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 eai-th 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 tyi-anny of gravitation. 



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 ; 



