18 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



formal and conventionalized into a kind of artistic 

 rh3i;hm. 



For the second illustration, I was visiting a gullery 

 on the coast of the Isle of Wight. Hundreds of birds were 

 flying overhead and wailing together in a tangle of wild 

 cries, intercrossing in beautiful curves and patterns 

 between two skies, and roimding the air for minutes at 

 a time without moving their angular, thin-bladed wings. 

 Others were seated on their nests among the samphire — 

 mere untidy wisps of hay — while others stood out upon 

 the points and bluffs of the chalk cliffs, festooned with 

 ribands and patches of bright green grass, the rocks 

 scattered among them burnished with the pale gold 

 of algae. It was the colour of the manes of Blake's 

 lions. The intimate harmony of white cliff, white bird, 

 blue sea and sky, green grass and golden algse, was such 

 that the animate gave personality and expression, gave 

 the grace, freedom and intensity of the living to the 

 inanimate. It was the gull mass rather than the gulls 

 which breathed life into the dead cliffs. " Beauty and 

 sublimity in nature," wrote Professor Pringle-Pattison, 

 " are not subjective imaginings ; they give us a deeper 

 truth than ordinary vision, just as the more developed 

 eye or ear carries us further into Nature's refinements 

 and beauties." But to appreciate the ulterior value of 

 landscape we must have life in it and to deepen our appre- 

 ciation, multitudinous life, and it is then that the animism 

 of past ages becomes a reality to us. As Lord Kelvin said 

 so justly : " A tree contains more mystery of creative 

 power than the sun from which all its mechanical energy 

 is borrowed. An earth without life, a sun and countless 

 stars contain less wonder than that grain of mignonette." 

 How much less wonder than a bird of the air ! In its 

 beginning the earth gave life to her creatures ; they were 

 bom of her dust, and in return they give life to her. 



In the sandy bay (a quarter of a mile in length and, at 

 low tide, a hundred yards in depth) and on the headlands 

 in sight I once reckoned thirteen hundred gulls, greater and 

 lesser blackbacks, blackheads, and common and herring 

 gulls, and as the beauty of this physical world is sometimes 

 unearthly when the spirit behind its substance seems to 



