I let it pass without a word. I'hey are sliy and solitary 

 birds, and are chiefly emploj'ed in tapping decayed 

 trunks in search of insects. BufFon, that always: 

 eloquent, hut frequently erroneous, and sometimes 

 inconsistent Frenchman, has drawn a melancholy 

 picture of the miseries of a woodpecker's life. Ac- j 

 cording to his views, nature appears to have condemned j 

 it to incessant toil, for while other species freely employ 

 their courage or address, and either glide along on fear- 

 less rapid wings, or lurk insidiously in closer ambush, 

 the wootlpecker is constrained to drag on a miserable 

 existence, in boring through the scaly bark and tough 

 unyielding hbre> of the hardest trees. Necessity admits 

 no intermission of its labours — no interval of sweet re- 

 pose. Not even the darkness of the night, nor sleep — 

 that soft restorer" who throws her balmy mantle over 

 such a mass of liuman misery — brings any solace here, 

 far the noctunil hours are spent in the same constrained 

 and painful posture as are those of day. It never shares 



' in the joyous sports of the otiier inhabitants of tlie 

 woods, and so far from joining in their glad responses, it 

 rather deepens the natural sadness of the forest by its 

 wild and melancholy cries. So Button thinks and writes; 

 but what is all this but the most fantastic coinage of the 

 brain, as if the blessed beings which people this gladsome 

 world endurtd tlie primal curse and shared the self- 

 inflicted ri.in of our race — as if their joyful hearts were 

 ever pressed by sorrow, or responded, in wailing sad- 

 ness, to thf woes of man ! Amid the unmeasured wretch- 

 edness which springs from human folly, the wan faces 

 of our ft'Uow men pent up in close built cities, the 

 drunkard's hollow eyes, his palsied limbs and tattered 

 garments, with all the ills that vice is heir to, what is 

 more inspiring tlian to see even a fragment of the face of 

 nature, some little open plot of garden-ground where in 

 spring tliH blackbird still may sing his evening hymn, or 

 the autumnal redbreast cheerily announce approaching 

 winter. Is there sorrow there, or suffering, save what 

 may sprisig from some dark spirit in the mind of man — 

 the " immortal rebel !" AVhen liuftbn himself, a great 

 iuterpretf-r of nature, in spite of all his fitful fancies, 

 yielded up his life to tlie (iod who gave it, did the 

 lilied fields of France reflect the sun's warm rays lessi 

 brightly, or Ijer sylvan choristers welcome with sadder 

 note, the rosy break of the ensuing mbrn ? It would 

 indeed be but a doleful thought if miser}- sucli as 

 man so often meets with amontr human kind, and which 



