BIRD, BEAST AND HUNTER. 19 
earthy,” and associated with the baseness and lowliness of 
filth and dirt. However nice it may be, however intact of 
the habitual soil it may keep its pelage, yet are its appetites 
thirsty for blood like the absorbing earth ; its passions linger- 
ing, deadly, but sure as the revolving seasons. Birds do not 
linger so. When they strike, it is for the death; and then, 
with no pause between, they swallow. Sometimes, as with 
many of the fishers, they do not even tarry that they may 
tear their prey, but deglutate alive. 
As with the higher intellection, alimentation seems with 
the bird rather a means than anend. Life has higher blisses 
for them, and they eat to live; while the animal but lives to 
eat. The joy of wings, of sunshine and of singing, of battle 
with the wind and storms, of rocking on the wave of forest- 
tops, or swinging with the bound of waters, is with the bird 
the nobler purpose; while the beast must lick its thirsty 
chops forever, and with baleful eye glare always the insatiate 
lust of ravin through the smiles of peaceful nature ! 
With all this we have to confess that as yet the beast 
more closely approximates our sympathies, appeals to us 
through more numerous traits of consanguinity than the 
bird. This, though honest, and sufficiently honorable to us, 
is nevertheless most humiliating to a transcendental pride. 
They who would have the human all spiritualized, with 
wings, forget that such conditions belong to a remote de- 
velopment, or the other life; that, linked as we are here with 
the material, it is as brave of us, and as necessary, that we 
should be true animals, as that we should be true angels. 
Our mingled being can, as yet, be neither one nor the other 
wholly, but must wisely compound between the extremes, and 
be simply what we are—men! As men, then, all the vene- 
rable past is sacred to our memory, as the cheerful future 
is to our hope. The youth of humanity, in which the mate- 
rial or passionate life predominated so much over the spiritual, 
was just as excellent and as noble as its present condition. 
