238 
WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. 
own physical expression ! Thus we can have not only an 
allegory told, but an historical truth as well, and in a living 
language. 
We can clearly remember how ludicrous it seemed even 
to our unsophisticated childhood, that these brute creatures 
should talk to one another like people," and yet, we were 
intensely interested in what they said^ because the rude 
wood-cuts of our copy gave the forms of each, and were 
more suggestive sometimes than the fable itself. With our 
faith thus helped along, we become reconciled to the reality, 
but we are sure it was through the wood-cuts more than the 
language of these fables that they have accompanied us all 
our life since ; a whole folio of practical ethics was imbedded 
into our memory with each of those crude, but graphic pic- 
tures. 
We doubt very much, if any child was ever very greatly 
impressed by the fables of ^sop, whose first copy was with- 
out the illustrations ! 
How very natural, when we remember -that the first lan- 
guage which greets the awakening sense of infancy, is that 
of the mother earth — of form, color and action — and there- 
fore it must continue to be most significant to the man. Who 
has not marked the antics of a baby over the first picture- 
book ? how he sprawls upon it in a destructive ecstasy of 
sputtering delight ? Look, too, at the first slate of the un- 
willing school-boy, covered with rude figures of bird and 
beast rather than with numerals or pot-hooks. He is strug- 
gling for the most direct mode of expression, just as the sav- 
age or natural man is doing through his hieroglyphics. 
This is not all, for extremes meet, and the language of in- 
fants and of angels is the same, if we may trust to certain 
of the Old Fathers and the revelations of modern clairvoy- 
ance. These unite in representing that such spiritual beings 
have no occasion for the use of speech after the manner of 
man, but that they possess such eloquence of look and form, 
as to communicate through these alone ; every motion being 
