His Last Bays. 441 



" 'You have seen a poor old man,' said he, clasping 

 my hand in his — and he was then only seventy years of 

 age. He had measured life by what he had done, and 

 he seemed to himself to be old. 



" It is hard to confine one's self to dates and times 

 when contemplating such a man as Audubon. He be- 

 longs to all time. He was born, but he can never die." 



A few years before Audubon's death he exhibited in 

 New York his wonderful collection of drawings, consist- 

 ing of several thousands of animals and birds, all of 

 which the naturalist had studied in their native homes, 

 all drawn of the size of life by his own hand, and all rep- 

 resented with their natural foliage around them. A por- 

 tion of this collection was exhibited in Edinburgh, and as 

 Prof. Wilson has said of the same pictures, the spectator 

 immediately imagined himself in the forest. The birds 

 were all there, — " all were of the size of life, from the 

 wren and the humming-bird to the wild turkey and the 

 bird of Washington, But what signified the mere size ? 

 The colors were all of life too, bright as when borne in 

 beaming beauty through the woods. There too were 

 their attitudes and postures, infinite as they are assumed 

 by the restless creatures, in motion or rest, in their glee 

 and their gambols, their loves and their wars, singing, or 

 caressing, or brooding, or preying, or tearing one another 

 to pieces. The trees on which they sat or sported all 

 true to nature, in bole, branch, spray, and leaf, the flow- 

 ery shrubs and the ground flowers, the weeds and the 

 very grass, all American — as were the atmosphere and 

 the skies. It was a wild and poetical vision of the heart 

 of the New World, inhabited as yet almost wholly by the 

 lovely or noble creatures that " own not man's dominion." 

 It was, indeed, a rich and magnificent sight, such as we 

 would not for a diadem have lost." 



** Surrounded " wrote Audubon in 1846, "by all the 

 19* 



