WHITE-HEADED EAGLE. 
19 
Was blackly shadow' d on the sunny ground ; 
And deeper terror hush'd the wilderness, 
To hear his nearer whoop. Then up again 
He soar'd and wheel'd. There was an air of scorn 
In all his movements, whether he threw round 
His crested head to look behind him ; or 
Lay vertical and sportively display'd 
The inside whiteness of his wing declined, 
In gyres and undulations full of grace. 
An object beautifying Heaven itself." 
Tennyson^ in one of his fragments called ^The Eagle/ 
has^ in six short lines^ painted a graphic picture of the king 
of birds/^ 
" He clasps the crag with hooked hands ; 
Close to the sun in lonely lands, 
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands. 
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls ; 
He watches from his mountain walls. 
And like a thunderbolt he falls." 
Alexander Wilson, in the ^American Ornithology/ has 
given an admirable description of the predatory habits of the 
White-headed Eagle {Haliaetus leucocejoJiahis) , a species 
which has been adopted in the United States as the repre- 
sentative of that country, although Benjamin Eranklin and 
other illustrious citizens have expressed a wish, that some 
nobler denizen of the American continent had been selected 
