BY WAY OF APFENDIX. 
195 
extinct forms of life, that he admits the pilgrims 
into the forbidden ground. 
Very wild is this, and all that follows ; but how 
sane it is, and how beautiful, and what a lesson it 
teaches ! The fantastic imagery appears as a rich 
barbaric embroidery on the mantle worn by one 
of the immortals. The poem is an apologue, the 
finest written in this century, perhaps in any 
century since man invented the art of imparting 
lessons of wisdom by fable and allegory. One 
would imagine that, reading it, all those who had 
wantonly persecuted the feathered people would 
have suffered keen remorse and have sinned no 
more ; that the cockney sportsman — the man who 
shoots birds that are unfit for food, merely for the 
pleasure of the thing — would have put away his 
gun ; that ladies would have divested themselves of 
such shocking ornaments as murdered songsters; 
that the amateur collector — the remorseless pur- 
suer of all the rarer kinds — would have made haste 
to send his specimens to the nearest museum, 
and broken up his cabinets for kindling-wood. 
Yet it was published during the fifties, and has 
had no efiect ! One is reminded of certain words 
of the author of L'Oiseau — another classic to be 
included among our hundred best books : " The 
winged order — the loftiest, the tenderest, the most 
sympathetic with man — is that which man now- 
