, of freedom, of alliance and
collaboration with ourselves, proper for each individual creature, is
one of the gravest subjects which can occupy us.

A new art is this ; nor shall you succeed in it without a moral
gravity, a refinement, a delicacy of appreciation wliich as yet are
scarcely understood, and shall only exist perhaps when Woman under-
takes those scientific studies from which she has hitherto been excluded.

This art supposes a tenderness unlimited in justice and wisdom.

(i "-

i

ft**^

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

The chief illustration of a book is incontestably the formula in
which it is summed up. Here it is, then, in few words : —

This book has considered the bird in himself, and but little in
relation to man.

The bird, bom in a much lower condition than man (oviparous,
like the serpent), possesses three advantages over him, which are his
special mission : —

I. The wing, flight, an unique power, which is the dream of man.
Every other creature is slow. Compared with the falcon or swallow,
the Arab horse is a snail.

II. Flight itself does not appertain solely to the wing, but to an
incomparable power of respiration and vision. The bird is peculiarly
the son of air and light.

III. An essentially electrical being, the bird sees, knows, and
foresees earth and sky, the weather, the seasons. Whether through
an intimate relation with the globe, whether through a prodigious
memory of localities and routes, he is always facing eastward, and
always knows his path.

He swoops ; he penetrates ; he attains what man shall never
attain. This is evident, particularly in his marvellous war against
the reptile and the insect.

312 ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

Add the marvellous work of continual purification of eveiything
dangerous and unclean, wliieli some species accomplisli. If this war
RvA tins work ceased but for one day, man would disappear from the
earth.

This daily victory of the beloved son of light over death, over a
murderous and tenebrous life, is the fitting theme of his song, of
that hjonn of joy with which the bird salutes each Dawn.

But, besides song, the bird has many other languages. Like
man, he prattles, recites, converses. He and man are the only beings
which have really a language. Man and the bii-d are the voice of
the world.

The bird, with its gift of augury, is ever drawing near to man,
who is ever inflicting injury upon him. He undoubtedly divines,
and has a presentiment of, what he will one day become when
he emerges from the bai'barism in which he is now unhajDpily
plunged.

He recognizes in him the creature unique, sanctified, and blessed,
who ought to be the arbiter of all, who should accomplish the destiny
of this globe by one supreme act of good — the union of all life and
the reconciliation of all beings.

This pacific union must after a time be effected by a great art of
education and initiation, which man begins to comprehend.

Page 64. Training for flight (see also p. 84). — Is it wrong for
man, in his reveries, to beguile himself into a belief that he will one
day be more than man, to attribute to himself wings ? Dream or pre-
sentiment, it matters not.

It is certain that a power of flight such as the bird possesses is
truly a sixth sense. It would be absurd to see in it only an auxiliary

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. SM

of touch. (See, among other works, Huber, Vol des oiseaux de jjroie,
1784).

The wirig is so rapid and so infallible only because it is aided by
a visual faculty which has not its equal in all creation.

The bird, we must confess, lives wholly in the air, in the light.
If there be a sublime life, a life of fire, it is this,

Wlio surveys and descries all earth ? Wlio measures it with his
glance and his wing ? Who knows all its paths ? And not in any
beaten route, but at the same time in every direction : for where is
not the bird's track ?

His relations with heat, electricity, and magnetism, all the impon-
derable forces, are scarcely known to us ; we see them, however, in
his singular meteorological prescience.

If we had seriously studied the matter, we should have had the
balloon for some thousands of years ; but even with the balloon, and
the balloon capable of being steered, we should still be enormously
behind the bird. To imitate its mechanism, and exactly reproduce
its details, is not to possess the agi-eement, the ensemble, the unity
of action, which moves the whole with so much facility and with such
terrible swiftness.

Let us renounce, for this life at least, these higher gifts, and
confine ourselves to examine the two machines — our own and the
bird's — in those points where they differ least.

The human machine is superior in what is its smallest peculiarity,
its susceptibihty of adaptation to the most diverse purposes, and, above
all, in its omnipuissance of the hand.

On the other hand, he has far less unity and centralization. Our
inferior limbs, our thighs and legs, which are very long, perfonn
eccentric movements far from the central point of action. Circulation
is very slow ; a thing perceptible in those last moments, when the
body is dead at the feet before the heart has ceased to throb.

The bird, almost spherical in form, is certainly the apex, divine
and sublime, of living centralization. We can neither see nor imagine
a higher degree of unity. From his excess of concentration he derives

314 ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

his great personal force, but it implies his extreme individuality, his
isolation, his social weakness.

The profound, the marvellous solidarity, which is found in the
higher o-enera of insects, as in the bees and ants, is not discovered
among birds. Flocks of them are common, but true republics are
rare.

Family ties are very strong in their influence, such as maternity
and love. Brotherhood, the sympathy of species, the mutual assist-
ance rendered even by different kinds, are not unknown. Never-
theless, fraternity is strong among them in the inferior line. The
whole heart of the bird is in his love, in his nest.

There lies his isolation, his feebleness, his dependence ; there also
the temptation to seek for himself a defender.

The most exalted of livino^ beings is not the less one of those
which the most eagerly demand protection.

Page 67. On the life of the bird in the egg. — I draw these details
from the accurate M. Duvernoy. Ovology in our days has become a
science. Yet I know but a few treatises specially devoted to the bird's
egg. The oldest is that of an Abbe Manesse, wiitten in the last cen-
tury, very verbose, and not very instructive (the MS. is preserved in

the Museum Library). The same library possesses the German work
of Wirfing and Gunther on nests and eggs ; and another, also German,

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 315

whose illustrations appear of a superior character, although still
defective. I have seen a part of a new collection of engravings, much
more carefully executed.

Page 14. Gelatinous and nourishing seas. — Humboldt, in one
of his early works (" Scenes in the Tropics "), was the first, I think,
to authenticate this fact. He attributes it to the prodigious quantity
of medusae, and other analogous creatures, in a decomposed state in
these waters. If, however, such a cadaverous dissolution reaUy pre-
vailed there, would it not render the waters fatal to the fish, instead
of nourishing them ? Perhaps this phenomenon should be attributed
rather to nascent life than to life extinct, to that first livinof fermen-
tation in which the lowest microscopic organizations develop them-
selves.

It is especially in the Polar Seas, whose aspect is so wild and
desolate, that this characteristic is observed. Life there abounds in
such excess that the colour of the waters is completely changed by
it. They are of an intense olive-gi-een, thick with living matter and
nutriment.

Page 91. Our Museum. — In speaking of its collections, I may
not forget its valuable library, which now includes that of Cuvier, and
has been enriched by donations from all the physicists of Europe. I

have had occasion to acknowledge very warmly the courtesy of the
conservator, M. Desnoyers, and of M. le Docteur Lemercier, who has

316 ILLUSTKATIVE NOTES.

obligingly supplied me with a number of pamphlets and curious
memoirs from his private collection.

Page 94. Buffon. — I think that now-a-dayswe too readily forget
that this gi'eat generalizer has not the less received and recorded a
number of very accurate observations furnished him by men of special
vocations, officers of the royal hunt, gamekeepers, marines, and persons
of every profession.

Page 9G. The Penguin. — The brother of the auk, but less de-
graded ; he carries his wings like a veritable bird, though they are
only membranes floating on an evoided breast. The more rarified
air of our northern pole, where he lives, has already expanded his
lungs, and the breast-bone begins to project. The legs, less closely
confined to the body, better maintain its equilibrium, and the port
and attitude gain in confidence. There is here a notable difference
between the analogous products of the two hemispheres.

Page 103. The Petrel, the Qnariners tensor. — The legend of the
petrel gliding upon the waves, around the ship which he appears to
lead to perdition, is of Dutch origin. This is just as it ought to
be. Tlie Dutch, who voyage en famille, and cany with them their
wives, their children, even their domestic animals, have been more
susceptible to evil auguries than other navigators. Tlie hardiest of
all, perhaps— true amphibians — they have not the less been anxious
and imaginative, hazarding not only their lives, but their affections,

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 317

and exposing to the fantastic chances of the sea the beloved home, a
world of tenderness. That small lumbering bark, which is in truth
a floating house, will nevertheless go, ever rolling across the seas
of the North, the great Arctic Ocean, and the furious Baltic, accom-
plishing without pause the most dangerous voyages, as from Amster-
dam to Cronstadt. We laugh at these ugly vessels and their
antiquated build, but he who observes how plenteously they combine
the two purposes of store-room for the cargo and accommodation for
the family, can never see them in the ports of Holland without a
lively interest, or without lavishing on them his good washes.

Page 113. Epiornis. — The remains of this gigantic bird and its
enormous eg^ may be seen in the Museum. It is computed that its
size was fivefold that of the ostrich. How much we must regret
that our rich collection of fossils, or the major part, lies buried in the
drawers of the Museum for want of room. For thirty or forty thou-
sand francs a wooden gallery might be constructed, in which the
whole could find opportunities of display.

Meanwhile, we argue as if these vast studies, now in their very
infancy, had already been exhausted. Wlio knows but that man has
only seen the threshold of the prodigious world of the dead ? He
has scarcely scratched the surface of the globe. The deeper explora-
tions to which he is constrained by the thousand novel needs of art
and industry (as that, for example, of piercing the Alps for a new
railway) will open to science unexpected prospects. Palaeontology as
yet is built upon the narrow foundation of a minimum number of
facts. If we remember that the dead — owing to the thousands of
years the globe has already lived- — are enormously more numerous
than the livins;, we cannot but consider this method of reasonino;

318 ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

upon a few specimens very audacious. It is a hundred, nay, a thou-
sand to one, that so many millions of dead, once disinten'ed, will con-
vict us of having eiTed, at least, through incomplete enumeration.

Page 113. Man had perished a hundred times. — Here we trace
one of the early causes of the limited confederacy originally existing
between man and the animal — a compact forgotten by our ungrateful
pride, and without which, nevei-theless, the existence of man had
been impossible.

When the colossal birds whose remains we are constantly exhuming
had prepared for him the globe, had subjugated the crawling, climbing
life which at first predominated — when man came upon the earth to
confront what remained of the reptiles, to confront those new but not less
formidable inhabitants of our planet, the tiger and the lion — he found
on his side the bird, the dog, and the elephant.

At Alexandria may be seen the last few individuals of those
giant dogs which could strangle a lion. It was not through terror
that these formidable animals allied themselves with man, but
through natural sympathy, and their peculiar antipathy to the fehne
race, the giant cat (the tiger or Hon).

Without the alliance of the dog against beasts of prey, and that
of the bird against serpents and crocodiles (which the bird kills in
the very &gg), man had assuredly been lost.

The useful friendship of the horse originated in the same cause.
You may trace it in the indescribable and convulsive horror which
every young horse experiences at the mere odour of the lion. He
attaches, he surrenders himself to man.

Had he not possessed the horse, the ox, and the camel — had he
been compelled to bear on his back and shoulders the lieavy burdens

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 319

of which they relieve him — man would have remained the miserable
slave of his feeble organization. Borne down by the habitual dispro
portion of weight and strength, either he would have abandoned
labour, have lived upon chance victims, without art or progress ; or,
rather, he would have lived earth's everlasting porter — crooked,
dragging, and drawing, with sunken head, never gazing on the sky,
never thinking, never raising himself to the heights of invention.

Page 132. On the poiver of insects. — -It is not only in the Tropical
world that they are formidable ; at the commencement of the last
ceMury half Holland perished because the piles which strengthen its
dykes simultaneously gave way, invisibly undermined by a worm
named the taret.

This redoubtable nibbler, which is often a foot in length, never
betrays itself ; it only works within. One morning the beam breaks,
the framework yields, the ship engulfed founders in the waves.

How shall we reach, how discover it ? A bird knows it — the
lapwing, the guardian of Holland. And it is thus a notable impru-
dence to destroy, as has been done, his eggs. (Quatrefages, Souvenirs
d'un Katiiraliste.)

France, for more than a centuiy, has suffered from the impor-
tation of a monster not less terrible — the termite, which devours
dry wood just as the taret consumes wet wood. The single
female of each swarm has the honible fecundity of laying daily
eighty thousand eggs. La Rochelle begins to fear the fate of
that American city which is suspended in the air, the termites
having devoured all its foundations, and excavated immense cata-
combs beneath.

320 ILLUSTKATIVE NOTES.

In Guiana the dwellings of the termites are enormous hillocks,
fifteen feet in height, which men only venture to attack from a dis-
tance, and by means of gunpowder. You may judge, therefore, the
importance of the ant-eater, wliich dares to enter this gulf, and seek
out the horrible female whence issues so accursed a torrent.
(Smeathmann, Memoir e sur les Temmtes.)

Does climate save us ? The termites prosper in France. Here,
too, the cockchafer flourishes ; and even on the northern slopes
of the Alps, under the very breath of the glaciers, it devours vegeta-
tion. In the presence of such an enemy every insectivorous bird
should be respected ; at least, the canton of Vaud has recently placed
the swallow under the protection of the law. (See the work of
Tschudi.)

^is^ -^ ^-^^

Page 134. You frequently detect there a strong odour of mush. — -
The plain of Cumana, says Humboldt, presents, after heavy rains, an
extraordinary phenomenon. The earth, moistened and reheated by
the sun's rays, gives forth that odour of musk which, under the
torrid zone, is common to animals of very different classes — -to the
jaguar, the small species of the tiger-cat, the cabiai, the galinazo vul-
ture, the crocodile, the viper, the rattlesnake. The gaseous emana-
tions which are the vehicles of this aroma appear only to disengage
themselves in proportion as the soil enclosing the dehr'is of an innu-
merable quantity of reptiles, worms, and insects, becomes impregnate(i
with water. Everywhere that one stirs up the soil, one is struck by
the mass of organic substances which alternately develop, transform,
or decompose. Nature in these climates appears more active, more
prolific, one might say more lavish of life.

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 821

Pages 136, 137. Humming-hirds and colibris. — The eminent
naturalists (Lesson, Azara, Stedmann, &c.) who have supplied so
many excellent descriptions of these birds, are not, unfortunately, as
rich in details of their manners, their food, their character.

As to the terrible unhealthiness of the places where they live
(and live with so intense a life), the narratives of the old travellers —
of Labat and others — are fully confirmed by the moderns. Messieurs
Durville and Lesson, in their voyage to New Guiana, scarcely
dared to cross the threshold of its profound virgin forests, with their
strange and tenible beauty.

The most fantastic aspect of these forests^ — their prodigious faiiy-
like enchantment of nocturnal illumination by myriads of fire-flies —
is attested and very forcibly described, as far as relates to the coun-
tries adjoining Panama, by a French traveller, M. Caqueray, who has
recently visited them. (See his Journal in the new Revue Frangaise,
10th June 1855.)

Page 153. The valuable museum of anatomical collections — that
of Doctor Auzoux. — -*! cannot too warmly thank, on this occasion, our
esteemed and skilful professor, who condescends to instruct us igno-
rant people, men of letters, men of the world, and women. He
willed that anatomy should descend to all, should become popular ;
and it is done. His admirable imitations, his lucid demonstrations,

21

322 ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

gradually work out that great revolution whose full extent can
already be perceived. Shall I dare to tell men of science my inmost
thought ? They themselves will have an advantage in possessing
always at hand these objects of study under so convenient a form
and in enlarged proportions, which greatly diminish the fatigue
of attention. A thousand objects, which seem to us different
because different in size, recover their analogies, and reappear
in their true relative forms, through the simple process of enlarge-
ment.

America, I may add, appears more keenly sensible of these advan-
tages than we are. An American speculator had desired M. Auzoux
to supply him yearly with two thousand copies of his figure of man,
being certain of disposing of them in all the small towns, and even in
the villages. Every American village, says M. Auzoux, endeavours
to obtain a museum, an observatory, &c.

Page 157. The suioiJression of ixdii. — To prevent death is
undoubtedly impossible ; but we may prolong life. We may even-
tually render rarer, less cruel, and almost suppress pain.

That the hardened old world laughs at this expression is so much
the better. We have seen this spectacle in the days when our
Europe, barbarized by war, centred all medical art in surgery, and
only knew how to cure by the knife by a horrible prodigality of
suffering, young America discovered the miracle of that profound
dream in which all pain is annihilated.*

* Our author refers to the discovery of the anaesthetic properties of ether by an
American. It was a surgeon of old Europe, however, that gave tlie world the far more
powerful anaesthetic of chloroform. — Translator.

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 323

Page 15 7. The useful equUihriuin of life and death. — Numerous
species of birds no longer make a halt in France. One with difficulty
descries them flying at inaccessible elevations, deploying their wings
in haste, accelerating their passage, saying,- — -" Pass on, pass on
quickly ! Let us avoid the land of death, the land of destruction !"

Provence, and many other departments in the south, are barren
deserts, peopled by every living tribe, and therefore vegetable
nature is sadly impoverished. You do not interrupt with impunity
the natural harmonies. The bird levies a tax on the plant, but he is
its protector.

It is a matter of notoriety that the bustard has almost disappeared
from Champagne and Provence. The heron has passed away ; the
stork is rare. As we gi'adually encroach upon the soil, these species,
partial to dusty wastes and morasses, depart to seek a livelihood else-
where. Our progress in one sense is our poverty. In England the
same fact has been observed. (See the excellent articles on Sport
and Natural History, translated from Messrs. St. John, Knox, Gosse,
and other.s, in the Revue Britannique.) The heath-cock retires before
the step of the cultivator ; the quail passes into Ireland. The ranks
of the herons grow daily thinner before the utilitarian iTriprovements
of the nineteenth century. But to these causes we must add the
barbarism of man, which so heedlessly destroys a throng of innocent
species. Nowhere, says M. Pavie, a French traveller, is game more
timid tha.n in our fields.

Woe to the ungrateful people ! And hj this phrase I mean the
sporting crowd who, unmindful of the numerous benefits we owe to
animals, have exterminated innocent life. A terribls sentence of the
Creator weighs upon the tribes of sportsmen, — they can create nothing.

324 ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

They originate no art, no industry. They have added nothing to tlie
hereditary patrimony of the human species. What has their heroism
profited the Indians of North America ? Having organized nothing,
having accomplished nothing permanent, these races, despite their
singular energy, have disappeared from the earth before inferior men,
the last emigi'ants of Europe.

Do not believe the axiom that huntsmen gradually develop into
agriculturists. It is not so — they kill or die ; such is their whole
destiny. We see it clearly through experience. He who has killed,
will kill ; he who has created, will create.

In the want of emotion which every man suffers from his birth,
the child who satisfies it habitually by murder, by a miniature
ferocious drama of surprise and treason, of the toriure of the weak,
will find no great enjoyment in the gentle and tranquil emotions
arising from the progressive success of toil and study, fi'om the limited
industry which does everything itself To create, to destroy — these
are the two raptures of infancy : to create is a long, slow process ; to
destroy is quick and ea.sy. The least act of creation implies those best
gifts of the Creator and of kindly Nature : gentleness and patience.

It is a shocking and hideous thing to see a child partial to
"spori;" to see woman enjoying and admiring murder, and encourag-
ing her child. That delicate and sensitive woman would not give
him a knife, but she gives him a orm : kill at a distance — be it so !
for we do not see the suffering. And this mother will think it
admirable that her son, kept confined to his room, shall drive off ennui
by plucking the wings fi"om flies, by torturing a bird or a little dog.

Far-seeing mother ! She will know when too late the evil of
having formed a hard heart. Aged and weak, rejected of the world,
she will experience in her turn her son's brutality.

******

But rifle practice ? They will object to you. Must not the child
gTOw skilful in killing, that, from murder to murder, he may at last
arrive at the surpassing feat of killing the flying swallow ? The only
country in Europe where everybody knows how to handle a musket is

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 325

that where the bird is least exposed to slaughter. The land of William
Tell knew how to place before her children a juster and more exalted
object when they liberated their country.

******

France is not cruel. Why, then, this love of murder, this exter-
mination of tlie animal world ?

It is the rnvpatient people, the young people, the childish people,
in a rude and restless childhood. If they cannot be doing in creating,
they will be doing by destroying.

But what they most fatally injure is — themselves ! A violent
education, stormily impassioned in love or severit}^, criLshes in the
child, withers, chokes up the firet moral flower of natural sensitiveness,
all that was purest of the maternal milk, the germ of universal love
which rarely blooms again.

Among too many cliildren we are saddened by their almost incred-
ible sterility. A few recover from it in the long circle of life, when
they have become experienced and enlightened men. But the first
freshness of the heart? It shall return no more.*

How is it that this nation, otherwise born under such felicitous
circumstances, is, with rare and local exceptions, accursed with so
singular an incapacity for harmony ? It has its own peculiar songs,
its charming little melodies of vivacity and mirth. But it needs a
prolonged effort, a special education, to attain to harmony.

Page 158. Flattening of the brain. — The weight of the brain,

compared with that of the body, is, in the

Ostrich, in the ratio of 1 to 1200

Goose, 1 to 360

Duck, 1 to 257

Eagle 1 to 160

* Compare Byron, in " Don Jean."

326 ILLVSTRATIVE NOTES.

Plover, 1 to 122

Falcon, 1 to 102

Paroquet, 1 to 45

Eobiu I to 32

Jay 1 to 28

Chaffinch, cock, sparrow, goldfinch, 1 to 25

Hooded tomtit 1 to 16

Blue-cap tomtit 1 to 12

[Estimate of Hallcr and I.eiiret.)

Page 158. The noble falcon. — The nohle birds (the falcon, ger-
falcon, saker) are those which hold their prey by the talon, and kill
it with the bill : their bill, for this purpose, is toothed. The ignoble
birds (the eagle, the kite, &c.) are for the most part swift of flight
(voiliers) : these employ their talons to rend and choke their victims.
The rameiirs rise with difficulty, which enables the voiliers to escape
them the more easily. The tactics of the former are to feign, in
the first place, to rise to a great height ; and then, by sufiering
themselves to drop, they disconcert the manoeuvres of the voiliers.
(Huber, Vol des Oiseaux de Proie, 1784, 4to. He was the first of
that clever lineage, Huber of the birds, Huber of the bees, Huber of
the ants.)

.:'~"'»^_

Page 177. Its happiness in the morning, when terrors vanish!
— "Before " (says Tschudi) "the vermeil tints of the early dew have
announced the approach of the sun, oftentimes before even the lightest
gleam has heralded dawn in the east, while the stars still sparkle in

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 327

the sombre azure of heaven, a low murmur resounds on the summit
of a venerable pine, and is speedily followed by a more or less distinct
prattling ; then the notes arise, and an interminable series of keen
sounds strike the air on every side like a clang of swords continually
hurtled one against another. It is the coupling time of the wood-
cock. With his eye a-flame, he dances and springs on the branch,
while below him, in the copse, his hens repose tranquilly, and rever-
ently contemplate the mad antics of their lord and master. He is
not long left alone to animate the forest. The mavis rises in his
turn, shaking the dew from his glittering feathers. Behold him
whetting his bill upon the branch, and leaping from bough to bough,
up to the veiy crest of the maple tree where he has slept, astonished
to find nearly all life still slumbering in the forest, though the dawn
has taken the place of night. Twice, thrice, he hurls his fanfare at
tlie echoes of the mountain and the valley, which a dense mist still
envelopes.

"Thin columns of white smoke escape from the roof of the cot-
tages ; the dogs bark around the farm-yards ; and the bells ring
suspended to the neck of the cow. The birds now quit their thickets,
flutter their wings, and dart into the air to salute the sun, which
once more comes to bless them with his bounteous light. More than
one poor little sparrow rejoices that he has escaped the perils of the
darkness. Perched on a little twig, he had trusted to enjoy his
slumber without alarm, his head buried beneath his wing, when^ by the
ray of a star, he discerned the noiseless screech-owl gliding through
the trees, intent upon some misdeed. The pole-cat stole from
the valley-depth, the ermine descended from the rock, the pine-
marten quitted his nest, the fox prowled among the bushes. All
these enemies the poor little one watched during this terrible night.
On his tree, on the earth, in the air — destruction menaced him on
every side. How long, how long were the hours when, not daring to
move, his only protection was the young leaves which screened him !
And now, how great the pleasure to ply his unfettered wing, to live
in safety, protected, defended by the light !

328 ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

"The chaffinch raises with all his energy his clear and sonorous
note ; the robin sings from the summit of the larch, the gokllinch
amid the alder-groves, the blackbird and the bullfinch beneath the
leafy arbours. The tomtit, the wren, and the troglodyte mingle their
voices. The stockdove coos, and the woodpecker smites his tree.
But far above these joyous utterances re-echo the melodious strains of
the woodlark and the inimitable song of the thrush."

Page 185. Migrations. — For the famished Arab, the lank in-
habitant of the desert;, the amval of the migrating birds, weary and
heavy at this season, and, therefore, easy to catch, is a blessing from
God, a celestial manna. The Bible tells us of the raptures of the
Israelites, when, during their wanderings in Arabia Petrsea, fasting
and enfeebled, they suddenly saw descending upon them the winged
food : not the locusts of abstemious Elias, not the bread with which
the raven nourished his bowels, but the quail heavy with fat, delicious
and yet substantial, which voluntarily fell into their hands. They
ate to repletion ; and no longer regretted the rich flesh-pots of
Pharaoh.

I willingly excuse the gluttony of the famished. But what shall
I say of our people, in the richest countries of Europe, who, after
harvest and vintage-time, with barns and cellars brimming full, pursue
with no less fury these poor travellers ? Thin or fat, they are equally
good: they would eat even the swallows; they devour the song-birds,
"those which have only a voice." Their wild frenzy dooms the
nightingale to the spit, plucks and kills the household guest, the poor
robin, which yesterday fed from their hands.

The migration season is a season of slaughter. The law which
impels southward the tribes of birds is, for millions, a law of death.

ILLUSTEATIYE NOTES. 329

Many depart, few return ; at each stage of their route they must
pay a tribute of blood. The eagle waits on his crag, man watches in
the valley. He who escapes the tyrant of the air, falls a victim to
the tja-ant of the earth. "A fortunate opportunity !" exclaims the
child or the sportsman, the ferocious child with whom murder is a
jest. "God has willed it so !" mutters the pious glutton; "let us be
resigned !" These are the judgments of man upon the carnival of
massacre. As yet we know nothing more, for history has not written
the opinions of the massacred.

Migrations are exchanges for every country (except the poles, at
the epoch of winter). The particular condition of climate or food,
which decides the departure of one species of birds, is precisely that
which determines the arrival of another species. When the swallow
quits us at the autumn rains, we note the amval of the army of
plovers and peewits in quest of the lobworms driven from their lurking-
places by the floods. In October, and as the cold increases, the gi-een-
finches, the yellow-hammers, the wrens, replace the song-birds which
have deserted us. The snipes and partridges descend from their moun-
tains at the moment when the quail and the thrush emigrate towards
the south. It is then, too, that the leg-ions of the aquatic species quit
the extreme north for those temperate climes where the seas, the
lakes, and the pools, do not freeze. The wild geese, the swans, the
divers, the ducks, the teal, cleave the air in battle array, and swoop
do"\vn upon the lakes of Scotland and Hungary, and our marshes of
the south. The delicate stork flies southward, when his cousin, the

crane, sets out from the north, where his supplies begin to fail him.
Passing over our lands, he pays us tribute by delivering us from the

330 ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

last reptiles and batrachians which a warm autumnal breeze has
restored to life.

Page 188. My muse is the light. — And yet the nightingale loses
it when he returns to us from Asia. But all true artists require that
it should be softly ordered, blended with rays and shadows. Rem-
brandt in his paintings has exhausted the effects, at once warm and soft,
of the science of chiaro-oscuro. Tlie nightingale begins his song when
the gloom of evening mingles with the last beams of the sun ; and
hence it is that we tremble at his voice. Our soul in the misty and
uncertain hours of the gloaming regains possession of the inner light.

..r^

Page 215. Bo not say, " Winter is on my side." — AMiile M. de
Custine was travelling in Russia, he tells u.-3 that, at the fair of
Nijni-Novgorod, he was frightened by the multitude of hiattes which
thronged his chamber, with an infectious smell, and which could not
be got rid of Dr. Tschudi, a careful traveller, who has explored
Switzerland in its smallest details, assures us that at the breath of
the south wind, which melts the snow in twelve hours, innumerable
hosts of cockchafers ravage the country. They are not a less terri])le
scourge than the locusts to the south.

During our Italian tour, my wife and I made an observation
which will not have escaped the notice of naturalists ; namely, that
the cockchafer does not die in autumn. From the inhabited portions
of our palazzo, almost entirely shut up in winter, we saw clouds of
these insects emerge in the spring, which had slept peacefully in ex-
pectation of its warmth. Moreover, in that country, even ephemeral
insects do not perish. Gigantic gnats wage war against us every
night, demanding our blood with sharp and strident voice.

If, by the side of these proofs of the multiplication of insects, even

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 831

in temperate or cold countries, we put the fact that the swallow is
not satisfied with less than one thousand flies per diem; that a couple
of sparrows cany home to their young four thousand three hundred
caterpillars or beetles weekly; a tomtit three hundred daily; we see
at once the evil and the remedy. We quote these figures from M.
Quatrefages (Souvenirs), and from a letter written by Mr. Walter
Trevelyan to the editor of "The Birds of Great Britain," translated
in the Revue Britannique, July 7, 1850.

I offer the reader a very incomplete summary of the services ren-
dered to us by the birds of our climate.

Many are the assiduous guardians of our herds. The heron garde-
bceuf. making use of his bill as a lancet, cuts the flesh of the ox to
extract from it a parasitical worm which sucks the blood and life of
the animal. The wagtails and the starlings render very similar
services to our cattle. The swallows destroy myriads of winged
insects which never rest, and which we see dancing in the sun's rays ;
gnats, midges, flies. The goat-suckers and the martinets, twilight
hunters, effect the disappearance of the cockchafers, the gnats, the
moths, and a swarm of nibbling insects (rongeurs), which work only
by night. The magpie hunts after the insects which, concealed be-
neath the bark of the tree, live upon its sap. The humming-bird,
the fly-catcher, the soui-niangas, in tropical countries, puiify the
chalice of the flower. The bee-eater, in all lands, carries on a fierce
hostility against the wasps which ruin our fruit. The goldfinch,
partial to uncultivated soil and the seeds of the thistle, prevents the
latter from spreading over the ground. Our garden birds, the chaf-
finches, blackcaps, blackbirds, tits, strip our fruit-bushes and gi-eat trees
of the gnibs, caterpillars, and beetles, whose ravages would be incal-
culable. A large number of these insects remain during winter in
the egg or the larva, waiting for spring to burst into life ; but in
this state they are diligently hunted up by the mavis, the wren, the
troglodyte. The former turn over the leaves which strew the earth ;
the latter climb to the loftiest branches, or clear out the trunk. In
wet meadows, you may see the crows and storks boring the ground

332

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

to seize on the wliite worm {ver lilanc) which, for three years before
metamorphosing into a cockchafer, gnaws at the roots of our grasses.

Here we pause, not to weary our reader, and yet the list of useful
birds is scarcely glanced at.

Page 228. The woodpecJxer, as an augur. — ^Are the methods
of observation adopted by meteorology serious and efficacious ? Some
men of science doubt it. It might, perhaps, be worth while examining
if we could not deduce any part of the meteorology of the ancients
from their divination by birds. The principal passages are pointed
out in Pauly's Encyclopaedia (Stuttgard), article Divinatio.

"The woodpecker is a favoured bird in the steppes of Poland and
Russia. In these sparsely wooded plains he constantly directs his
course towards the trees ; by following him, you discover a hidden
ravine, a little later some springs, and finalfy descend towards the
river. Under the bird's guidance you may thus explore and recon-
noitre the country." (Mickiewicz, Les Slaves, vol. i., p. 200.)

Page 235. Song. — Do not separate what God has joined together.
If you place a bird in a cage beside you, his song quickly fatigues
you with its sonorous timbre and its monotony. But in the grand
concert of Nature, that bird would supply his note, and complete the
harmony. This powerful voice would subdue itself to the modulations
of the air ; soft and tender it would glide, borne upon the breeze.

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 833

And then, in the deep woody depths, the singer incessantly moves
from place to place, now drawing near, and now receding ; hence arise
those distant effects which induce a delightful reverie, and that delicate
cadence which thrills the heart.

Under our roof his song would ho. ever the same ; but on the
pinions of the wind the music is divine, it penetrates and ravishes
the soul.

Page 241. The rohiii hastens, singing, to enjoy his share of the
luarmth. — I find this admirable passage in " The Conquest "of England
by the Normans " (by Augustin Thierry). The chief of the barbarous
Saxons assembles his priests and wise men to ascertain if they will
become Christians. One of them speaks as follows : —

" Thou mayst remember, O king, a thing which sometimes happens,
when thou art seated at table Avith thy captains and men-at-arms, in
the winter season, and when a fire is kindled and the hall well
warmed, while there are wind and rain and snow without. There
comes a little bird, which traverses the room on fiutterino; wino-,
entering by one door and flying out at another : the moment of its

passage is full of sweetness for it, it feels neither the rain nor the
storm ; but this interval is brief, the bird vanishes in the twinkling
of an eye, and from ivinter ijasses a%vay into ivinter. Such seems to
me the life of man upon this earth, and its limited duration, compared
with the length of the time which precedes and follows it."

334 ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

From winter he passes into winter. "Of wintra in winter eft
cymeth."

Page 247. Nests and Hatching.- — In the vast extent of the
islands linking India to Australia, a species of bird of the family
GaUinacece dispenses with the labour of hatching her eggs. Raising
an enormous hillock of grasses whose fermentation will produce a
degree of heat favourable to the process, the parents, as soon as this
task is completed, trust to Nature for the reproduction of their kind.
Mr. Gould, who furnishes these curious details, speaks also of some
curious nests constructed by another species of bird. It consists of
an avenue formed by small branches planted in the ground, and woven
together at their upper extremities in the fashion of a dome. The
structure is consolidated by enlaced and intertwined herbs. This
first stage of their labour accomplished, the artists proceed to the work
of decoration. They seek in every direction, and often at a distance,
the gaudiest feathers, the finest polished shells, and the most brilliant
stones, to strew over the entrance. This avenue would seem, however,
not to be the nest, but the place where the birds hold their first ren-
dezvous. (See the coloured plates in Mr. Gould's magnificent volume,
"Australian Birds.")

Page 266. Instinct and Reason. — The ignorant and inattentive
think all things nearly alike. And Science perceives that all things
differ. According as we leam to obsefve, do these differences become
apparent; that imperceptible "shade," and woi-thless "almost," which
at the outset does not prevent us from confusing all things with one
another, really distinguishes them, and points out a notable discre-
pancy, a wide interval betwixt this object and that, a blank, a hiatus,
sometimes an enormous abyss, which separates and holds them apart.

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 835

— SO much SO, that occasionally between these things, at first sio-ht .so
nearly alike, a whole world will intervene, without the power of
brinodng them together.

It has been asserted and repeated that the works of insects pre-
sented an absolute similarity, a mechanical regularity. And yet our
Reaumurs and our Hubers have discovered numerous facts which
positively contradict this pretended symmetry, especially in the case
of the ant, whose life is complicated with so many incidents, so many
unforeseen exigencies, that she would never provide against them but
for the rapid discernment, the promptitude of mind, which is one of
the most striking characteristics of her individuality.

It has been supposed that the nests of birds are always con-
structed on identical principles. Not at all. A close observation
reveals the fact that they differ according to the climate and the
weather. At New York, the baltimore makes a closely fitted nest,
to shelter him from the cold. At New Orleans his nest is left with
a free passage for the air to diminish the heat. The Canadian
partridges, which in winter cover themselves with a kind of small
pent-roof at Compiegne, under a milder sky do away with this pro-
tection, because they judge it to be useless. The same discernment
prevails in relation to the seasons. The American spring, in the open-
ing years of the present century, occurring very late, the woodpecker
(of Wilson) wisely made his nest two weeks later. I will venture to
add that I have seen, in southern France, this delicate appreciation
of climatic changes varying from year to year ; by an inexplicable
foresight, when the summer was likely to be cold, the nests were
always more thickly woven.

The guiUeniot of the north {mergiila), which fears above aU things
the fox, on account of his partiality for her eggs, builds her nest on
a rock level with the water, so that, no sooner are they hatched than
the brood, however closely dogged by the plunderer, have time to
escape in the waves. On the other hand, here, on our coasts, where
her only enemy is man, she makes her nest on the loftiest and most
precipitous cliffs, where man can with difficulty reach it.

336 ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

Ignorant persons, and no less those naturalists who study natural
history in books only, acknowledge the differences existing between
species, but believe that the actions and labours of the individuals of
a species invariably correspond. Such a view is possible when you
have only seen things from above and afar, in a sublime generality.
But when the naturalist takes in hand his pilgrim's staff — when, as
a modest, resolute, indefatigable pilgrim of IS'ature, he assumes his
shoes of iron — all things change their aspect : he sees, notes, com-
pares numerous individual works in the labours of each species, seizes
their points of difference, and soon arrives at the conclusion which
logic had already suggested,- — that, in truth, no one thing resembles
another. In those works which appear identical to inexperienced
eyes, a Wilson and an Audubon have detected the diversities of an art
very variable— according to means and places, according to the
characters and talents of the artists — in a spontaneous infinit}^. So
extensive is the region of liberty, fancy, and ingegno.

Let us hope that our collections will bring together several
specimens of each species, arranged and classified according to the
talent and progi-ess of the individual, recording as near as may be the
age of the birds which constructed the nests.

If these boundless diversities do not result from unrestrained activ-
ity and pei-sonal spontaneity, if you wish to refer them all to an iden-
tical instinct, you must, to support so miraculous a theory, make us
believe another miracle : that this instinct, although identical, pos-
sesses the singular elasticity of accommodating and proportioning
itself to a variety of circumstances which are incessantly chan^ng, to
an infinity of hazardous chances.

"What, then, will be the case if we find, in the history of animals,
such an act of pretended instinct as supposes a resistance to that very
course our Instinctive nature would apparently desire ? What will
you say to the wounded elephant spoken of by Fouche d'ObsonviUe ?

That judicious traveller, so utterly disinclined to romantic ten-
dencies, saw an elephant in India, which, having been wounded in
battle, went daily to the hospital that liLs wound might be dressed.

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 837

Now, guess what this wound might be. A burn. In this dangerous
Indian climate, where everything grows putrid, they are frequently
constrained to cauterize the sores. He endm-ed this treatment
patiently, and went every day to undergo it. He felt no antipathy
towards the surgeon who inflicted upon him so sharp an agony. He
groaned ; nothing more. He evidently understood that it was done
for his benefit ; that his torturer was his friend ; that this necessary
cruelty was designed for his cure.

Plainly this elephant acted upon reflection, and upon a blind
instinct ; he acted against nature in the strength and enlightenment
of his will.

\\\\l''^j/y

3f^

Page 270. The master-nightingale. — I owe this anecdote to a
lady well entitled to a judgment upon such questions — to Madame
Garcia Viardot (the gi-eat singer). The Russian peasants, who pos-
sess a fine ear and a keen sensibility for Nature (compared with her
harshness towards them), said, when they occasionally heard the
Spanish cantatrice : " The nightingale does not sing so well."

Page 273. Still the little one hesitates, &g. — " One day I was
walking with my son in the neighbourhood of Montier. We perceived
towards the north, on the Little Saleve, an eagle emerging from the

22

338 ILLUSTKATIVE NOTES.

windings of the rocks. When he was tolerably near the Great Saleve
he halted, and two eaglets, which he had carried on his back, at-
tempted to fly, at first very close to their teacher, and in narrow
circles ; then, a few minutes afterwards, feeling fatigued, they
returned to rest upon his back. Gradually their essays were pro-
tracted, and at the close of the lesson the eaglets effected some much
more impoiiant flights, still under the eyes of their teacher of gym-
nastics. After about an hour's occupation the two scholars resumed
their post on the paternal back, and the eagle returned to the rock
from which he had started." (M. Chenvieres, of Geneva.)

^.^

Page 304. The small Chili falcon (cemicula).— I extract this
statement from a new, curious, but little known work, written in
French by a Chilian: Le Chili, by B. Vicuna Mackenna (ed. 1855,
p. 100). Chili I take to be a most interesting country, which, by
the energy of its citizens, should considerablj'" modify the unfavour-
able opinion entertained by the citizens of the United States in
reference to South Americans. America will not exist as a world, so
long as a common feeling shall be wanting between the two opposite
poles which ought to create her majestic harmony.

Final Note on the Winged Life. — To appreciate beings so alien

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 339

from the conditions of our prosaic existence, we must for a moment
abandon earth, and become a sense apart. We get a glimpse of some-
tliing inferior and superior, of something on this side and on that, the
limbs of the animal life on the borders of the life of the angels. In
proportion as we assume this sense, we lose the temptation of degrad-
ing the winged life — that strange, delicate, mighty dream of God — to
the vulgarities of earth.

To-day even, in a place infinitely unpoetic, neglected, squalid, and
obscure, among the black mud of Paris, and in the dank darkness of
an apartment scarcely better than a cavern, I saw, and I heard chirpino-,
in a subdued voice, a little creature which seemed not to belong to
this low world. It was a warbler, and one of a common species — not
the blackcap, which is prized so highly for his song. This one was
not then singing ; she chattered to herself, just a few notes, as mono-
tonous as her situation. For winter, shadow, captivity, all were
around her. The captive of a rough, rude man, of a speculator in
birds, she heard on every side sounds which silenced her song ;
powerful voices were above her head, a mocking-bird among them,
which rang out every moment their brilliant clarions. Generally,
she would be condemned to silence. She was accustomed, one could
perceive, to sing in a low tone. But in this limited flight, this
habitual resignation and half lamentation, might be detected a charm-
ing delicacy, a more than feminine softness (inorhidezza). Add to
this the unique gi^ace of her bosom and her motions, of her modest
red and white attire, which sparkled, however, with a bright sheeny
reflex.

I recalled to my mind the pictures in which Ingres and Delacroix
have shown us the captives of Algiers or the East, and exactly depicted
the dull resignation, the indifference, the weariness of their mono-
tonous lives, and also the decline (must we say the extinction ?) of
the inner fire.

But, alas! it was wholly different here. The flame burned in all
its strength. She was more and less than a woman. No comparison
was of any use. Inferior by right of her animal nature, by her

340

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

pretty bird-masquerade, she was lifted above by her wings, and by
the winged soul which sang in that little body. An all-powerful alihi
held her enthralled afar off, in her native grove, in the nest whence
she had been stolen in her infancy, or in her future love-nest. She
warbled five or six notes, and they kindled my very soul ; I myself,
for the moment armed with wings, accompanied her in her distant
dream.

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