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 



