BIRDS. 317 



CLASS IL-AVES. 



OVIPAROUS YERTEBRATA, (Birds.) 



VISIONS of sentiment and beauty come with the bird, for 

 his life is embalmed in aroma and love, thoughts of glad- 

 ness gleam from his pinions, for his motions are like the 

 "swift-winged arrows of light;" but his voice! the wild, 

 sweet voice of the bird, that song, heard through far- 

 away deeps as a sacred trance of the soul, and delicious 

 revery of the heart, as the memory of other days, and the 

 joys of youth, touches with emotions " that chain the spirit 

 to the gates of Paradise." 



" Yet has each, soul an inborn feeling 



Impelling it to mount and soar away, 

 When, lost in heaven's blue depths, the lark is pealing 



High overhead her airy lay ; 

 When o'er the mountain pine's black shadow 



With outspread wing the eagle sweeps, 

 And, steering on o'er lake and meadow, 



The crane his homeward journey keeps." 



Swift gliding harbingers of lovely dreams, these frag- 

 ments of the perfection of the world, come, a sweet and 

 touching mediation between the dumb, inarticulate, uncom- 

 municating animal, and the high speaking consciousness of 

 man. As creatures of beauty their suggestions are exhaust- 

 less in artistic intimations, as instruments of the miracles of 

 instinct, they open abysses unfathomable by human thought, 

 and as organs of musical ecstasy they speak of "that which, 

 in all this mortal life, we have not seen, and never shall 

 see." "The bird is thoroughly, or out-and-out, organized 

 as an animal of song. In it nature attains unto a definite 

 hearing and speech. The bird speaketh the language of 



27* 



