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 fatal 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 parroquet 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 every 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.He maintains a continual cry ofhour! hour!until, with 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, sometimes 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 devourer 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 great sanitary work, the time-old combat of the bird against the inferior tribes which might long render theworld 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 giganticjabirudoes not labour less in the deserts of Guiana, where man as yet ventures not to live. Their perilous savannahs, alternately inundated and parched, a dubious ocean teeming in the sunshine with a horrible population of monsters as yet unknown, possess, as their superior inhabitant, their intrepid scavenger, a noble bird of battle, retaining some relics of the ancient weapons with which the primeval birds were very probably provided in their struggle against the dragon. These are a horn on the head, and a spur on each of the wings. With the first it stirs up, excites, and rouses out of the mud its enemy. The others serve as a guard and defence: the reptilewhich 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 gravity and dignified heroism of the noble and haughty purifier. The kamichi (Palamedéa 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 together; they follow the same destiny. Theirs is that soldierly marriage of which Tacitus speaks: "Sic vivendum, sic pereundum,"—"To life, to death." When this tender companionship,this consoling succour, fails the kamichi, he disdains to protract his existence; he rejoins the loved one which he cannot survive.
PURIFICATION.
PURIFICATION.
PURIFICATION.
In the morning—not at the first blush of dawn, but when the sun already mounts the horizon—and at the very moment when the cocoa-nut tree unfolds its leaves, theurubus(or little vultures), perched in knots of forty or fifty upon its branches, open their brilliant ruby eyes. The toils of the day demand them. In indolent Africa a hundred villages 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 urubu, his day's work ended, replaces himself on the cocoa-nut tree—the minarets ofAsia 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 functions. Approach them, and they will not retreat. When 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! Naturallysolitary, and without communication—mostly silent—they flock to the banquet by the hundred, and nothing disturbs them. They quarrel 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 fermentation, 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 truerôle, as the beneficent cressets of living fire through which nature passes everything that might corrupt the higher life. For this purpose she has provided them with an admirable 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 gulls (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. Levaillant killed one of these birds, which, though mortally wounded, still 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 of 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 everything, they are subject, more than any other beings, to general influences; are swayedby the conditions of atmosphere and temperature; essentially hygrometrical, 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 great is their subjection to external 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 great purifying 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 Pyramids, he is the ancient inhabitant of the country. Man is there only through his instrumentality; 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 thecharm 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 suckling their little ones in as much security as in the bosom of their native forests.
"At Cairo," remarks a traveller, "the turtle-doves know so well 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 cooingon my window-shutters, 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 the ceremonies of marriage fill 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 Saïs 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 conscious 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 with naïve but not the less profound intuitions of the essential mystery of life and death.Do not let the form deceive you; do not look upon this as an artificial work, fabricated by a priestly hand. Under the strange complexity 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 soulfrom the shipwreck of death;
The 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 declare: that the Bird is the agent of the grand universal transition, and of purification—the wholesome accelerator of the interchange of substances. 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 grateful 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.
DEATH.
DEATH.
DEATH.
It was one of my saddest hours when, seeking in nature 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 something still more horrible. You seized at once the delicate, infinite, fearfully prescient precautions by which the deadly machine is sopotently 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 supernumerary teeth, to supply at need the place of any accidentally broken. Oh, what provision for killing! What precautions that the victim shall not escape! What love for this horrible creature! I stood by itscandalized, if I may so speak, and with a sick soul. Nature, the great mother, by whose side I had taken refuge, shocked me with a maternity so cruelly impartial.
Gloomily I walked away, bearing on my heart a darker shadow than rested on the day itself, one of the sternest in winter. I had come forth 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 cruel weapons; I do not refer to those terrible beaks which kill with a blow, but those talons, those sharpened saws, those instruments of torture which fix the shuddering prey, protract the last keen pangs and the agony of suffering.
Ah! 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 activity of my soul would be suspended, my nerves shattered by it; I should 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 dissolution? This cruel school is the stimulant and spur of prudence for all living 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 higher 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 violentaction 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 powerful 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 world of winged game being cleared in its turn, either by man's depredations or by the disappearance of certain insects on which the small birds lived, you see that the odious tyrants of the air are also decreasing; the eagle is seldom met with, even among the Alps, and the exaggerated and enormousprices 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 regulate it in such wise as to maintain the scale even between the living species, to encourage them according to their merit or innocence—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 instincts of violence, our admiration of strength, may cause us to take in these winged robbers, it is impossible to misread in their deathlike 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 dispense 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 countless 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.
The flattened skull is the degrading 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, unlike the eagle and other executioners, it knows how to kill its prey at a blow, and scorns to torture it.
These birds of prey, with their small brains, offer a striking contrast 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 very moment hovers about me, perches on my shoulder or my paper, examines my writing, warms himself atthe fire, or curiously peers through the window to see if the spring-time will not soon return.
If there be any choice among the raptores, I should certainly prefer—dare I say it?—the vulture to the eagle. Among the bird-world I have seen nothing so grand, so imposing, as our five Algerian vultures (in the Jardin des Plantes), posted together like so many Turkish pachas, adorned with superb cravats of the most delicate white down, and draped in noble mantles of gray. A solemn divan of exiles, who seem to discuss among themselves the vicissitudes of things and the political events which have driven them from their native country.
What real difference exists between the eagle and the vulture? The eagle passionately loves blood, and prefers living flesh, very rarely eating the dead. The vulture seldom kills, and directly benefits life by restoring to its service and to the grand current of vital circulation the disorganized objects which would associate with others to their disorganization. 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 associate 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. Buffon went the furthest. Heeulogizes the eagle for histemperance. 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 animals. 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 from the nest before they can support 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 gorged with an abundance of food obtained without fighting, that he appears to regret nothing. A Falstaff of an eagle, he grows 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 notbe given to the eagle, but to the bird which figures in the "Thousand and One Nights" under the name ofRoc, 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. When 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 delicatechef-d'œuvreof 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 bird, 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 without 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 great, of mind over matter, in the singular tête-à-tête 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 hundred tricks of his own invention, and refines his rude nature. This 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 hissavoir-fairebefore a single eye-witness. He calculatesupon 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. The 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 struggle between strength and weakness, this simulated equality, is well adapted to soften the barbarian, 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 growls, but too late; his tutor, far more nimble, with his black eye, metallic andlustrous as steel, has 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 daily, 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 manœuvre, 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 more 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 off an eaglet.
Such exertions and such danger for this miserable prey! If the thing be true, we must suppose that the prudent republic, 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, ferreting out (éventant) 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 peculiar 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:they hoot him; they give him chase; profiting by his embarrassment, they persecute him to death.
There is no form of association by which they do not know how to profit. That which 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 illustration—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 gorged himself with blood; when this takes place, he flies away, and the remainder falls to the crows.
Their evident superiority 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. Very different 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 with things and seasons, harvests and hunts. They interest themselves in everything, and observe everything. 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 prudence, thewisdom of self-interest. To arrive at the higher orders, the heroes of the winged 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.
Part Second.
Part Second.
Part Second.
THE LIGHT—THE NIGHT.
THE LIGHT—THE NIGHT.
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. What was said by that man of power—one of the eldest sons of God—is said by His humblest children, the least advanced in the scale of animal life, the molluscs in the depths of ocean; they will not dwell where the light never penetrates. The flower seeks the light, turns towards it; without it, sickens. Our fellow-workers, the animals, rejoice like us, or mourn like us, according as it comes or goes. My grandson, but two months old, bursts into tears when the day declines.
"This summer, when walking in my garden, I heard and I saw on a branch a bird singing to the setting sun; he inclined himself 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 ofpassion. 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 fromhisdestiny to that of all living beings which, since the dim profundities of creation, have so slowly risen to the day, I said, like Goethe and the little bird: 'Light, light, O Lord, more light!'"—(Michelet,The People, p. 62, edit. 1846.)
The world of fishes is the world of silence. Men say, "Dumb as a fish."
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 by 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 risingsun, 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 them but one meaning. If you would have the captive nightingale sing when it is not the season of 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 light of harmony with his voice, becoming a sun unto himself in his internal fire.
I would willingly believe that this is the chief inspiration of the bird's song in our gloomy climates, where the 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 glowing at intervals, have exactly the effect of the cage, first covered, and then exposed, of the imprisoned nightingale. They provoke the strain, and, like light, awaken bursts of harmony.
Even the bird's flight is influenced by it. Flight depends on theeye 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 in a thicket—like 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 littleaccidentin a road which he has only traversed once. How, then, will 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 without shadow!
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 sublime freedom, it were not burdened by the two fatalities which chain our globe to a condition of barbarism, and render futile all our aspirations.