MY PET WOOD THRUSHES. 
191 
of it, than of almost any other bird within the limits of set- 
tlement on the Continent. Now, the question, why is this if 
admits of many a sage answer ; but I say it is simply be- 
cause men have sold "their birth -right for the mess of pot- 
tage." They were born with the gift to know their angels, 
but, in their progressive obesity, they are worse than Abra- 
ham of old, and seldom make the mistake of entertaining 
them even in disguise. The clear seraphic vision of child- 
hood, which once could see the halo and the folded wings, 
stares now through the dim medium of worldly grease and 
dust, upon what may seem a mystery or a monster. We are 
born in God and nature, and so long as we remain un vitiated, 
there is no such thing as mystery and fear — for love is our 
pure enlightener, and faith maketh sport of fear — but, as 
the world wags, the same child that could smile in confiding 
wonder amidst the rock of elemental war, and toy with the 
very bolts of heaven, as with its own rattle, would, as a man, 
tremble at a moon-thrown shadow, or faint if a donkey should 
bray of a sudden in the dark. The farther from birth the 
farther from nature, is almost a truism, and to the rheumy 
vision of age we owe the ghostly forms of superstition. As 
men become more and more besotted in the worship of the 
golden calf they have formed to themselves, so do the reali- 
ties of beauty and harmony about them become as common 
and unclean — they cannot see them, neither can they hear — 
and then with dim and morbid yearnings for more exalted 
communion, they turn to the shadow realm of sickly dream, 
and " call up spirits from the vasty deep" of superstition, to 
minister to their craven appetites, and bring them the empty 
visions of a servile bliss. With the best of us, those voices 
which spoke to our young sense in lofty themes have lost their 
meaning, and now they seem wise indeed in their day and 
generation who can invoJ^e even the echoes of that innocent 
time, and name them by holy names — their comforters ! 
Who knows the little Wood Thrush for a comforter? — 
and yet, ye children of mammon, it w^as the first sweet singer 
