BIRD, BEAST AND HUNTER. 19 



earthy," and associated with the baseness and lowliness of 

 filth and dirt. However nice it may be, however intact of 

 the habitual soil it may keep its pelage, yet are its appetites 

 thirsty for blood like the absorbing earth ; its passions linger- 

 ing, deadly, but sure as the revolving seasons. Birds do not 

 linger so. When they strike, it is for the death; and then, 

 with no pause between, they swallow. Sometimes, as with 

 many of the fishers, they do not even tarry that they may 

 tear their prey, but deglutate alive. 



As with the higher intellection, alimentation seems with 

 the bird rather a means than an end. Life has higher blisses 

 for them, and they eat to live ; while the animal but lives to 

 eat. The joy of wings, of sunshine and of singing, of battle 

 with the wind and storms, of rocking on the wave of forest- 

 tops, or swinging with the bound of waters, is with the bird 

 the nobler purpose; while the beast must lick its thirsty 

 chops forever, and with baleful eye glare always the insatiate 

 lust of ravin through the smiles of peaceful nature ! 



With all this we have to confess that as yet the beast 

 more closely approximates our sympathies, appeals to us 

 through more numerous traits of consanguinity than the 

 bird. This, though honest, and sufficiently honorable to us, 

 is nevertheless most humiliating to a transcendental pride. 



They who would have the human all spiritualized, with 

 wings, forget that such conditions belong to a remote de- 

 velopment, or the other life ; that, linked as we are here with 

 the material, it is as brave of us, and as necessary, that we 

 should be true animals, as that we should be true angels, 

 Our mingled being can, as yet, be neither one nor the other 

 wholly, but must wisely compound between the extremes, and 

 be simply what we are men ! As men, then, all the vene- 

 rable past is sacred to our memory, as the cheerful future 

 is to our hope. The youth of humanity, in which the mate- 

 rial or passionate life predominated so much over the spiritual, 

 was just as excellent and as noble as its present condition. 



