82 THE WING. 
Yea; the vegetables, fettered by their immovable roots, expand their 
secret loves towards a winged existence, and commend themselves to 
the winds, the waters, the insects, in quest of a life beyond their 
narrow limits—of that gift of flight which nature has refused to them. 
We contemplate pityingly those rudimentary animals, the unau 
and the ai, sad and suttering images of man, which cannot advance a 
step without a groan—sloths or tardigrades. The names by which 
we identify them we might justly reserve for ourselves. If slowness 
be relative to the desire of movement, to the constantly futile effort 
to progress, to advance, to act, the true tardigrade is man. His 
faculty of dragging himself from one point of the earth to another, 
the ingenious instruments which he has recently invented in aid of 
that faculty—all this does not lessen his adhesion to the earth; he is 
not the less firmly chained to it by the tyranny of gravitation. 
I see upon earth but one order of created beings which enjoy the 
power of ignoring or beguiling, by their freedom and swiftness of motion, 
this universal sadness of impotent aspiration; I mean those beings 
which belong to earth, so to speak, only by the tips of their wings ; 
