Chapter II: Part 2

To return: our residence near Nantes would have possessed an infinite charm for a less absorbed mind. This beautiful spot, this great liberty of work, this solitude, so sweet in such society, formed a rare harmony, such as one but seldom meets with in life. Its sweetness contrasted strongly with the thoughts of the present, with the gloomy past which then occupied my pen. I was writing of '93. Its heroic primeval history enveloped, possessed, shall I say consumed, me. All the elements of happiness which surrounded me, which I sacrificed to work, adjourning them for a time that, according to all appearances, might never be mine, I regretted daily, and incessantly cast back upon them a look of sorrow. It was a daily battle of affection and nature, against the sombre thoughts of the human world.

That battle for me will be always a powerful _souvenir_. The scene has remained sacred in my thought. Elsewhere it no longer exists. The house is destroyed--another built on its site. And it is for this reason that I have dallied here a little. My cedar, however, has survived; a notable thing, for architects now-a-days hate trees.

When, however, I drew near the end of my task, some glimpses of light enlivened the wild darkness. My sorrows were less keen, when I felt sure that I should thenceforth enjoy this memorial of a cruel but fertile experience. Once more I began to hear the voices of solitude, and more plainly I believe than at any other age, but slowly and with unaccustomed ear, like one who shall have been some time dead, and have returned from the other world.

In my youth, before I was taken captive by this implacable History, I had sympathized with nature, but with a blind warmth, with a heart less tender than ardent. At a later period, when residing in the suburb of Paris, I had again felt that emotion of love. I watched with interest my sickly flowers in that arid soil, so sensible every evening of the joy of refreshing waterings, so plainly grateful. How much more at Nantes, surrounded by a nature ever powerful and prolific, seeing the herbage shoot upward hour after hour, and all animal life multiplying around me, ought I not, I too, to expand and revive with this new sentiment!

If there were aught that could have re-inspired my mind and broken the sombre spell that lay upon it, it would have been a book which we frequently read in the evening, the "Birds of France," by Toussenel, a charming and felicitous transition from the thought of country to that of nature.

So long as France exists, his Lark and his Redbreast, his Bullfinch, his Swallow, will be incessantly read, re-read, re-told. And if there were no longer a France, in its ingenious pages we should re-discover all which it owned of good, the true breath of that country, the Gallic sense, the French _esprit_, the very soul of our fatherland.

The formulæ of a system which it bears, however, very lightly, its forced comparisons (which sometimes make us think of those too _spirituel_ animals of Granville), do not prevent the French genius, gay, good, serene, and courageous, young as an April sun, from illuminating the entire book. It possesses numerous passages enlivened with the joyousness, the elasticity, the gushing song of the lark in the first day of spring.

Add a thing of great beauty, which does not spring from youth. The author, a child of the Meuse and of a land of hunters, himself in his early years an ardent and impassioned sportsman, appears altered in character by his book. He wavers visibly between the first habits of slaughterous youth, and his new sentiment, his tenderness for those pathetic lives which he unveils--for these souls, these beings recognized by his soul. I dare to say that thenceforth he will no more hunt without remorse. Father and second creator of this world of love and innocence, he will find interposed between them and him a barrier of compassion. And what barrier? His own work, the book in which he gives them life.

I had scarcely begun my book, when it became necessary for me to leave Nantes. I, too, was ill. The dampness of the climate, the hard continuous labour, and still more keenly, without doubt, the conflict of my thoughts, seemed to have struck home to that vital nerve of which nothing had ever before taken hold. The road which our swallows tracked for us, we followed; we proceeded southward. We fixed our transitory nest in a fold of the Apennines, two leagues from Genoa.

An admirable situation, a secure and well-defended shelter, which, in the variable climate of that coast, enjoys the astonishing boon of an equable temperature. Although one could not entirely dispense with fires, the winter sun, warm in January, encouraged the lizard and the invalid to think it was spring. Shall I confess it, however? These oranges, these citrons, harmonizing in their changeless foliage with the changeless blue of heaven were not without monotony. Animated life was very rare. There were few or no small birds; no sea birds. The fish, limited in numbers, did not fill with life those translucent waters. My glance pierced them to a great depth, and saw nothing but solitude, and the white and black rocks which form the bed of that gulf of marble.

The littoral, exceedingly narrow, is nothing but a small cornice, an extremely confined border, a mere eyebrow (_sourcil_) of the mountains, as the Latins would have said. To ascend the ladder and overlook the gulf is, even for the most robust, a violent gymnastic effort. My sole promenade was a little quay, or rather a rugged circular road, which wound, with a breadth of about three feet, between ancient garden walls, rocks, and precipices.

Deep was the silence, sparkling the sea, but all lonesome and monotonous, except for the passage of a few distant barks. Work was prohibited to me; for the first time for thirty years, I was separated from my pen, and had escaped from that paper and ink existence in which I had previously lived. This pause, which I thought so barren, in reality proved to me very fertile. I watched, I observed. Unknown voices awoke within me.

At some distance from Genoa, and the excellent friends whom we knew there, our only society was the small people of the lizards, which run over the rocks, played, and slumbered in the sun. Charming, innocent animals, which every noon, when we dined, and the quay was absolutely deserted, amused me with their vivacious and graceful evolutions. At the outset my presence had appeared to disquiet them; but a week had not passed before all, even the youngest, knew me, and knew they had nothing to fear from the peaceful dreamer.

Such the animal, and such the man. The abstemious life of my lizards, for which a fly was an ample banquet, differed in nothing from that of the _povera gente_ of the coast. Many lived wholly on herbs. But herbs were not abundant in the barren and gaunt mountain. The destitution of the country exceeded all belief. I was not grieved at daring it, at finding myself sympathizing with the woes of Italy, my glorious nurse, who has nourished France, and me more than any Frenchman.

A nurse? That was she ever, so far as was possible in her poverty of resources, in the poverty of nature to which my health reduced me. Incapable of food, I still received from her the only nourishment which I could support, the vivifying air and the light--the sun, which frequently permitted us, in one of the severest winters of the century, to keep the windows open in January.

In the lazy, lizard-like life which I lived upon that shore, I wholly occupied myself with the surrounding country, with the apparent antiquity of the Apennines and the mountains which girdle the Mediterranean. Is there then no remedy? Or rather, in their leafless declivities shall we not discover the fountains which may renew their life? Such was the idea which absorbed me. I no longer thought of my illness; I troubled myself no more about recovering. I had made what is truly great progress for an invalid: I had forgotten myself. My business henceforward was to resuscitate that mighty patient, the Apennines. And as by degrees I became aware that the case was not hopeless--that the waters were hidden, not lost--that by their discovery we might restore vegetable life, and eventually animal life,--I felt myself much stronger, refreshed, renewed. For each spring that revealed itself, I grew less athirst; I felt its waters rise within my soul.

Ever fertile is Italy. She proved so to me through her very barrenness and poverty. The ruggedness of the bald Apennines, the lean Ligurian coast, did but the more awaken, by contrast, the recollection of that genial nature which cherishes the luxuriant richness of our western France. I missed the animal life; I felt its absence. From the mute foliage of sombre orange-gardens I demanded the woodland birds. For the first time I perceived the seriousness of human existence when it is no longer surrounded by the grand society of innocent beings whose movements, voices, and sports are, so to speak, the smile of creation.

A revolution took place in me which I shall, perhaps, some day relate. I returned, with all the strength of my ailing existence, to the thoughts which I had uttered, in 1846, in my book of "The People," to that City of God where the humble and simple, peasants and artisans, the ignorant and unlettered, barbarians and savages, children, and those other children, too, which we call animals, are all citizens under different titles, have all their privileges and their laws, their places at the great civic banquet. "I protest, for my part, that if any one remains in the rear whom the City still rejects and does not shelter with her rights, I myself will not enter in, but will halt upon her threshold."

Thus, all natural history I had begun to regard as a branch of the political. Every living species came, each in its humble right, striking at the gate and demanding admittance to the bosom of Democracy. Why should their elder brothers repulse them beyond the pale of those laws which the universal Father harmonizes with the law of the world?

Such, then, was my renovation, this tardy new life (_vita nuova_), which led me, step by step, to the natural sciences. Italy, whose influence over my destiny has always been great, was its scene, its occasion, just as, thirty years before, it had lit for me, through Vico, the first spark of the historic fire.

Beloved and beneficent nurse! Because I had for one moment shared her sorrows, suffered, dreamed with her, she bestowed on me a priceless gift, worth more than all the diamonds of Golconda. What gift? A profound sympathy of spirit, a fruitful interchange of the most intimate ideas, a perfect home-harmony in the thought of Nature.

We arrived at this goal by two paths: I, by my love of the City, by the effort of completing it through an association of self with all other beings; my wife, by religious feeling and by her filial reverence for the fatherhood of God.

Henceforth we were able, every evening, to enjoy a mutual feast.

I have already explained how this work, unknown to ourselves, grew rich, was rendered fruitful, was impelled forward, by our modest auxiliaries. They have almost always dictated it.

Our Parisian flowers prepared what our birds of Nantes accomplished. A certain nightingale of which I speak at the close of the book crowned the work.

These divers impressions blended and melted together, on our return to France, and especially here, in the presence of the ocean. At the promontory of La Hève, under the venerable elms which overshadow it, this revelation completed itself. The gulls, gannets, and guillemots of the coast, the small birds of the groves, could say nothing which was not understood. All things found an echo in our hearts, like so many internal voices.

The Pharos, the huge cliff, from three to four hundred feet in height,[9] which from so lofty an elevation overlooks the vast embouchure of the Seine, the Calvados, and the ocean, was the customary goal of our promenades, and our resting-point. We usually climbed to it by a deep covered road, full of freshness and shadow, which suddenly opened upon this immense lighthouse. Sometimes we ascended the colossal staircase which, without surprises, in the full sunlight, and always facing the mighty sea, leads by three flights to the summit, each flight covering upwards of a hundred feet. You cannot accomplish this ascent at one breath; at the second stage, you breathe, you seat yourself for a few moments by the monument which the widow of one of France's greatest soldiers has raised to his memory, in the hope that its pyramid might prove a beacon to the mariner, and guard him from shipwreck.

This cliff, of a very sandy soil, loses a little every winter.[10] It is not, however, the sea which gnaws at it; the heavy rains wash it away, carrying off the débris, which, at first bare and shapeless, bear eloquent witness to their downfall. But tender and gracious Nature does not long suffer this. She speedily attires them, bestows upon them greensward, herbs, shrubs, briers, which in due time become miniature oases on the declivity, Liliput landscapes suspended on the vast cliff, consoling its gloomy barrenness with their sweet youth.

Thus the Beautiful and the Sublime here embrace, a thing of rarity. The storm-beaten mountain relates to you the _epopea_ of earth, its rude dramatic history, and shows its bones in evidence of its truth. But these young children of chance, who spring up on its arid flank, prove that she is still fertile, that her débris contain the elements of a new organization, that all death is a life begun.

So these ruins have never caused us any sadness. We have conversed among them freely of destiny, providence, death, the life to come. I, whom age and toil have given a right to die--she, whose brow is already bent by the trials of infancy and a wisdom beyond her years, we have not lived the less for a grand inspiration of soul, for the rejuvenescent breath of that much-loved mother, Nature.[11]

Sprung from her at so great a distance from one another, so united in her to-day, we would fain have rendered eternal this rare moment of existence, "have cast anchor on the island of time." And how could we better realize our idea than by this work of tenderness, of universal brotherhood, of adoption of all life!

My wife incessantly recalled me to it, enlarging my sentiments of individual tenderness by her facile, bright, emotional interpretation of the spirit of the country and the voices of solitude.

It was then, among other things, that I learned to understand birds which, like the swallows, sing little, but talk much--prattling of the fine weather, of the chase, of scanty or abundant food, of their approaching departure; in fact, of all their affairs. I had listened to them at Nantes in October, at Turin in June. Their September _causeries_ were more intelligible at La Hève. We translated them easily in all their fond vivacity, all their joyousness of youth and good-humour, free from ostentation or satire, in accord with the happy moderation of a bird so free and so wise, which appears not ungratefully to recognize that he has received from God a lot of such signal felicity.

Alas! even the swallow is not spared in that senseless warfare which we wage against nature. We destroy the very birds that protect our crops--our guardians, our honest labourers--which, following close upon the plough, seize the future pest, which the heedless peasant disturbs only to replace in the earth.

Whole races, valuable and interesting, perish. Those lords of ocean, those wild and sagacious creatures which Nature has endowed with blood and milk--I speak of the cetacea--to what number are they reduced! Many great quadrupeds have vanished from the globe. Many animals of every kind, without utterly disappearing, have recoiled before man; brutalized (_ensauvagés_) they fly, they lose their natural arts, and relapse into barbarism. The heron, whose prudence and address were remarked by Aristotle, is now, at least in Europe, a misanthropical, narrow-minded, half-foolish animal. The beaver, which, in America, in its peaceful solitudes, had become a great architect and engineer, has grown discouraged;[12] to-day it has scarcely the heart to excavate a burrow in the earth. The hare, so gentle, so handsome, distinguished by its fur, its swiftness, its wonderful delicacy of ear, will soon have disappeared; the few of its kind which remain are positively embruted. And yet the poor animal is still docile and teachable: in careful hands it might be taught the things most antagonistic to its nature, even those which need a display of courage.[13]

These thoughts, which others have expressed in far better language, we cherished at heart. They had been our aliment, our habitual dream, over which we had brooded for two years, in Brittany, in Italy; it is here that they have developed into--what shall I say--a book? a living fruit? At La Hève it appeared to us in its genial idea, that of the primitive alliance which God has ordained for all his creatures, of the love-bond which the universal mother has sealed between her children.

The winged order--the loftiest, the tenderest, the most sympathetic with man--is that which man now-a-days pursues most cruelly.

What is required for its protection? To reveal the bird as soul, to show that it is a person.

_The_ bird, then, _a single bird_--that is all my book; but the bird in all the variations of its destiny, as it accommodates itself to the thousand conditions of earth, to the thousand vocations of the winged life. Without any knowledge of the more or less ingenious systems of transformations, the heart gives oneness to its object; it neither allows itself to be arrested by the external differences of species, nor by that death which seems to sever the thread. Death, rude and cruel, intervenes in this book, in the full current of life, but as a passing accident only; life does not the less continue.

The agents of death, the murdering species, so glorified by man, who recognizes in them his image, are here replaced very low in the hierarchy, remitted to the rank which is rightly theirs. They are the most deficient in the two special qualifications of the bird--nest-making and song. Sad instruments of the fatal passage, they appear in the midst of this book as the blind ministers of nature's hardest necessity.

But the lofty light of life--art in its earliest dawn--shines only in the smallest. With the small birds, unostentatious as they are, modestly and seriously clad, art begins, and, on certain points, rises higher than the sphere of man. Far from equalling the nightingale, we have been unable to express or to render an account of his sublime song.

The eagle, then, is in these pages dethroned; the nightingale reigns in his stead. In that moral _crescendo_, where the bird continuously advances in self-culture, the apex and the supreme point are naturally discovered, not in brutal strength, so easily overpassed by man, but in a puissance of art, of soul, and of aspiration which man has not attained, and which, beyond this world, transports him in a moment to the further spheres.

High justice and true, because it is clear-visioned and tender! Feeble on too many points, I doubt not, this book is strong in tenderness and faith. It is one, constant and faithful. Nothing makes it divaricate. Above death and its false divorce, through life and the masks which disguise its unity, it flies, it loves to hover, from nest to nest, from egg to egg, from love to the love of God.

LA HÈVE, NEAR HAVRE, _September 21, 1855_.

Part First.

THE EGG.

The wise ignorance, the clear-seeing instinct of our forefathers gave utterance to this oracle: "Everything springs from the egg; it is the world's cradle."

Even our original, but especially the diversity of our destiny, is due to the mother. She acts and she foresees, she loves with a stronger or a weaker love, she is more or less the mother. The more she is so, the higher mounts her offspring; each degree in existence depends on the degree of her love.

What can the mother effect in the mobile existence of the fish? Nothing, but trust her birth to the ocean. What in the insect world, where she generally dies as soon as she has produced the egg? To obtain for it before dying a secure asylum, where it may come to light, and live.

In the case of the superior animal, the quadruped, where the warm blood should surely stir up love, where the mother's womb is so long the rest and home of her young, the cares of maternity are also of minor import. The offspring is born fully formed, clothed in all things like its mother; and its food awaits it. And in many species its education is accomplished without any further care on the part of the mother than she bestowed when it grew in her bosom.

Far otherwise is the destiny of the bird. It would die if it were not loved.

Loved! Every mother loves, from the ocean to the stars. I should rather say anxiously tended, surrounded by infinite love, enfolded in the warmth of the maternal magnetism.

Even in the egg, where you see it protected by a calcareous shell, it feels so keenly the access of air, that every chilled point in the egg is a member the less for the future bird. Hence the prolonged and disquieted labour of incubation, the self-inflicted captivity, the motionlessness of the most mobile of beings. And all this so very pitiful! A stone pressed so long to the heart, to the flesh--often the live flesh!

It is born, but born naked. While the baby-quadruped, even from his first day of life, is clothed, and crawls, and already walks, the young bird (especially in the higher species) lies motionless upon its back, without the protection of any feathers. It is not only while hatching it, but in anxiously rubbing it, that the mother maintains and stimulates warmth. The colt can readily suckle and nourish itself; the young bird must wait while the mother seeks, selects, and prepares its food. She cannot leave it; the father must here supply her place; behold the real, veritable family, faithfulness in love, and the first moral enlightenment.

I will say nothing here of a protracted, very peculiar, and very hazardous education--that of flight. And nothing here of that of song, so refined among the feathered artists. The quadruped soon knows all that he will ever know: he gallops when born; and if he experiences an occasional fall, is it the same thing, tell me, to slide without danger among the herbage, as to drop headlong from the skies?

Let us take the egg in our hands. This elliptical form, at once the most easy of comprehension, the most beautiful, and presenting the fewest salient points to external attack, gives one the idea of a complete miniature world, of a perfect harmony, from which nothing can be taken away, and to which nothing can be added. No inorganic matter adopts this perfect form. I conceive that, under its apparent inertness, it holds a high mystery of life and some accomplished work of God.

What is it, and what should issue from it? I know not. But _she_ knows well--yonder trembling creature who, with outstretched wings, embraces it and matures it with her warmth; she who, until now the free queen of the air, lived at her own wild will, but, suddenly fettered, sits motionless on that mute object which one would call a stone, and which as yet gives no revelation.

Do not speak of blind instinct. Facts demonstrate how that clear-sighted instinct modifies itself according to surrounding conditions; in other words, how that rudimentary reason differs in its nature from the lofty human reason.

Yes; that mother knows and sees distinctly by means of the penetration and clairvoyance of love. Through the thick calcareous shell, where your rude hand perceives nothing, she feels by a delicate tact the mysterious being which she nourishes and forms. It is this feeling which sustains her during the arduous labour of incubation, during her protracted captivity. She sees it delicate and charming in its soft down of infancy, and she predicts with the vision of hope that it will be vigorous and bold, when, with outspread wings, it shall eye the sun and breast the storm.

Let us profit by these days. Let us hasten nothing. Let us contemplate at our leisure this delightful image of the maternal reverie--of that second childbirth by which she completes the invisible object of her love--the unknown offspring of desire.

A delightful spectacle, but even more sublime than delightful. Let us be modest here. With us the mother loves that which stirs in her bosom--that which she touches, clasps, enfolds in assured possession; she loves the reality, certain, agitated and moving, which responds to her own movements. But this one loves the future and unknown; her heart beats alone, and nothing as yet responds to it. Yet is not her love the less intense; she devotes herself and suffers; she will suffer unto death for her dream and her faith.

A faith powerful and efficacious! It produces a world, and one of the most wonderful of worlds. Speak not to me of suns, of the elementary chemistry of globes. The marvel of a humming-bird's egg transcends the Milky Way.

Understand that this little point which to you seems imperceptible, is an entire ocean--the sea of milk where floats in embryo the well-beloved of heaven. It floats; fears no shipwreck; it is held suspended by the most delicate ligaments; it is saved from jar and shock. It swims all gently in the warm element, as it will swim hereafter in the atmosphere. A profound serenity, a perfect state in the bosom of a nourishing habitation! And how superior to all suckling (_allaitement_)!

But see how, in this divine sleep, it has perceived its mother and her magnetic warmth. And it, too, begins to dream. Its dream is of motion; it imitates, it conforms to its mother; its first act, the act of an obscure love, is to resemble her.

"Knowest thou not that love transforms
Into itself whate'er it loves?"

And as soon as it resembles her, it will seek to join her. It inclines, it presses more closely against the shell, which thenceforth is the sole barrier between it and its mother. Then, then she listens! Sometimes she is blessed by hearing already its first tender piping. It will remain a prisoner no longer. Grown daring, it will take its own part. It has a beak, and makes use of it. It strikes, it cracks, it cleaves its prison wall. It has feet, and brings them to its assistance. See now the work begun! Its reward is deliverance; it enters into liberty.

To tell the rapture, the agitation, the prodigious inquietude, the mother's many cares, is beyond our province here; of the difficulties of its education we have already spoken.

It is only through time and tenderness that the bird receives its initiation. Superior by its powers of flight, it is so much the more so through this, that it has had a home and has gained life through its mother; fed by her, and by its father emancipated, the freest of beings is the favourite of love.

If one wishes to admire the fertility of nature, the vigour of invention, the charming, and in a certain sense, the terrifying richness, which from one identical creation draws a million of opposite miracles, one should regard this egg, so exactly like another, and yet the source whence shall issue the innumerable tribes born to a life of wings on earth.

From the obscure unity it pours out, it expands, in countless and prodigiously divergent rays, those winged flames which you name birds, glowing with ardour and life, with colour and song. From the burning hand of God escapes continuously that vast fan of astounding diversity, where everything shines, where everything sings, where everything floods me with harmony and light. Dazzled, I lower my eyes.

Melodious sparks of celestial fire, whither do ye not attain? For ye exists nor height nor distance; the heaven, the abyss, it is all one. What cloud, what watery deep is inaccessible to ye? Earth, in all its vast circuit, great as it is with its mountains, its seas, and its valleys, is wholly yours. I hear ye under the Equator, ardent as the arrows of the sun. I hear ye at the Pole, in the eternal lifeless silence, where the last tuft of moss has faded; the very bear sees ye afar, and slinks away growling. Ye, ye still remain; ye live, ye love, ye bear witness to God, ye reanimate death. In those terrestrial deserts your touching loves invest with an atmosphere of innocence what man has designated the barbarism of nature.

THE POLE.

AQUATIC BIRDS.

That powerful fairy which endows man with most of his blessings and misfortunes, Imagination, sets herself to work to travestie nature for him in a hundred ways. In all which exceeds his energies or wounds his sensations, in all the necessities which overrule the harmony of the world, he is tempted to see and to curse a maleficent will. One writer has made a book against the Alps; a poet has foolishly placed the throne of evil among those beneficent glaciers which are the reservoir of the waters of Europe, which pour forth its rivers and make its fertility. Others, still more absurdly, have vented their wrath upon the ices of the Pole, misunderstanding the magnificent economy of the globe, the majestic balance of those alternative currents which are the life of Ocean. They have seen war and hate, and the malice of nature, in those regular and profoundly pacific movements of the universal Mother.

Such are the dreams of man. Animals, however, do not share in these antipathies, these terrors; a twofold attraction, on the contrary, impels them yearly towards the Poles in innumerable legions.

Every year birds, fishes, gigantic cetaceans, hasten to people the seas and islands which surround the southern Pole. Wonderful seas, fertile, full to overflowing of rudimentary life (in the stage of the zoophytes), of living fermentation, of viscous waters, of spawn, of superabundant embryos.

Both the Poles are for these innocent myriads, everywhere pursued by foes, the great, the happy rendezvous of love and peace. The whale, that unfortunate fish, which has, however, like ourselves, sweet milk and hot blood, that poor proscribed unfortunate which will soon have disappeared--it is there that it again finds a refuge, a halt for the sacred moments of maternity. No races are of purer or gentler disposition, none more fraternal towards their kin, more tender towards their offspring. Cruel ignorance of man! How can he have slain without horror the walrus and the seal, which in so many points are like himself?

The giant man of the old ocean, the whale--a being as gentle as man the dwarf is brutal--enjoys this advantage over him: sure of species whose fecundity is alarming, it can accomplish the mission of destruction which nature has ordained, without inflicting upon them any pain. It has neither teeth nor saw; none of those means of punishment with which the destroyers of the world are so abundantly provided. Suddenly absorbed in the depths of this moving crucible, they lose themselves, they swoon away, they undergo instantaneously the transformations of its grand chemistry. Most of the living matter on which the inhabitants of the Polar Seas support themselves--cetaceans, fishes, birds--have neither organism nor the means of suffering. Hence these tribes possess a character of innocence which moves us infinitely, fills us with sympathy, and also, we must confess, with envy. Thrice blessed, thrice fortunate that world where life renews and repairs itself without the cost of death--that world which is generally free from pain, which ever finds in its nourishing waters the sea of milk, has no need of cruelty, and still clings to Nature's kindly breast!

Before man's appearance, profound was the peace of these solitudes and their amphibious races. From the bear and the blue fox, the two tyrants of that region, they found an easy shelter in the ever-open bosom of the sea, their bountiful nurse.

When our mariners first landed there, their only difficulty was to pierce through the mass of curious and kindly-natured phocæ which came to gaze upon them. The penguins of Australian lands, the auks and razor-bills of the Arctic shores, peaceable and more active, made no movement. The wild geese, whose fine down, of incomparable softness, furnishes the much-prized eider, readily permitted the spoilers to approach and seize them with their hands.

The attitude of these novel creatures was the cause of pleasant mistakes on the part of our navigators. Those who from afar first saw the islands thronged with penguins, standing upright, in their costume of white and black, imagined them to be bands of children in white aprons! The stiffness of their small arms--one can scarcely call them wings in these rudimentary birds--their awkwardness on land, their difficulty of movement, prove that they belong to the ocean, where they swim with wonderful ease, and which is their natural and legitimate element. One might speak of them as its emancipated eldest sons, as ambitious fishes, candidates for the characters of birds, which had already progressed so far as to transform their fins into scaly pinions. The metamorphosis was not attended with complete success; as birds powerless and clumsy, they remain skilful fishes.

Or again, with their large feet attached so near to the body, with their neck short or poised on a great cylindrical trunk, with their flattened head, one might judge them to be near relations of their neighbours the seals, whose kindly nature they possess, but not their intelligence.

These eldest sons of nature, eye-witnesses of the ancient ages of transformation, appeared like so many strange hieroglyphics to those who first beheld them. With eyes mild, but sad and pale as the face of ocean, they seemed to regard man, the last-born of the planet, from the depths of their antiquity.

Levaillant, not far from the Cape of Good Hope, found them in great numbers on a desert isle where rose the tomb of a poor Danish mariner, a child of the Arctic Pole, whom Fate had led thither to die among the Austral wastes, and between whom and his fatherland the density of the globe intervened. Seals and penguins supplied him with a numerous society; the former prostrate and lying down; the latter standing erect, and mounting guard with dignity around the lonely grave: all melancholy, and responding to the moans of Ocean, which one might have imagined to be the wail of the dead.

Their winter station is the Cape. In that warm African exile they invest themselves with a good and solid coat of fat, which will be very useful defences for them against cold and hunger. When spring returns, a secret voice admonishes them that the tempestuous thaw has broken and rent the sharp crystalline ice; that the blissful Polar Seas, their country and their cradle, their sweet love-Eden, are open and calling upon them. Impatiently they set forth; with rapid wings they oar their way across five or six hundred leagues of sea, without other resting-place than occasional pieces of floating ice may, for a few moments, offer them. They arrive, and all is ready. A summer of thirty days' duration makes them happy.

With a grave happiness. The happiness of discovering a profound tranquillity separates them from the sea where their sole element lies. The season of love and incubation is, therefore, a time of fasting and inquietude. The blue fox, their enemy, chases them into the desert. But union is strength. The mothers all incubate at one and the same time, and the legion of fathers watches around them, prepared to sacrifice themselves in their behalf. Let but the little one be hatched, and the serried ranks conduct it to the sea; it leaps into the waters, and is saved!

Stern, sad climates! Yet who would not love them, when he sees there the vast tenderness of nature, which impartially orders the home of man and the bird, the central source of love and devotion? From nature the Northern home receives a moral grace which that of the South rarely possesses; a sun shines there which is not the sun of the Equator, but far more gentle--that of the soul. There every creature is exalted, either by the very austerity of the climate or the urgency of peril.

The supreme effort in this world of the North, which is nowhere that of beauty, is to have discovered the Beautiful. This miracle springs from the mother's soul. Lapland has but one art, one solitary object of art--the cradle. "It is a charming object," says a lady who has visited those regions; "elegant and graceful, like a pretty little shoe lined with the soft fur of the white hare, more delicate than the feathers of the swan. Around the hood, where the infant's head is completely protected, warmly and softly sheltered, are hung festoons of coloured pearls, and tiny chains of copper or silver which clink incessantly, and whose jingling makes the young Laplander laugh."

O wonder of maternity! Through its influence the rudest woman becomes artistic, tenderly heedful. But the female is always heroic. It is one of the most affecting spectacles to see the bird of the eider--the eider-duck--plucking its down from its breast for a couch and a covering for its young. And if man steals the nest, the mother still continues upon herself the cruel operation. When she has stripped off every feather, when there is nothing more to despoil but the flesh and the blood, the father takes his turn; so that the little one is clothed of themselves and their substance, by their devotion and their suffering. Montaigne, speaking of a cloak which had served his father, and which he loved to wear in remembrance of him, makes use of a tender phrase, which this poor nest recalls to my mind--"I wrapped myself up in my father."

THE WING.

"Wings! wings! to sweep
O'er mountain high and valley deep.
Wings! that my heart may rest
In the radiant morning's breast.

"Wings! to hover free
O'er the dawn-empurpled sea.
Wings! 'bove life to soar,
And beyond death for evermore."

RUCKERT.

It is the cry of the whole earth, of the world, of all life; it is that which every species of animals or plants utters in a hundred diverse tongues--the voice which issues from the very rock and the inorganic creation: "Wings! we seek for wings, and the power of flight and motion!"

Yea; the most inert bodies rush greedily into the chemical transformations which will make them part and parcel of the current of the universal life, and bestow upon them the organs of movement and fermentation.

Yea; the vegetables, fettered by their immovable roots, expand their secret loves towards a winged existence, and commend themselves to the winds, the waters, the insects, in quest of a life beyond their narrow limits--of that gift of flight which nature has refused to them.

We contemplate pityingly those rudimentary animals, the unau and the aï, sad and suffering images of man, which cannot advance a step without a groan--sloths or _tardigrades_. The names by which we identify them we might justly reserve for ourselves. If slowness be relative to the desire of movement, to the constantly futile effort to progress, to advance, to act, the true _tardigrade_ is man. His faculty of dragging himself from one point of the earth to another, the ingenious instruments which he has recently invented in aid of that faculty--all this does not lessen his adhesion to the earth; he is not the less firmly chained to it by the tyranny of gravitation.

I see upon earth but one order of created beings which enjoy the power of ignoring or beguiling, by their freedom and swiftness of motion, this universal sadness of impotent aspiration; I mean those beings which belong to earth, so to speak, only by the tips of their wings; which the air itself cradles and supports, most frequently without being otherwise connected with them than by guiding them at their need and their caprice.

A life of ease, yet sublime! With what a glance of scorn may the weakest bird regard the strongest, the swiftest of quadrupeds--a tiger, a lion! How it may smile to see them in their utter powerlessness bound, fastened to the earth, which they terrify with vain and useless roaring--with the nocturnal wailings that bear witness to the bondage of the so-called king of animals, fettered, as we are all, in that inferior existence which hunger and gravitation equally prepare for us!

Oh, the fatality of the appetites! the fatality of motion which compels us to drag our unwilling limbs along the earth! Implacable heaviness which binds each of our feet to the dull, rude element wherein death will hereafter resolve us, and says, "Son of the earth, to the earth thou belongest! A moment released from its bosom, thou shalt lie there henceforth for ages."

Do not let us inveigh against nature; it is assuredly the sign that we inhabit a world still in its first youth, still in a state of barbarism--a world of essay and apprenticeship, in the grand series of stars, one of the elementary stages of the sublime initiation. This planet is the world of a child. And thou, a child thou art. From this lower school thou shalt be emancipated also; thy wings shall be majestic and powerful. Thou shalt win and deserve, while here, by the sweat of thy brow, a step forward in liberty.

Let us make an experiment. Ask of the bird while still in the egg what he would wish to be; give him the option. Wilt thou be a man, and share in that royalty of the globe which men have won by art and toil?

No, he will immediately reply. Without calculating the immense exertion, the labour, the sweat, the care, the life of slavery by which we purchase sovereignty, he will have but one word to say: "A king myself, by birth, of space and light, why should I abdicate when man, in his loftiest ambition, in his highest aspirations after happiness and freedom, dreams of becoming a bird, and taking unto himself wings?"

It is in his sunniest time, his first and richest existence, in his day-dreams of youth, that man has sometimes the good fortune to forget that he is a man, a slave to hard fate, and chained to earth. Behold, yonder, him who flies abroad, who hovers, who dominates over the world, who swims in the sunbeam; he enjoys the ineffable felicity of embracing at a glance an infinity of things which yesterday he could only see one by one. Obscure enigma of detail, suddenly made luminous to him who perceives its unity! To see the world beneath one's self, to embrace, to love it! How divine, how lofty a dream! Do not wake me, I pray you, never wake me! But what is this? Here again are day, uproar, and labour; the harsh iron hammer, the ear-piercing bell with its voice of steel, dethrone and dash me headlong; my wings are rent. Dull earth, I fall to earth; bruised and bent, I return to the plough.

When, at the close of the last century, man formed the daring idea of giving himself up to the winds, of mounting in the air without rudder, or oar, or means of guidance, he proclaimed aloud that at length he had secured his pinions, had eluded nature, and conquered gravitation. Cruel and tragical catastrophes gave the lie to this ambition. He studied the economy of the bird's wing, he undertook to imitate it; rudely enough he counterfeited its inimitable mechanism. We saw with terror, from a column of a hundred feet high, a poor human bird, armed with huge wings, dart into air, wrestle with it, and dash headlong into atoms.

The gloomy and fatal machine, in its laborious complexity, was a sorry imitation of that admirable arm (far superior to the human arm), that system of muscles, which co-operate among themselves in so vigorous and lively a movement. Disjointed and relaxed, the human wing lacked especially that all-powerful muscle which connects the shoulder to the chest (the _humerus_ to the _sternum_), and communicates its impetus to the thunderous flight of the falcon. The instrument acts so directly on the mover, the oar on the rower, and unites with him so perfectly that the martinet, the frigate-bird, sweeps along at the rate of eighty leagues an hour, five or six times swifter than our most rapid railway trains, outstripping the hurricane, and with no rival but the lightning.

But even if our poor imitators had exactly imitated the wing, nothing would have been accomplished. They, then, had copied the form, but not the internal structure. They thought that the bird's power of ascension lay in its flight alone, forgetting the secret auxiliary which nature conceals in the plumage and the bones. The mystery, the true marvel lies in the faculty with which she endows the bird, of rendering itself light or heavy at its will, of admitting more or less of air into its expressly constructed reservoirs. Would it grow light, it inflates its dimension, while diminishing its relative weight; by this means it spontaneously ascends in a medium heavier than itself. To descend or drop, it contracts itself, grows thin and small; cutting through the air which supported and raised it in its former heavy condition. Here lay the error, the cause of man's fatal ignorance. He assumed that the bird was a ship, not a balloon. He imitated the wing only; but the wing, however skilfully imitated, if not conjoined with this internal force, is but a certain means of destruction.

But this faculty, this rapid inhalation or expulsion of air, of swimming with a ballast variable at pleasure, whence does it proceed? From an unique, unheard-of power of respiration. The man who should inhale a similar quantity of air at once would be suffocated. The bird's lung, elastic and powerful, quaffs it, grows full of it, grows intoxicated with vigour and delight, pours it abundantly into its bones, into its aerial cells. Each aspiration is renewed second after second with tremendous rapidity. The blood, ceaselessly vivified with fresh air, supplies each muscle with that inexhaustible energy which no other being possesses, and which belongs only to the elements.

The clumsy image of Antæus regaining strength each time he touched the earth, his mother, does but rudely and weakly render an idea of this reality. The bird does not need to seek the air that he may be reinvigorated by touching it; the air seeks and flows into him--it incessantly kindles within him the burning fires of life.

It is this, and not the wing, which is so marvellous. Take the pinions of the condor, and follow in its track, when, from the summit of the Andes and their Siberian glaciers, it swoops down upon the glowing shore of Peru, traversing in a minute all the temperatures and all the climates of the globe, breathing at one breath the frightful mass of air--scorched, frozen, it matters not. You would reach the earth stricken as by thunder.

The smallest bird in this matter shames the strongest quadruped. Place me, says Toussenel, a chained lion in a balloon, and his harsh roaring will be lost in space. Far more powerful in voice and respiration, the little lark mounts upward, trilling its song, and makes itself heard when it can be seen no longer. Its light and joyous strain, uttered without fatigue, and costing nothing, seems the bliss of an invisible spirit which would fain console the earth.

Strength makes joy. The happiest of beings is the bird, because it feels itself strong beyond the limits of its action; because, cradled, sustained by the breath of heaven, it floats, it rises without effort, like a dream. The boundless strength, the exalted faculty, obscure among inferior beings, in the bird clear and vital, of deriving at will its vigour from the maternal source, of drinking in life at full flood, is a divine intoxication.

The tendency of every human being--a tendency wholly rational, not arrogant, not impious--is to liken itself to Nature, the great Mother, to fashion itself after her image, to crave a share of the unwearied wings with which Eternal Love broods over the world.

Human tradition is fixed in this direction. Man does not wish to be a man, but an angel, a winged deity. The winged genii of Persia suggest the cherubim of Judea. Greece endows her Psyche with wings, and discovers the true name of the soul, #asthma#, _aspiration_. The soul has preserved her pinions; has passed at one flight through the shadowy Middle Age, and constantly increases in heavenly longings. More spotless and more glowing, she gives utterance to a prayer, breathed in the very depths of her nature and her prophetic ardour: "Oh, that I were a bird!" saith man.

Woman never doubts but that her offspring will become an angel. She has seen it so in her dreams.

Dreams or realities? Winged visions, raptures of the night, which we shall weep so bitterly in the morning! If ye really _were_! If, indeed, ye lived! If we had lost some of the causes of our regret! If, from stars to stars, re-united, and launched on an eternal flight, we all performed in companionship a happy pilgrimage through the illimitable goodness!

At times one is apt to believe it. Something whispers us that these dreams are not all dreams, but glimpses of a world of truth, momentary flashes revealed through these lower clouds, certain promises to be hereafter fulfilled, while the pretended reality it is that should be stigmatized as a foul delusion.

THE FIRST FLUTTERINGS OF THE WING.

There is never a man, unlettered, ignorant, exhausted, insensible, who can deny himself a sentiment of reverence, I might almost say of terror, on entering the halls of our Museum of Natural History.

No foreign collection, as far as my knowledge extends, produces this impression.

Others, undoubtedly, as the superb museum of Leyden, are richer in particular branches; but none are more complete, none more harmonious. This sublime harmony is felt instinctively; it imposes and seizes on the mind. The inattentive traveller, the chance visitor, is unwillingly affected; he pauses, and he dreams. In the presence of this vast enigma, of this immense hieroglyph which for the first time is displayed before him, he may consider himself fortunate if he can read a character or spell a letter. How often have different classes of persons, surprised and tormented by such fantastic forms, inquired of us their meaning! A word has set them in the right path, a simple indication charmed them; they have gone away contented, and promising themselves to return. On the other hand, they who traversed this ocean of unknown objects without comprehending them, have departed fatigued and melancholy.

Let us express our wish that an administration so enlightened, so high in the ranks of science, may return to the original constitution of the museum, which appointed _gardiens démonstrateurs_--attendants who were also cicerones--and will only admit as guardians of this treasure men who can understand it, and, on occasion, become its interpreters.

Another wish we dare to form is, that by the side of our renowned naturalists they will place those courageous navigators, those persevering travellers who, by their labours, their fruits, by a hundred times hazarding their lives, have procured for us these costly spoils. Whatever their intrinsic value, it is, perhaps, increased by the heroism and grandeur of heart of these adventurers. This charming colibris,[14] madam, a winged sapphire in which you could see only a useless object of personal decoration, do you know that an Azara[15] or a Lesson[16] has brought it from murderous forests where one breathes nothing but death? This magnificent tiger, whose skin you admire, are you aware that before it could be planted here, there was a necessity that it should be sought after in the jungles, encountered face to face, fired at, struck in the forehead by the intrepid Levaillant?[17] These illustrious travellers, ardent lovers of nature, often without means, often without assistance, have followed it into the deserts, watched and surprised it in its mysterious retreats, voluntarily enduring thirst and hunger and incredible fatigues; never complaining, thinking themselves too well recompensed, full of devotion, of gratitude at each fresh discovery; regretting nothing in such an event, not even the death of La Perouse[18] or Mungo Park,[19] death by shipwreck, or death among the savages.