360 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
Learned and ignorant alike were astonished at the spectacle, 
which we will not attempt to reproduce. 
Imagine a landscape wholly American, trees, flowers, grass, 
even the tints of the sky and the waters, quickened with a life 
that is real, peculiar, trans-Atlantic. On twigs, branches, bits 
of shore, copied by the brush with the strictest fidelity, sport 
the feathered races of the New World, in the size of life, each 
in its particular attitude, its individuality and peculiarities. 
Their plumages sparkle with nature’s own tints; you see them 
in motion or at rest, in their plays and their combats, in their 
anger fits and their caresses, singing, running, asleep, just 
awakened, beating the air, skimming the waves, or rending one 
another in their battles. It is a real and palpable vision of the 
New World, with its atmosphere, its imposing vegetation, and 
its tribes which know not the yoke of man. The sun shines 
athwart the clearing in the woods; the swan floats suspended 
between a cloudless sky and a glittering wave; strange and 
majestic figures keep pace with the sun, which gleams from the 
mica sown broadcast on the shores of the Atlantic; and this 
realization of an entire hemisphere, this picture of a nature so 
lusty and strong, is due to the brush of a single man; such an 
unheard of triumph of patience and genius!—the resultant 
rather of a thousand triumphs won in the face of innumerable 
obstacles !” 
Another French writer *” remarked that Audubon 
produced the same sensation among the savants of Eng- 
land that Franklin had made at the close of the eight- 
eenth century among the politicians of the Old World; 
his works, he added, should be translated into his native 
tongue, and produced in a form which would enable 
them to reach the library of every naturalist in France. 
One after another the scientific, literary, and arts so- 
“Pp. A. Cap, in L’Illustration for 1851. Cap’s hint was taken by 
Eugene Bazin, who translated copious selections from the Ornithological 
Biography, which were published in two volumes in Paris in 1857 (see 
Bibliography, No. 38). 
