VII.

Hollo! make way along the line:
Hark how the peasant scuds along,-
His iron heels, in concord fine,

Brattling afar their under-song:
And see, that urchin ho-ieroe!

His truant legs they sink from under,
And to the quaking sheet below,

Down thwacks he, with a thud like thunder!

VIII.

The skater there, with motion nice,
In semicirque and graceful wheel,
Chalks out upon the dark clear ice
His chart of voyage with his heel;
Now skimming underneath the boughs,-
Amid the crowd now gliding lone,-
Where down the rink the curler throws,
With dextrous arm, his booming stone.

IX.

Behold! upon the lapsing stream

The frostwork of the night appears,-
Beleaguer'd castles, round which gleam
A thousand glittering crystal spears;
Here galleys sail of shape grotesque;
There hills o'erspread with palmy trees;
And mix'd with temples arabesque,-
Bridges and pillar'd towers Chinese.

X.

Ever doth winter bring to me

Deep reminiscence of the past:
The opening flower, and leafing tree,—
The sky without a cloud o'ercast,—
Themselves of beauty speak, and throw
A gleam of present joy around,
But, at each silent fall of snow,

The heart to boyhood's pulses bound

XI.

To boyhood turns reflection back,
With mournful pleasure to behold
Life's early morn, the sunny track
Of feet, now mingled with the mould:
7

VOL. II.

Where are the playmates of those years?
Hills rise and oceans roll between:
We call but scarcely one appears-
No more shall be what once hath been.

XII.

Yes! gazing o'er the bleak, green sea,
The snow-clad peaks and desert plain,
Mirror'd in thought, methinks to me
The spectral past comes back again:
Once more in retrospection's eyes,
As 'twere to second life restored,
The perish'd and the past arise,
The early lost, and long deplored!

AUDUBON'S ORNITHOLOGICAL BIOGRAPHY.

(Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1831.)

INTRODUCTION.

THE present age, which, after all, is a very pretty and pleasant one, is feelingly alive and widely awake to the manifold delights and advantages with which the study of natural science swarms, and especially that branch of it which unfolds the character and habits, physical, moral, and intellectual, of those most interesting and admirable creatures-birds. It is familiar not only with the shape and colour of beak, bill, claw, talon, and plume, but with the purposes for which they are designed, and with the instincts which guide their use in the beautiful economy of all-gracious nature. We remember the time when the very word ornithology would have required interpretation in mixed company; and when a naturalist was looked on as a sort of out-of-the-way but amiable monster. Now, one seldom meets with man, woman, or child, who does not know a hawk from a handsaw, or even, to adopt the more learned reading, from a heronshaw; a black swan is no longer erroneously considered a rara avis any more than a black sheep; while the Glasgow gander himself, no longer apocryphal, has taken his place in the national creed, belief in his existence being merely blended with wonder at his magnitude, and some surprise perhaps among the scientific, that he should be as yet the sole specimen of that enormous anser.

The chief cause of this advancement of knowledge in one of its most delightful departments, has been the gradual extension of its study from stale books, written by

men, to that book ever fresh from the hand of God. And the second-another yet the same-has been the gradual change wrought by a philosophical spirit in the observation, delineation, and arrangement of the facts and laws with which the science is conversant, and which it exhibits in the most perfect harmony and order. Students now range for themselves, according to their capacities and opportunities, fields, woods, rivers, lakes, and seas; and proficients, no longer confining themselves to mere nomenclature, enrich their works with anecdotes and traits of character, which, without departure from truth, have imbued bird-biography with the double charm of reality and

romance.

How we come to love the birds of Bewick, and White, and the two Wilsons, and Montagu, and Mudie, and Knapp, and Selby, and Swainson, and Syme, and Audubon, and many others, so familiar with their haunts and habits, their affections and their passions, till we feel that they are indeed our fellow-creatures, and part of one wise and wonderful system! If there be sermons in stones, what think ye of the hymns and psalms, matin and vesper, of the lark, who at heaven's gate sings, of the wren, who pipes her thanksgivings as the slant sunbeam shoots athwart the mossy portal of the cave, in whose fretted roof she builds her nest above the waterfall?

Ay, these, and many other blameless idolaters of nature, have worshipped her in a truly religious spirit, and have taught us their religion. Nor have our poets been blind or deaf to the sweet Minnesingers of the woods. Thomson, and Cowper, and Wordsworth, have loved them as dearly as Spenser, and Shakspeare, and Milton. All those prevailing poets have been themselves "musical and melancholy" as nightingales, and often from the inarticulate language of the groves, have they breathed the enthusiasm that inspired the finest of their own immortal strains. "Lonely wanderer of nature," must every poet be-and though often self-wrapt his wanderings through a spiritual world of his own, yet as some fair flower silently asks his eye to look on it, some glad bird his ear solicits with a song, how intense is then his perception, his emotion how profound, his spirit being thus appealed to, through all its

human sensibilities, by the beauty and the joy perpetual even in the most solitary wilderness!

Our moral being owes deep obligation to all who assist us to study nature aright; for believe us, it is high and rare knowledge, to know and to have the true and full use of our eyes. Millions go to the grave in old age without ever having learned it; they were just beginning perhaps to acquire it when they sighed to think that "they who look out of the windows were darkened ;" and that, while they had been instructed how to look, sad shadows had fallen on the whole face of nature, and that the time for those intuitions was gone for ever. But the science of seeing has now found favour in our eyes; and "blessings are with them and eternal praise" who can discover, discern, and describe the least as the greatest of nature's works, who can see as distinctly the finger of God in the lustre of the little humming-bird murmuring round a rosebush, as in that of "the star of Jove, so beautiful and large," shining sole in heaven.

Take up now almost any book you may on any branch of natural history, and instead of the endless, dry details of imaginary systems and classifications, in which the ludicrous littlenesses of man's vain ingenuity used to be set up as a sort of symbolical scheme of revelation of the sublime varieties of the inferior-as we choose to call it -creation of God, you find high attempts in a humble spirit rather to illustrate tendencies, and uses, and harmonies, and order, and design. With some glorious exceptions, indeed, the naturalists of the day gone by, showed us a science that was but a skeleton-nothing but dry bones; with some inglorious exceptions, indeed, the naturalists of the day that is now, have been desirous to show us a living, breathing, and moving body, to explain, as far as they might, its mechanism and its spirit. Ere another century elapse, how familiar may men be with all the families of the flowers of the field, and the birds of the air, with all the interdependencies of their characters and their kindreds, perhaps even with the mystery of that instinct which now is seen working wonders, not only beyond the power of reason to comprehend, but of imagination to conceive!