ART AND THE INFINITE. 



279 



bent. This unhappy virtuoso, whose song, like himself, was dis- 

 sembled and deformed, had been a mean image of the ugliness of the 

 slave-artist, if not ennobled by that indomitable effort to pursue the 

 light, seeking it always on high, and ever centering his song in the 

 invisible sun which he had treasured up in his soul. 



Moderately capable of profiting by instruction, this bird repeats, 

 with a marvellous metallic timbre, the song of his native wood, and 

 preserves the particular accent of the country in which he was born; 

 there being as many dialects of chaffinches as there are different 

 districts. He remains faithful to his own ; he sings only his cradle- 

 song, and that with an uniform rate, but with a wild passion and an 

 extraordinary emulation. Set opposite, a rival, he will repeat it eight 

 hundred successive times ; occasionally he dies of it. I am not 

 astonished that the Belgians enthusiastically celebrate the combats of 

 this hero of the national song, the chorister of their forest of Ardennes, 

 decreeing prizes, crowns, even triumphal arches, to those acts of 

 supreme devotion in which life is yielded for victory. 



Still lower down than the chaffinch, and in a very small and wretched 

 cage, peopled pell-mell with half-a-dozen birds of very different sizes, 

 I was shown a prisoner which I had not distinguished, a young night- 



