18 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
of being. But these most intimate relations to the life below 
us express far more than is conveyed in mere consanguinity, 
for they are each separate and living types of our compounded 
selves. 
Thus we see in the bird the type of our intellect—of the 
soul. We feel that they address the imagination, appeal to 
what is exulting and exalting in us—to “the aspiration in 
our heels !” 
The beast, on the other hand, is the type of our sensuous 
life—it appeals to our material and lower impulses. It pre- 
figures and embodies individually those purely physical attri- 
butes which we find expressed in man the Microcosm. In a 
word, quadrupeds are the indices of our passions which belong 
to sense; and birds, of our passions which belong to soul. 
The bird has wings, and like thought, triumphs over time 
and space. It lives in the pure ether, and all its modes and 
associations are apparently those of the soul’s life. 
‘¢ As birds within the wind 
As fish within the wave, 
As the thought of man’s own mind 
Floats through all above the grave.” 
Even the impulses of the bird are those of cold and clear 
intellection. When it strikes it kills—the quick, fierce, 
promptitude of appetite knows no pause. It never dallies 
with the prey, to gloat upon its agonies and heat a hunger 
on the struggles of fear in the efforts to escape, as do the 
felines and many others of the quadrupeds. With it to feel 
is to do, and to do quickly. Vent, vidi, vici! is the accepted 
motto of fiery, keen, victorious thought. They are the vicious 
and ignoble sluggards of action that creep to conquer. The 
beast is crushed by its grossness, and in its highest moods is 
a crawler, with its belly in the dust. Even in the exultings 
of its passion, in the murderous bound upon its prey, it must 
shake the earth from its claws. It is indeed, “of the earth, 
