72 THE BOOK OF BIRDS 



He prefers the lonely solitude where paths are few and 

 footsteps are still fewer. 



We must not let such stories as I have been recalling 

 spoil our admiration of this magnificent soarer and sailer, 

 whose presence lends romance to glen or moorland. 



Do all my readers know Tennyson's description of an 

 Eagle swooping from his dizzy watch-tower on the craggy 

 cliffs overlooking the sea ? — a perfect picture in six lines — 



"He clasps the crag with crooked hands; 

 Close to the sun in lonely lands, 

 Eing'd with the azure world, he stands. 



The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls ; 

 He watches from his mountain walls, 

 And like a thunderbolt he falls." 



Is not that a wonderful piece of word-painting? How 

 well some of us know that "wrinkled sea"! But few of 

 us have seen it with the Eagle swooping. Dr. Stopford 

 Brooke, in his book. The Art of Tennyson, which I hope you 

 will read some day, tells us how he had the great good 

 fortune to see both. 



"One day," he says, "I stood on the edge of the cliff 

 below Slieve League in Donegal. The cliff from which I 

 looked down on the Atlantic was nine hundred feet in 

 height. Beside me the giant slope of Slieve League 

 plunged down from its summit for more than eighteen 

 hundred feet. 



" As I gazed down on the sea below, which was calm in 

 the shelter, for the wind blew off the land, the varying 

 puffs that eddied in and out among the hollows and jut- 

 tings of the cliffs covered the quiet surface with a network 

 of ripples. It was exactly Tennyson's 'wrinkled sea.' 

 Then by rare good fortune, an Eagle which built on one of 

 the ledges of Slieve League flew out of his eyrie and 



