ments, games, and voices, are as the smiles | they are, disappear. The first of the ocean, of creation. Michelet had, in his work "Le Peuple," emitted in the spirit of democratic eclecticism which dominates over all his ideas, a protestation against there being any one so degraded as to be undeserving of civic rights. Natural history now appeared to him in the light of a branch of politics. All living creatures came in their humble right to knock at the door of his intelligence, and ask to be admitted into the bosom of a universal democracy. Such is the legitimate progress of philosophy. Admit one, you must admit all. Why should the superior brothers," says the preacher of universal democracy, "place beyond the law those whom the universal Father harmonizes in the world's law ?” Thus man and wife united in deep agreement of spirit, entertaining a fruitful communication of intimate thoughts and sustaining a perfect harmony in feeling for nature. Only that they arrived at this by different processes, the one by his love for the city, and his efforts to complete it by associating with it all living things; the other by the force of religion and filial love "pour la maternité de Dieu." The promontory of La Hève completed the revelation. There the birds of the sea and those of the woods had nothing to say that was not understood. There, from that elevated point, from whence the eye embraces the mouth of the Seine, the Calvador, and the Ocean, they began to hear the birds that seldom sing, but that speak like the swallows, gossiping about fine weather, about rare or abundant food, or about their proximate departure. "I had listened to them at Nantes in October, at Turin in June. Their gossip in September at La Hève was more distinct. We could translate it freely, in their pleasing vivacity, in that joy of youth and happiness, which is void of noise or display, in conformity with that felicitous equilibrium of a bird that is free and wise, and which appears to recognize not without gratitude that it has received from the Creator so much that is conducive to happiness." "Alas! the swallow itself is not excepted from the insensate war that is carried on against nature. We even destroy the birds that save our harvests, good workmen that follow the plow, seizing the future destroyer, which the careless peasant turns up and then buries again. "Entire races, important and interesting as those mild and sensible beings to whom nature gave blood and milk, (I speak of the ceteceæ,) how few do they now number! Many large quadrupeds have disappeared from the earth. Many animals of different kinds, without entirely disappearing, have fled before man; they fly bewildered, lose their natural arts, and fall into a state of barbarism. The heron, extolled by Aristotle for its skill and prudence, is now (at least in Europe) a misanthropic, stupid creature. The beaver, which in America had, in its peaceful solitudes, become an architect and an engineer, has lost courage, and in the present day is scarcely at the trouble of making a hole in the ground. The hare, so good, so handsome, so original in its fur, by its speed and its quick sense of hearing, will soon have disappeared; Yet, neverthe few that remain are brutalized. theless, the poor animal is still docile and teachable; with kindness it can be taught things require the exercise of courage." that are even opposed to its nature, and that "The winged class," Michelet goes on to remark, after a few more paragraphs to the same purport, "the most perfect, the most delicate, the one that sympathizes most with man, is that which man pursues in the present day with the most cruel perseverance. "What is to be done to protect it? Reveal birds as minds-show that they are persons." In such a system if system it can be called where faith and love take the place of scientific classification, the agents of death, the murderous birds, so glorified by some, are rejected among the lower classes of the bird hierarchy. They are so in their modification as they are also in the arts of music. The nightingale, on the contrary, is placed at the top of the scale. But the egg precedes the bird, and upon this theme we have the following beautiful passage: "The learned ignorance, the far-seeing instinct of the ancients, spoke this oracle. Every thing comes from an egg; it is the cradle of the world. "Same origin, but diversity of destiny comes especially from the mother. She acts and foresees, she loves more or less; she is more or less mother. The more she is so, the more she ascends in the scale; every degree in existence attaches itself to the degree of love. "What can the mother do in the mobile existence of fish? Nothing but confide its egg to the ocean. What can it do in the insect world, when generally she perishes after having laid her egg? Find for it, before dying, a safe place to come to life and to live. "The destiny of a bird is different. It would die if it was not loved. "Loved? Every mother loves, from the ocean When man first reached the polar reto the stars. But I mean to say, cared for, sur-gions, he was received by the living mulrounded by an infinite love, enveloped in the titudes with curiosity, but without fear. maternal warmth and magnetism." It was with difficulty, we are told, that the sailors could force their way through the crowd of benevolent and curious seals that came to look at them. The penguins of the southern seas, the auks of the northern, never stirred from their places. The ducks, whose soft down supplies us with eider, allowed themselves to be approached without difficulty and to be taken with the hand. Remarking upon the birds of the Arctic regions, Michelet justly observes that those realms of ice and darkness have been stupidly vilified. "A poet has foolishly placed the throne of evil in these beneficent glaciers, which are the reserve of the waters of Europe, which pour forth its rivers and give to it its fertility. Others still more stupid have cursed the ices of the pole, ignoring the magnificent economy of the globe and the majestic balancing of alternative currents which constitute the life of the ocean. They have seen war and hatred, wickedness of nature, in these profoundly pacific and regular movements of the universal mother. "Such are the dreams of men. Animals in no way participate in these antipathies. On the contrary, a double attraction makes them congregate every year towards the poles in innumerable legions. "Every year birds, fish, gigantic cetacea go to people the seas and islands which surround the southern pole. Admirably productive seas full to superabundance of life, germinating, (in the state of zoophytes,) of living fermentation, of gelatin ous waters, of spawn and germs incalcu lable." Then we are told that the poles are the seat of love and peace to these great gatherings. How the "giant man of the old ocean"-the whale-finds there a temporary shelter during the sacred moments of maternity. It slays its myriads -a work of destruction commanded by nature-it is true, but it does this without inflicting pain; the whale has neither teeth nor saw in its capacious mouth. "Most of the living matters with which the inhabitants of the seas around the poles support life are so imperfectly or ganized as to have little or no consciousness. This gives to these tribes a character of innocence which touches us infinitely, fills us with sympathy-nay, if it must be said, with envy." Alas! on the other side of the picture, see the stealthy fox pouncing upon a thoughtless palmiped, or the hardy white bear waiting polar days and nights at a hole till an innocent seal shall pop up its devoted head. Thus the polar regions are depicted as deriving from love and devotion a moral grace which is seldom met with in the South. A sun shines there which is not the sun of the equator, but milder, that of the mind. Every living creature is raised in the scale there by the very austerity of the climate and by a common danger. The wing-the cry of the psalmist and the poet-furnishes the subject for a pleasingly comtemplative chapter. Man endeavors to supersede the absence of wings by all kinds of locomotive contrivances, but how little do they effect towards overcoming the universal aspiration, the more sad as it is so utterly powerless. With the bird, on the contrary, what a sublime and easy life! With what an eye of contempt can the smallest of the winged creation look down upon the strongest and the swiftest of quadrupedsthe tiger or the lion! How the bird must smile at the vain and useless fretting, the nocturnal roar which only testifies to the slavery of the miscalled king of animals! The genius of Michelet has seized the great inference to be drawn from this state of things-at least in so far as regards man-and which was long ago announced, in a less poetic but a more philosophic form, by the author of the "Natural History of Enthusiasm," in his best work, "The Physical Theory of another Life." "It is the certain sign," says Michelet, "that we still inhabit a very young world, a world still barbarous, a world of trial and apprenticeship, in the series of stars, a mere elementary step in the great final initiation." But he goes on to argue that we, too, shall have wings handsome and powerful wings. This is not necessarily the case. The vis inertia of matter, the tendency of gravitation, and the resistance of the atmosphere, are not overcome by mere mechanical force-southern Aptenyx and Patagonian penby bones, tendons, and muscles-but by guins, and an imperfect development in the force of mind. But mind is limited by the ostrich and its congeners, the triumph the capabilities of the materials it employs, and when it is freed of these encumbrances, and enjoys that which St. Paul so eloquently designates as a "spiritual body," and when the locomotion of that spiritual corporeity shall follow volition as a whole, as now the relative motion of the limbs follow it in man, or of wings in birds, who shall say what shall be the limits to such locomotive power? Without carrying out his philosophy to so refined a height as that presented to us in "The Physical Theory of another Life," the French historian says: "Ask a bird if he will be a man, and participate in the royalty of the world, gained by the sweat of the brow, by efforts, and pains, and cares innumerable and unceasing, and he would answer: 'King myself by my birth in space and light, wherefore shall I abdicate, when man, in his loftiest ambition, in his supreme aspirations for happiness and liberty, dreams of making himself a bird and taking flight with wings?" How clumsy, how miserably inefficient, too, have been the attempts made to imitate wings! These attempts date as far back as the mythological era, and have come down to our own times. Yet, had wings been successfully imitated, nothing could have come of it. Apart from want of muscular power, man could not have admitted, as the bird does, air into expansive lungs and cellular bones and feathers. He would have been stifled, struck down by apoplexy, or exhausted by rarefaction. of the same organ is undoubtedly witnessed in the frigate-bird. The gull, in its white dress and playful flight, is a charming bird, beloved by sailors, whom it always reminds of home. The stormy petrel-not black, but of an indescribable smoky brown-surging out of the waves, coming no one knows whence, and riding the tempest, is, on the contrary, looked upon with horror. Poor thing, it probably seeks for a little shelter from the storm in the vessel's wake. "It is the eaglet of the sea, the first of the winged race, the audacious navigator, that never furls its sails, the prince of the tempest, contemner of all dangers; the warrior, or the frigatebird. "We attained the term of the series in com mencing with the wingless birds. Here we have a bird that is almost all wings. With a body scarcely larger than that of a domestic fowl, it has prodigious wings that sometimes extend fourteen feet. The great problem of flight is solved, and even surpassed; for flight seems to be useless. Such a bird, naturally sustained by such appliances, has only to let itself be borne along. The storm comes, it aspoetic metaphor, false for every other bird, is cends to such heights that it finds peace. The no longer a figure of speech in this instance; it sleeps to the letter on the storm. disappears. It breakfasts in Senegal and dines "If it wishes seriously to travel, all distance in America. "The smallest bird puts to shame the largest quadruped. Chain a lion to a balloon and his deep roar would be lost in space. The little "Or if it wishes to take it more quietly, to lark, so far more powerful in voice and respiration, ascends singing, and is heard when it is lay by for the night, certain of repose; on amuse itself on the way, it can do so; it can no longer visible. Its song, gay, light, without what? on its great motionless wings, that it has fatigue, that costs no effort, seems like the glad-only to stretch out in the atmosphere, which ness of an invisible spirit, which would console takes all charge of the fatigues of the journey, or upon the bosom of the wind, its slave, which is obliged to cradle it." the earth. "Force constitutes joy. The most exuberantly joyful of beings is a bird, because it feels strength beyond its action-because cradled, lifted by the breath of heaven, it swims, it ascends without an effort, as in a dream. The unlimited force, the sublime faculty of taking its force at will from the maternal source, of inspiring life by torrents, obscure among inferior beings, is clear and lively in birds; it is in them a divine inebriation." Strong and swift, the frigate-bird can afford to despise the tyrants of the air. It could in an instant leave the condor leagues behind it. But even this king of the air, fearless and indefatigable, master of and seemingly more than any space, other creature detached from the miserIf poverty of wing is to be seen in the able fatalities of being, has its cares, its apprehensions. They show themselves in | It does not in any way affect either the its anxious eye. The very magnificence philosophy or the purport of the work. of its wings unfit it for the earth; it dare and we shall not therefore trouble ournot land or swim, and it has to depend selves with the vexed question. At the for nourishment upon meeting with other best it is a tale at second-hand from Loubirds that are fishing, and that have lifted isiana. their fish out of the water. It attacks them, makes them disgorge their prey, and catches it ere it reaches what to him is almost a fatal element. Thus it is in all things; even in the triumph of winged power there is not perfect freedom. "There must be, therefore, another state that the soul awaits, asks, and hopes for: "Des ailes par-dessus la vie! Des ailes par-delà la mort !'" All birds are not esteemed equally happy by our author. Some, he thinks, as the heron, are gradually disappearing. This lonely bird of the marsh, flying with only one limb, extended like some strange hieroglyph, he pictures to his fancy as some great lord ruined, some king tumbled down from his throne. He traces back its history to the time when the earth was inhabited by those great monsters, which now lie entombed in its crust, when man could not have lived; for what could the club of Hercules have done against a Plesiosaurus? and when birds, such as the Epiornis-an eagle twenty feet high, and fifty from wing to wingfirst prepared the earth for the reception of humanity, by extirpating the colossal creatures of mixed characters-toad-birds, winged-fish, and mythological dragons. The swan-spared by man for its grace and beauty, and because it is not esteemed at table-has almost disappeared from the waters of Italy, where it once abounded. Driven to the north, it has lost the power of song, so much vaunted by antiquity. "Is its existence a fable, or has it expired away from the mild climate of Greece and Italy ?" Cranes have also almost disappeared from France and England. In Buffon's time, he said there was scarcely a province without a heronry. There is only one now in France, between Epernay and Rheims. How few of these bird relics of the middle ages are now to be met with in England! An anecdote, related by Michelet-after drawing a fine portrait of Wilson-of a snake imbibing the milk of a human being, has been contested, and again defended. Birds, according to our author, continue in the present day the labor imposed upon them in bygone epochs, that of preparing the earth for the habitation of men. The cranes and storks defend men against reptiles in Asia and in Africa. The giant jabiru (Mycteria Americana) prepares the way for man in those forests of Guyana in which he dare not yet venture to dwell. The noble Kamichi toils away at the same great purport. There are also the purifiers, cleansers, or scavengers. Such are the urubus, or little vultures of America, without which some of the cities of the south would be untenantable. Vultures, crows, storks, ibises, all contribute to the salubrity of the earth, more especially in warm climates. Gulls will not leave the floating carcase of a whale; the vulture will not sometimes be driven from its prey. Levaillant shot one on a hippopotamus, which still ate on after being fatally wounded. In some parts of Syria there is no expelling them from the burial-grounds, where inhumation is sadly too superficial. When the murrain attacks a flock of sheep, we have seen them so glutted and hardy as to scorn even the shepherd's stick. In America the law protects these public benefactors. Egypt did more; it loved them and venerated them. The Egyptian fellah, or peasant, never drives the crow from the buffalo's horn or the camel's back; he knows it is there for beneficent purposes. It is only the so-called civilized man who persecutes birds with a senseless hostility, as if they were the enemies instead of the kind friends of man. What should we do, for example, without the insectivorous birds? Look at the roseate thrush-the Seleucidæ, as the ancients called them-whose advent, on the ap proach of locusts, was looked upon as a manifestation of divine beneficence. Throughout the East, the mission of the bird is better understood than in the West. The vulture treads the streets of Antioch undisturbed. The beautiful beeeater builds in the rare pathways and horse-tracks, (the soil is so hard, the jackal can not get so easily at its nest.) The little owlet winks ominously from the tombstone close by; the doves of Cairo salute the bridal festival, or cheer the lonely inmates of the harem; the stork rears its young actually within reach of the urchin so mischievous in other climes. The observation of the priest of Sais to the Greek Herodotus, "You will always be children," had, Michelet tells us, much depth in it. Conquerors always deride the native respect for the animal creation. As it was with the Romans in Egypt, so it is with the English in India and the French in Algeria; they can not appreciate the regard of the native for animal life. It may appear puerile; it is not so. If the meaning was sought for, it would be found, even in apparently the most contemptible instances. What is a flea, or its still more repulsive congener? A warning, by their bites, that man is living in an atmosphere of impurity, and that there is not around and about him, or in his domicile, that cleanliness which is essential to perfect salubrity. selves up to it altogether? Pain, on the con- The world of fish is silence, that of insects is for the most part night. But the world of birds is light. Those of the south have its reflection on their wings, those of the north salute it with their songs. The bird's flight depends upon it. That flight is at once swiftest and boldest among those who see furthest; with the falcon, that can distinguish a wren in a bush from the skies, to the swallow that detects a fly at a distance of a thousand feet. So perfect is the sight in some birds, as the pigeon, the stork, the crow, or the swallow, that they remember every The men of the West-to return again feature of a country which they have once to Michelet-will always be children so traversed. Let us acknowledge this sulong as, subtle but superficial reasoners, periority. Let us contemplate without they shall not embrace with a more simple envy these sources of enjoyment which and comprehensive view the reason of we shall also, perhaps, participate in in a things. To be a child, is to contemplate better existence. The delight of seeing so life only by partial glimpses; to be a much, and so far, of piercing the infinite man, is to be able to understand the unity with the eye, what does it attach itself to? and the harmony that pervades all things. To this life, which is our remote idea: But what, then, amidst so much optim-"To live in full light and with no shade." ism, of the rapacious birds? "Birds of death, robbers by day and by night, frightful masks of birds, phantoms that terrify even by day. It is grievous to observe their cruel arms; I do not say those terrible beaks that can kill with one blow, but those claws, those sharp points, those instruments of torture, which fix the trembling prey, and prolong the last agony and the great anguish of the pains of death." "May not pain itself be an advertisement which teaches us to foresee and to provide, to preserve ourselves by all possible means from our dissolution? This cruel school is wakefulness, the stimulus to prudence on the part of all that has life; a powerful contraction of the mind upon itself, which would otherwise let itself float away with nature, and be enervated by soft and debilitating impressions. "Can it not be said that happiness has a centrifugal attraction, which expands itself outwardly, unframes, evaporates, and would give us back to the elements, if we were to give our Night, again, is the reverse of day. The fatality that chains even winged creatures to the terrestrial globe, makes night their time of trial, as it is to all other creatures. Little does man, in the security of civil associations, know of the anguish of savage life at the hours when Nature leaves such limited means of defense, when its terrible impartiality opens the way to death, as legitimate as is life. All nocturnal animals of prey have this in common, that they arrive without making any noise. Again, what joy, when in the morning light dispels the terror of the night! What chatting, what chirping, what singing! It is like a universal felicitation at seeing one another again, of still living. The lark ascends and sings, it bears the gladness of the earth upwards into the skies. "Birds chant the morning hymn, and the blessing of the day for all nature. Their innocent and divine voices are its priest and its augur.” |