MY PET WOOD THRUSHES. 191 



of it, than of almost any other bird within the limits of set- 

 tlement on the Continent. Now, the question, why is this ? 

 admits of many a sage answer ; but I say it is simply be- 

 cause men have sold " their birth-right for the mess of pot- 

 tage." They were born with the gift to know their angels, 

 but, in their progressive obesity, they are worse than Abra- 

 ham of old, and seldom make the mistake of entertaining 

 them even in disguise. The clear seraphic vision of child- 

 hood, which once could see the halo and the folded wings, 

 stares now through the dim medium of worldly grease and 

 dust, upon what may seem a mystery or a monster. We are 

 born in God and nature, and so long as we remain un vitiated, 

 there is no such thing as mystery and fear for love is our 

 pure enlightener, and faith maketh sport of fear but, as 

 the world wags, the same child that could smile in confiding 

 wonder amidst the rock of elemental war, and toy with the 

 very bolts of heaven, as with its own rattle, would, as a man, 

 tremble at a moon-thrown shadow, or faint if a donkey should 

 bray of a sudden in the dark. The farther from birth the 

 farther from nature, is almost a truism, and to the rheumy 

 vision of age we owe the ghostly forms of superstition. As 

 men become more and more besotted in the worship of the 

 golden calf they have formed to themselves, so do the reali- 

 ties of beauty and harmony about them become as common 

 and unclean they cannot see them, neither can they Ifear 

 and then with dim and morbid yearnings for more exalted 

 communion, they turn to the shadow realm of sickly dream, 

 and " call up spirits from the vasty deep" of superstition, to 

 minister to their craven appetites, and bring them the empty 

 visions of a servile bliss. With the best of us, those voices 

 which spoke to our young sense in lofty themes have lost their 

 meaning, and now they seem wise indeed in their day and 

 generation who can invoke even the echoes of that innocent 

 time, and name them by holy names their comforters ! 



Who knows the little Wood Thrush for a comforter? 

 and yet, ye children of mammon, it was the first sweet singer 



