84 THE WING. 
ness and freedom, dreams of becoming a bird, and taking unto him- 
self wings?” 
It is in his sunniest time, his first and richest existence, in his day- 
dreams of youth, that man has sometimes the good fortune to forget 
that he is a man, a slave to hard fate, and chained to earth. 
Behold, yonder, him who flies abroad, who hovers, who dominates over 
the world, who swims in the sunbeam; he enjoys the ineffable felicity 
of embracing at a glance an infinity of things which yesterday he 
could only see one by one. Obscure enigma of detail, suddenly made 
luminous to him who perceives its unity! To see the world beneath 
one’s self, to embrace, to love it! How divine, how lofty a dream! 
Do not wake me, I pray you, never wake me! But what is this? 
Here again are day, uproar, and labour; the harsh iron hammer, the 
ear-piercing bell with its voice of steel, dethrone and dash me head- 
long; my wings are rent. Dull earth, I fall to earth; bruised and 
bent, I return to the plough. 
When, at the close of the last century, man formed the daring idea 
of giving himself up to the winds, of mounting in the air without 
rudder, or oar, or means of guidance, he proclaimed aloud that at 
length he had secured his pinions, had eluded nature, and conquered 
gravitation. Cruel and tragical catastrophes gave the lie to this 
ambition. He studied the economy of the bird’s wing, he undertook 
to imitate it; rudely enough he counterfeited its inimitable mechanism. 
We saw with terror, from a column of a hundred feet high, a pocr 
human bird, armed with huge wings, dart into air, wrestle with it, 
and dash headlong into atoms. 
The gloomy and fatal machine, in its laborious complexity, was a 
sorry imitation of that admirable arm (far superior to the human 
arm), that system of muscles, which co-operate among themselves in 
so vigorous and lively a movement. ODisjointed and relaxed, the 
human wing lacked especially that all-powerful muscle which connects 
the shoulder to the chest (the humerus to the sternwm), and com- 
municates its impetus to the thunderous flight of the falcon. The 
instrument acts so directly on the mover, the oar on the rower, and 
peter. 
