102 TRIUMPH OF THE WING. 
What are they but air, sea, the elements, which have taken wing 
and fly? I know nothing of it. To see their gray eye, stern and 
cold (never successfully imitated in our museums), is to see the gray, 
indifferent sea of the north in all its icy impassiveness. What do i 
say? That sea exhibits more emotion, At times phosphorescent 
and electrical, it will rise into strong animation, Old Father Ocean, 
saturnine and passionate, often revolves, under his pale countenance, 
a host of thoughts. His sons, the goélands, have less of animal life 
than he has. They fly, with their dead eyes seeking some dead prey ; 
and in congregated flocks they expedite the destruction of the great 
carcasses which float upon the sea for their behoof. Not ferocious in 
aspect, amusing the voyager by their sports, by frequent glimpses of 
their snowy pinions, they speak to him of remote lands, of the shores 
which he leaves behind or is about to visit, of absent or hoped-for 
friends. And they are useful to him, also, by announcing and _ pre- 
dicting the coming storm. Ofttimes their sail expanded warns him 
to furl his own. 
For do not suppose that when the tempest breaks they deign to 
fold their wings. Far from this: it is then that they set forth. The 
storm is their harvest time; the more terrible the sea, so much the 
less easily can the fish escape from these daring fishers. In the Bay 
of Biscay, where the ocean-swell, driven from the north-west, after 
