THE WING. 87 
supplics each muscle with that inexhaustible energy which no other 
being possesses, and which belongs only to the elements. 
The clumsy image of Anteus regaining strength each time he 
touched the earth, his mother, does but rudely and weakly render an 
idea of this reality. The bird does not need to seek the air that he 
may be reinvigorated by touching it; the air seeks and flows into 
him—it incessantly kindles within him the burning fires of life. 
It is this, and not the wing, which is so marvellous. Take the 
pinions of the condor, and follow in its track, when, from the summit 
of the Andes and their Siberian glaciers, it swoops down upon the 
glowing shore of Peru, traversing in a minute all the temperatures and 
all the climates of the globe, breathing at one breath the frightful mass 
of air—scorched, frozen, it matters not. You would reach the earth 
stricken as by thunder. 
The smallest bird in this matter shames the strongest quadruped. 
Place me, says Toussenel, a chained lion in a balloon, and his harsh 
roaring will be lost in space. Far more powerful in voice and respira- 
tion, the little lark mounts upward, trilling its song, and makes itself 
heard when it can-be seen no longer. Its light and joyous strain, 
uttered without fatigue, and costing nothing, seems the bliss of an 
invisible spirit which would fain console the earth. 
Strength makes joy. The happiest of beings is the bird, because 
it feels itself strong beyond the limits of its action; because, cradled, 
sustained by the breath of heaven, it floats, it rises without effort, like 
a dream. The boundless strength, the exalted faculty, obscure among 
inferior beings, in the bird clear and vital, of deriving at will its 
vigour from the maternal source, of drinking in life at full flood, is a 
divine intoxication. 
The tendency of every human being—a tendency wholly rational, 
not arrogant, not impious—is to liken itself to Nature, the great 
Mother, to fashion itself after her image, to crave a share of the 
unwearied wings with which Eternal Love broods over the world. 
Human tradition is fixed in this direction. Man does not wish to 
be a man, but an angel, a winged deity. The winged genii of Persia 
