174 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



their curved sweep to take a flying sip from the water 

 as they go. Their monotonous shrill scream never ceases 

 for a moment meanwhile ; for the swift appears to be all 

 nerve and muscle — a sort of miniature engine for per- 

 petual motion, self-feeding and self-governing, but using 

 up all its powers from minute to minute, till at last it 

 runs down incontinently from sheer wearing out of the 

 unwearied vital mechanism. 



I often fancy that time to the swift must seem far 

 fuller, and therefore far longer, than it ^eems to us. An 

 hour must be so crammed with fresh impressions and 

 ever-varying emotions in those quickly pulsating little 

 brains, that it must lengthen out subjectively to the 

 apparent dimensions of a human month, Shelley once 

 finely said, in one of those luminous philosophic moments 

 which make him at times more than a mere poet in the 

 purely artistic sense, that if an infinity of thought could 

 be crowded into a minute, that minute would be eternity, 

 is'ow, if one reflects that the swifts which are among 

 broad English oaks to-day will be among the laden 

 vineyards of Andalusia to-morrow, and among the palm- 

 groves and mosques of Algeria the next day — not cooped 

 up by the road in narrow covered boxes, but winging their 

 way freely with their own wide pinions, and looking down 

 with unobstructed gaze upon all the intervening seas and 

 mountains as they pass — one can understand that per- 

 haps to them that wild sense of exuberance and richness 

 in feeling which balloonists always tell us they experience 

 in the upper air may be the regular and habitual ex- 

 perience of these little birds' aerial life. 



And not only must each moment be always full 

 for them of constantly shifting impressions ; but their 



