238 WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. 



own physical expression ! Thus we can have not only an 

 allegory told, but an historical truth as well, and in a living 

 language. 



"We can clearly remember how ludicrous it seemed even 

 to our unsophisticated childhood, that these brute creatures 

 should talk to one another " like people," and yet, we were 

 intensely interested in what they said, because the rude 

 wood-cuts of our copy gave the forms of each, and were 

 more suggestive sometimes than the fable itself. With our 

 faith thus helped along, we become reconciled to the reality, 

 but we are sure it was through the wood-cuts more than the 

 language of these fables that they have accompanied us all 

 our life since ; a whole folio of practical ethics was imbedded 

 into our memory with each of those crude, but graphic pic- 

 tures. 



"We doubt very much, if any child was ever very greatly 

 impressed by the fables of -*3Csop, whose first copy was with- 

 out the illustrations ! 



How very natural, when we remember that the first lan- 

 guage which greets the awakening sense of infancy, is that 

 of the mother earth of form, color and action and there- 

 fore it must continue to be most significant to the man. Who 

 has not marked the antics of a baby over the first picture- 

 book ? how he sprawls upon it in a destructive ecstasy of 

 sputtering delight ? Look, too, at the first slate of the un- 

 willing school-boy, covered with rude figures of bird and 

 beast rather than with numerals or pot-hooks. He is strug- 

 gling for the most direct mode of expression, just as the sav- 

 age or natural man is doing through his hieroglyphics. 



This is not all, for extremes meet, and the language of in- 

 fants and of angels is the same, if we may trust to certain 

 of the Old Fathers and the revelations of modern clairvoy- 

 ance. These unite in representing that such spiritual beings 

 have no occasion for the use of speech after the manner of 

 man, but that they possess such eloquence of look and form, 

 as to communicate through these alone ; every motion being 



