CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.
THIRD CANTICLE.
The Raven! In a solitary glen sits down on a stone the roaming pedestrian, beneath the hush and gloom of a thundery sky that has not yet begun to growl, and hears no sounds but that of an occasional big rain-drop, plashing on the bare bent; the crag high overhead sometimes utters a sullen groan—the pilgrim, starting, listens, and the noise is repeated, but instead of a groan, a croak—croak—croak! manifestly from a thing with life. A pause of silence! and hollower and hoarser the croak is heard from the opposite side of the glen. Eyeing the black sultry heaven, he feels the warm plash on his face, but sees no bird on the wing. By-and-by something black lifts itself slowly and heavily up from a precipice, in deep shadow; and before it has cleared the rock-range, and entered the upper region of air, he knows it to be a Raven. The creature seems wroth to be disturbed in his solitude, and in his strong straight-forward flight aims at the head of another glen; but he wheels round at the iron barrier, and, alighting among the heather, folds his huge massy wings, and leaps about as if in anger, with the same savage croak—croak—croak! No other bird so like a demon—and should you chance to break a leg in the desert, and be unable to crawl to a hut, your life is not worth twenty-four hours' purchase. Never was there a single hound in Lord Darlington's packs, since his lordship became a mighty hunter, with nostrils so fine as those of that feathered fiend, covered though they be with strong hairs or bristles, that grimly adorn a bill of formidable dimensions, and apt for digging out eye-socket and splitting skull-structure of dying man or beast. That bill cannot tear in pieces like the eagle's beak, nor are its talons so powerful to smite as to compress—but a better bill for cut-and-thrust—- push, carte, and tierce—the dig dismal and the plunge profound—belongs to no other bird. It inflicts great gashes; nor needs the wound to be repeated on the same spot. Feeder foul and obscene! to thy nostril upturned "into the murky air, sagacious of thy quarry from afar," sweeter is the scent of carrion, than to the panting lover's sense and soul the fragrance of his own virgin's breath and bosom, when, lying in her innocence in his arms, her dishevelled tresses seem laden with something more ethereally pure than "Sabean odours from the spicy shores of Araby the Blest."
The Raven dislikes all animal food that has not a deathy smack. It cannot be thought that he has any reverence or awe of the mystery of life. Neither is he a coward; at least, not such a coward as to fear the dying kick of a lamb or sheep. Yet so long as his victim can stand, or sit, or lie in a strong struggle, the raven keeps aloof—hopping in a circle that narrows and narrows as the sick animal's nostrils keep dilating in convulsions, and its eyes grow dimmer and more dim. When the prey is in the last agonies, croaking, he leaps upon the breathing carcass, and whets his bill upon his own blue-ringed legs, steadied by claws in the fleece, yet not so fiercely inserted as to get entangled and fast. With his large level-crowned head bobbing up and down, and turned a little first to one side and then to another, all the while a self-congratulatory leer in his eye, he unfolds his wings, and then folds them again, twenty or thirty times, as if dubious how to begin to gratify his lust of blood; and frequently, when just on the brink of consummation, jumps off side, back, or throat, and goes dallying about, round and round, and off to a small safe distance, scenting, almost snorting, the smell of the blood running cold, colder, and more cold. At last the poor wretch is still; and then, without waiting till it is stiff, he goes to work earnestly and passionately, and taught by horrid instinct how to reach the entrails, revels in obscene gluttony, and preserves, it may be, eye, lip, palate, and brain, for the last course of his meal, gorged to the throat, incapacitated to return thanks, and with difficulty able either to croak or to fly.
The Raven, it is thought, is in the habit of living upwards of a hundred years, perhaps a couple of centuries. Children grow into girls, girls into maidens, maidens into wives, wives into widows, widows into old decrepit crones, and crones into dust; and the Raven who wons at the head of the glen, is aware of all the births, baptisms, marriages, deathbeds, and funerals. Certain it is—at least so men say—that he is aware of the deathbeds and the funerals. Often does he flap his wings against door and window of hut, when the wretch within is in extremity, or, sitting on the heather-roof, croaks horror into the dying dream. As the funeral winds its way towards the mountain cemetery he hovers aloft in the air—or, swooping down nearer to the bier, precedes the corpse like a sable saulie. While the party of friends are carousing in the house of death, he too, scorning funeral-baked meats, croaks hoarse hymns and dismal dirges as he is devouring the pet-lamb of the little grandchild of the deceased. The shepherds maintain that the Raven is sometimes heard to laugh. Why not, as well as the hyena? Then it is that he is most diabolical, for he knows that his laughter is prophetic of human death. True it is, and it would be injustice to conceal the fact, much more to deny it, that Ravens of old fed Elijah; but that was the punishment of some old sin committed by Two who before the Flood bore the human shape, and who, soon as the Ark rested on Mount Ararat, flew off to the desolation of swamped forests and the disfigured solitude of the drowned glens. Dying Ravens hide themselves from daylight in burial-places among the rocks, and are seen hobbling into their tombs, as if driven thither by a flock of fears, and crouching under a remorse that disturbs instinct, even as if it were conscience. So sings and says the Celtic superstition—muttered to us in a dream—adding that there are Raven ghosts, great black bundles of feathers, for ever in the forest, night-hunting in famine for prey, emitting a last feeble croak at the blush of dawn, and then all at once invisible.
There can be no doubt that that foolish Quaker, who some twenty years ago perished at the foot of a crag near Red Tarn, "far in the bosom of Helvyllyn," was devoured by ravens. We call him foolish, because no adherent of that sect was ever qualified to find his way among mountains when the day was shortish, and the snow, if not very deep, yet wreathed and pit-falled. In such season and weather, no place so fit for a Quaker as the fireside. Not to insist, however, on that point, with what glee the few hungry and thirsty old Ravens belonging to the Red Tarn Club must have flocked to the Ordinary! Without asking each other to which part this, that, or the other croaker chose to be helped, the maxim which regulated their behaviour at table was doubtless, "First come, first served." Forthwith each bill was busy, and the scene became animated in the extreme. There must have been great difficulty to the most accomplished of the carrion in stripping the Quaker of his drab. The broad-brim had probably escaped with the first intention, and after going before the wind half across the unfrozen Tarn, capsized, filled, and sunk. Picture to yourself so many devils, all in glossy black feather coats and dark breeches, with waistcoats inclining to blue, pully-hawlying away at the unresisting figure of the follower of Fox, and getting first vexed and then irritated with the pieces of choking soft armour in which, five or six ply thick, his inviting carcass was so provokingly insheathed! First a drab duffle cloak—then a drab wraprascal—then a drab broadcloth coat, made in the oldest fashion—then a drab waistcoat of the same—then a drab under-waistcoat of thinner mould—then a linen-shirt, somewhat drabbish—then a flannel-shirt, entirely so, and most odorous to the nostrils of the members of the Red Tarn Club. All this must have taken a couple of days at the least; so, supposing the majority of members assembled about eight A.M. on the Sabbath morning, it must have been well on to twelve o'clock on Monday night before the club could have comfortably sat down to supper. During these two denuding days, we can well believe that the President must have been hard put to it to keep the secretary, treasurer, chaplain, and other office-bearers, ordinary and extraordinary members, from giving a sly dig at Obadiah's face, so tempting in the sallow hue and rank smell of first corruption. Dead bodies keep well in frost; but the subject had in this case probably fallen from a great height, had his bones broken to smash, his flesh bruised and mangled. The President, therefore, we repeat it, even although a raven of great age and authority, must have had inconceivable difficulty in controlling the Club. The croak of "Order!—order!—Chair!—chair!"—must have been frequent; and had the office not been hereditary, the old gentleman would no doubt have thrown it up, and declared the chair vacant. All obstacles and obstructions having been by indefatigable activity removed, no attempt, we may well believe, was made by the seneschal to place the guests according to their rank, above or below the salt, and the party sat promiscuously down to a late supper. Not a word was tittered during the first half-hour, till a queer-looking mortal, who had spent several years of his prime of birdhood at old Calgarth, and picked up a tolerable command of the Westmoreland dialect by means of the Hamiltonian system, exclaimed, "I'se weel nee brussen—there be's Mister Wudsworth—Ho, ho, ho!" It was indeed the bard, benighted in the Excursion from Patterdale to Jobson's Cherry-Tree; and the Red Tarn Club, afraid of having their orgies put into blank verse, sailed away in floating fragments beneath the moon and stars.
But over the doom of one true Lover of Nature let us shed a flood of rueful tears; for at what tale shall mortal man weep, if not at the tale of youthful genius and virtue shrouded suddenly in a winding-sheet wreathed of snow by the pitiless tempest! Elate in the joy of solitude, he hurried like a fast-travelling shadow into the silence of the frozen mountains, all beautifully encrusted with pearls, and jewels, and diamonds, beneath the resplendent night-heavens. The din of populous cities had long stunned his brain, and his soul had sickened in the presence of the money-hunting eyes of selfish men, all madly pursuing their multifarious machinations in the great mart of commerce. The very sheeted masts of ships, bearing the flags of foreign countries, in all their pomp and beauty sailing homeward or outward-bound, had become hateful to his spirit—for what were they but the floating enginery of Mammon? Truth, integrity, honour, were all recklessly sacrificed to gain by the friends he loved and had respected most—sacrificed without shame and without remorse—repentance being with them a repentance only over ill-laid schemes of villany—plans for the ruination of widows and orphans, blasted in the bud of their iniquity. The brother of his bosom made him a bankrupt—and for a year the jointure of his widow-mother was unpaid. But she died before the second Christmas—and he was left alone in the world. Poor indeed he was, but not a beggar. A legacy came to him from a distant relation—almost the only one of his name—who died abroad. Small as it was, it was enough to live on—and his enthusiastic spirit gathering joy from distress, vowed to dedicate itself in some profound solitude to the love of Nature, and the study of her Great Laws. He bade an eternal farewell to cities at the dead of midnight, beside his mother's grave, scarcely distinguishable among the thousand flat stones, sunk, or sinking into the wide churchyard, along which a great thoroughfare of life roared like the sea. And now, for the first time, his sorrow flung from him like a useless garment, he found himself alone among the Cumbrian mountains, and impelled in strong idolatry almost to kneel down and worship the divine beauty of the moon, and "stars that are the poetry of heaven."
Not uninstructed was the wanderer in the lore that links the human heart to the gracious form and aspects of the Mighty Mother. In early youth he had been intended for the Church, and subsequent years of ungrateful and ungenial toils had not extinguished the fine scholarship that native aptitude for learning had acquired in the humble school of the village in which he was born. He had been ripe for College when the sudden death of his father, who had long been at the head of a great mercantile concern, imposed it upon him, as a sacred duty owed to his mother and his sisters, to embark in trade. Not otherwise could he hope ever to retrieve their fortunes—and for ten years for their sake he was a slave, till ruin set him free. Now he was master of his own destiny—and sought some humble hut in that magnificent scenery, where he might pass a blameless life, and among earth's purest joys prepare his soul for heaven. Many such humble huts had he seen during that one bold, bright, beautiful spring winter-day. Each wreath of smoke from the breathing chimneys, while the huts themselves seemed hardly awakened from sleep in the morning-calm, led his imagination up into the profound peace of the sky. In any one of those dwellings, peeping from sheltered dells, or perched on wind-swept eminences, could he have taken up his abode, and sat down contented at the board of their simple inmates. But in the very delirium of a new bliss, the day faded before him—twilight looked lovelier than dream-land in the reflected glimmer of the snow—and thus had midnight found him, in a place so utterly lonesome in its remoteness from all habitations, that even in summer no stranger sought it without the guidance of some shepherd familiar with the many bewildering passes that stretched away in all directions through among the mountains to distant vales. No more fear or thought had he of being lost in the wilderness, than the ring-dove that flies from forest to forest in the winter season, and, without the aid even of vision, trusts to the instinctive wafting of her wings through the paths of ether.
As he continued gazing on the heavens, the moon all at once lost something of her brightness—the stars seemed fewer in number—and the lustre of the rest as by mist obscured. The blue ethereal frame grew discoloured with streaks of red and yellow—and a sort of dim darkness deepened and deepened on the air, while the mountains appeared higher, and at the same time further off, as if he had been transported in a dream to another region of the earth. A sound was heard, made up of far-mustering winds, echoes from caves, swinging of trees, and the murmur as of a great lake or sea beginning to break on the shore. A few flakes of snow touched his face, and the air grew cold. A clear tarn had a few minutes before glittered with moonbeams, but now it had disappeared. Sleet came thicker and faster, and ere long it was a storm of snow. "O God! my last hour is come!" and scarcely did he hear his own voice in the roaring tempest.
Men have died in dungeons—and their skeletons been found long years afterwards lying on the stone floor, in postures that told through what hideous agonies they had passed into the world of spirits. But no eye saw, no ear heard, and the prison-visitor gathers up, as he shudders, but a dim conviction of some long horror from the bones. One day in spring—long after the snows were melted—except here and there a patch like a flock of sheep on some sunless exposure—a huge Raven rose heavily, as if gorged with prey, before the feet of a shepherd, who, going forward to the spot where the bird had been feeding, beheld a rotting corpse! A dog, itself almost a skeleton, was lying near, and began to whine at his approach. On its collar was the name of its master—a name unknown in that part of the country—and weeks elapsed before any person could be heard of that could tell the history of the sufferer. A stranger came and went—taking the faithful creature with him that had so long watched by the dead—but long before his arrival the remains had been interred; and you may see the grave, a little way on from the south gate, on your right hand as you enter, not many yards from the Great Yew-Tree in the churchyard of——, not far from the foot of Ullswater.
Gentle reader! we have given you two versions of the same story—and pray, which do you like the best? The first is the most funny, the second the most affecting. We have observed that the critics are not decided on the question of our merits as a writer; some maintaining that we are strongest in humour—others, that our power is in pathos. The judicious declare that our forte lies in both—in the two united, or alternating with each other. "But is it not quite shocking," exclaims some scribbler who has been knouted in Ebony, "to hear so very serious an affair as the death of a Quaker in the snow among mountains, treated with such heartless levity? The man who wrote that description, sir, of the Ordinary of the Red Tarn Club, would not scruple to commit murder!" Why, if killing a scribbler be murder, the writer of that—this—article confesses that he has more than once committed that capital crime. But no intelligent jury, taking into consideration the law as well as the fact—and it is often their duty to do so, let high authorities say what they will—would for a moment hesitate, in any of the cases alluded to, to bring in a verdict of "Justifiable homicide." The gentleman or lady who has honoured us so far with perusal, knows enough of human life, and of their own hearts, to know also that there is no other subject which men of genius—and who ever denied that we are men of genius?—have been accustomed to view in so many ludicrous lights as this same subject of death; and the reason is at once obvious—yet recherché—videlicet, Death is, in itself and all that belongs to it, such a sad, cold, wild, dreary, dismal, distracting, and dreadful thing, that at times men talking about it cannot choose but laugh!
Too-hoo—too-hoo—too-whit-too-hoo!—we have got among the Owls. Venerable personages, in truth, they are—perfect Solomons! The spectator, as in most cases of very solemn characters, feels himself at first strongly disposed to commit the gross indecorum of bursting out a-laughing in their face. One does not see the absolute necessity either of man or bird looking at all times so unaccountably wise. Why will an Owl persist in his stare? Why will a Bishop never lay aside his wig?
People ignorant of Ornithology will stare like the Bird of Wisdom himself on being told that an Owl is an Eagle. Yet, bating a little inaccuracy, it is so. Eagles, kites, hawks, and owls, all belong to the genus Falco. We hear a great deal too much in poetry of the moping Owl, the melancholy Owl, the boding Owl, whereas he neither mopes nor bodes, and is no more melancholy than becomes a gentleman. We also hear of the Owl being addicted to spirituous liquors; and hence the expression, as drunk as an Owl. All this is mere Whig personality, the Owl being a Tory of the old school, and a friend of the ancient establishments of church and state. Nay, the same political party, although certainly the most shortsighted of God's creatures, taunt the Owl with being blind. As blind as an Owl, is a libel in frequent use out of ornithological society. Shut up Lord Jeffrey himself in a hay-barn with a well-built mow, and ask him in the darkness to catch you a few mice, and he will tell you whether or not the Owl be blind. This would be just as fair as to expect the Owl to see, like Lord Jeffrey, through a case in the Parliament House during daylight. Nay, we once heard a writer in Taylor and Hessey call the Owl stupid, he himself having longer ears than any species of Owl extant. What is the positive character of the Owl may perhaps appear by-and-by; but we have seen that, describing his character by negations, we may say that he resembles Napoleon Buonaparte much more than Joseph Hume or Alderman Wood. He is not moping—not boding—not melancholy—not a drunkard—not blind—not stupid; as much as it would be prudent to say of any man, whether editor or contributor, in her Majesty's dominions.
We really have no patience with people who persist in all manner of misconceptions regarding the character of birds. Birds often appear to such persons, judging from, of, and by themselves, to be in mind and manners the reverse of their real character. They judge the inner bird by outward circumstances inaccurately observed. There is the owl. How little do the people of England know of him—even of him the barn-door and domestic owl—yea, even at this day—we had almost said the Poets! Shakespeare, of course, and his freres, knew him to be a merry fellow—quite a madcap—and so do now all the Lakers. But Cowper had his doubts about it; and Gray, as every schoolboy knows, speaks of him like an old wife. The force of folly can go no further, than to imagine an owl complaining to the moon of being disturbed by people walking in a country churchyard. And among all our present bardlings, the owl is supposed to be constantly on the eve of suicide. If it were really so, he ought in a Christian country to be pitied, not pelted, as he is sure to be when accidentally seen in sunlight—for melancholy is a misfortune, especially when hereditary and constitutional, as it is popularly believed to be in the Black-billed Bubo, and certainly was in Dr Johnson. In young masters and misses we can pardon any childishness; but we cannot pardon the antipathy to the owl entertained by the manly minds of grown-up English clodhoppers, ploughmen, and threshers. They keep terriers to kill rats and mice in barns, and they shoot the owls, any one of whom we would cheerfully back against the famous Billy. "The very commonest observation teaches us," says the author of the "Gardens of the Menagerie," "that they are in reality the best and most efficient protectors of our cornfields and granaries from the devastating pillage of the swarms of mice and other small rodents." Nay, by their constant destruction of these petty but dangerous enemies, the owls, he says, "earn an unquestionable title to be regarded as among the most active of the friends of man; a title which only one or two among them occasionally forfeit by their aggressions on the defenceless poultry." Roger or Dolly beholds him in the act of murdering a duckling, and, like other light-headed, giddy, unthinking creatures, they forget all the service he has done the farm, the parish, and the state; he is shot in the act, and nailed, wide-extended in cruel spread-eagle, on the barn-door. Others again call him dull and shortsighted—nay, go the length of asserting that he is stupid—as stupid as an owl. Why, our excellent fellow, when you have the tithe of the talent of the common owl, and know half as well how to use it, you may claim the medal.
The eagles, kites, and hawks, hunt by day. The Owl is the Nimrod of the Night. Then, like one who shall be nameless, he sails about seeking those whom he may devour. To do him justice, he has a truly ghost-like head and shoulders of his own. What horror to the "small birds rejoicing in spring's leafy bowers," fast-locked we were going to say in each other's arms, but sitting side by side in the same cosy nuptial nest, to be startled out of their love-dreams by the great lamp-eyed, beaked face of a horrible monster with horns, picked out of feathered bed, and wafted off in one bunch, within talons, to pacify a set of hissing, and snappish, and shapeless powder-puffs, in the loophole of a barn? In a house where a cat is kept, mice are much to be pitied. They are so infatuated with the smell of a respectable larder, that to leave the premises, they confess, is impossible. Yet every hour—nay, every minute of their lives—must they be in the fear of being leaped out upon by four velvet paws—and devoured with kisses from a whiskered mouth, and a throat full of that incomprehensible music—a purr. Life, on such terms, seems to us anything but desirable. But the truth is, that mice in the fields are not a whit better off. Owls are cats with wings. Skimming along the grass tops, they stop in a momentary hover, let drop a talon, and away with Mus, his wife, and small family of blind children. It is the white, or yellow, or barn, or church, or Screech-Owl, or Gilley-Owlet, that behaves in this way; and he makes no bones of a mouse, uniformly swallowing him alive. Our friend, we suspect, though no drunkard, is somewhat of a glutton. In one thing we agree with him, that there is no sort of harm in a heavy supper. There, however, we are guilty of some confusion of ideas; for what to us, who rise in the morning, seems a supper, is to him who gets up at evening twilight, a breakfast. We therefore agree with him in thinking that there is no sort of harm in a heavy breakfast. After having passed a pleasant night in eating and flirting, he goes to bed betimes about four o'clock in the morning; and, as Bewick observes, makes a blowing hissing noise, resembling the snoring of a man. Indeed nothing can be more diverting to a person annoyed by blue devils, than to look at a white Owl and his wife asleep. With their heads gently inclined towards each other, there they keep snoring away like any Christian couple. Should the one make a pause, the other that instant awakes, and, fearing something may be wrong with his spouse, opens a pair of glimmering winking eyes, and inspects the adjacent physiognomy with the scrutinising stare of a village apothecary. If all be right, the concert is resumed, the snore sometimes degenerating into a sort of snivel, and the snivel into a blowing hiss. First time we heard this noise was in a churchyard when we were mere boys, having ventured in after dark to catch the minister's colt for a gallop over to the parish capital, where there was a dancing-school ball. There had been a nest of Owls in some hole in the spire; but we never doubted for a moment that the noise of snoring, blowing, hissing, and snapping proceeded from a testy old gentleman that had been buried that forenoon, and had come alive again a day after the fair. Had we reasoned the matter a little, we must soon have convinced ourselves that there was no ground for alarm to us at least; for the noise was like that of some one half stifled, and little likely to heave up from above him a six-feet-deep load of earth—to say nothing of the improbability of his being able to unscrew the coffin from the inside. Be that as it may, we cleared about a dozen of decent tombstones at three jumps—the fourth took us over a wall five feet high within and about fifteen without, and landed us, with a squash, in a cabbage-garden, enclosed on the other three sides by a house and a holly-hedge. The house was the sexton's, who, apprehending the stramash to proceed from a resurrectionary surgeon mistaken in his latitude, thrust out a long duck-gun from a window in the thatch, and swore to blow out our brains if we did not instantly surrender ourselves, and deliver up the corpse. It was in vain to cry out our name, which he knew as well as his own. He was deaf to reason, and would not withdraw his patterero till we had laid down the corpse. He swore that he saw the sack in the moonlight. This was a horse-cloth with which we had intended to saddle the "cowt," and that had remained, during the supernatural agency under which we laboured, clutched unconsciously and convulsively in our grasp. Long was it ere Davie Donald would see us in our true light—but at length he drew on his Kilmarnock nightcap, and coming out with a bouet, let us through the trance and out of the front door, thoroughly convinced, till we read Bewick, that old Southfield was not dead, although in a very bad way indeed. Let this be a lesson to schoolboys not to neglect the science of natural history, and to study the character of the White Owl.
Owls—both White and common Brown, are not only useful in a mountainous country, but highly ornamental. How serenely beautiful their noiseless flight; a flake of snow is not winnowed through the air more softly-silent! Gliding along the dark shadows of a wood, how spiritual the motion—how like the thought of a dream! And then, during the hushed midnight hours, how jocund the whoop and hollo from the heart of a sycamore—grey rock, or ivied Tower! How the Owls of Windermere must laugh at the silly Lakers, that under the garish eye of day, enveloped in clouds of dust, whirl along in rattling post-shays in pursuit of the picturesque! Why, the least imaginative Owl that ever hunted mice by moonlight on the banks of Windermere, must know the character of its scenery better than any poetaster that ever dined on char at Bowness or Lowood. The long quivering lines of light illumining some sylvan isle—the evening-star shining from the water to its counterpart in the sky—the glorious phenomenon of the double moon—the night-colours of the woods—and, once in the three years perhaps, that loveliest and most lustrous of celestial forms, the lunar rainbow—all these and many more beauteous and magnificent sights are familiar to the Owls of Windermere. And who know half so well as they do the echoes of Furness, and Applethwaite, and Loughrigg, and Landale, all the way on to Dungeon-Gill and Pavey-Ark, Scawfell and the Great Gable, and that sea of mountains, of which every wave has a name? Midnight—when asleep so still and silent—seems inspired with the joyous spirit of the Owls in their revelry—and answers to their mirth and merriment through all her clouds. The Moping Owl, indeed!—the Boding Owl, forsooth!—the Melancholy Owl, you blockhead!—why, they are the most cheerful—joy-portending—and exulting of God's creatures! Their flow of animal spirits is incessant—crowing-cocks are a joke to them—blue devils are to them unknown—not one hypochondriac in a thousand barns—and the Man-in-the-Moon acknowledges that he never heard one of them utter a complaint.
But what say ye to an Owl, not only like an eagle in plumage, but equal to the largest eagle in size—and therefore named, from the King of Birds, the Eagle Owl. Mr Selby! you have done justice to the monarch of the Bubos. We hold ourselves to be persons of tolerable courage, as the world goes—but we could not answer for ourselves showing fight with such a customer, were he to waylay us by night in a wood. In comparison, Jack Thurtell looked harmless. No—that bold, bright-eyed murderer, with Horns on his head like those on Michael Angelo's statue of Moses, would never have had the cruel cowardice to cut the weasand, and smash out the brains of such a miserable wretch as Weare! True, he is fond of blood—and where's the harm in that? It is his nature. But if there be any truth in the science of Physiognomy—and be that of Phrenology what it will, most assuredly there is truth in it—the original of that Owl, for whose portrait the world is indebted to Mr Selby, and Sir Thomas Lawrence never painted a finer one of Prince or Potentate of any Holy or Unholy Alliance, must have despised Probert from the very bottom of his heart. No prudent Eagle but would be exceedingly desirous of keeping on good terms with him—devilish shy, i' faith, of giving him any offence by the least hauteur of manner, or the slightest violation of etiquette. An Owl of this character and calibre is not afraid to show his horns at mid-day on the mountain. The Fox is not over and above fond of him—and his claws can kill a cub at a blow. The Doe sees the monster sitting on the back of her fawn, and, maternal instinct overcome by horror, bounds into the brake, and leaves the pretty creature to its fate. Thank Heaven, he is, in Great Britain, a rare bird! Tempest-driven across the Northern Ocean from his native forests in Russia, an occasional visitant he "frightens this isle from its propriety," and causes a hideous screaming through every wood he haunts. Some years ago, one was killed in the upland moors in the county of Durham—and, of course, paid a visit to Mr Bullock's Museum. Eagle-like in all its habits, it builds its nest on high rocks—sometimes on the loftiest trees—and seldom lays more than two eggs. One is one more than enough—and we who fly by night trust never to fall in with a live specimen of the Strix-Bubo of Linnæus.
But largest and loveliest of all the silent night-gliders—the $1! Gentle reader—if you long to see his picture, we have told you where it may be found;—and in the College Museum, within a glass vase on the central table in the Palace of Stuffed Birds, you may admire his outward very self—the semblance of the Owl he was when he used to eye the moon shining over the Northern Sea:—but if you would see the noble and beautiful Creature himself, in all his living glory, you must seek him through the long summer twilight among the Orkney or the Shetland Isles. The Snowy Owl dearly loves the snow—and there is, we believe, a tradition among them, that their first ancestor and ancestress rose up together from a melting snow-wreath on the very last day of a Greenland winter, when all at once the bright fields reappear. The race still inhabits that frozen coast—being common, indeed, through all the regions of the Arctic Circle. It is numerous on the shores of Hudson's Bay, in Norway, Sweden, and Lapland—but in the temperate parts of Europe and America "rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno."
We defy all the tailors on the face of the habitable globe; and what countless cross-legged fractional parts of men—who, like the beings of whom they are constituents, are thought to double their numbers every thirty years—must not the four quarters of the earth, in their present advanced state of civilisation, contain!—we defy, we say, all the tailors on the face of the habitable globe to construct such a surtout as that of the Snowy Owl, covering him, with equal luxury and comfort, in summer's heat and winter's cold. The elements, in all their freezing fury, cannot reach the body of the bird through that beautiful down-mail. Well guarded are the opening of those great eyes. Neither the driving dust, nor the searching sleet, nor the sharp frozen snow-stour, give him the ophthalmia. Gutta Serena is to him unknown—no Snowy Owl was ever couched for cataract—no need has he for an oculist, should he live an hundred years; and were they to attempt any operation on his lens or iris, how he would hoot at Alexander and Wardrope!
Night, doubtless, is the usual season of his prey; but he does not shun the day, and is sometimes seen hovering unhurt in the sunshine. The red or black grouse flies as if pursued by a ghost; but the Snowy Owl, little slower than the eagle, in dreadful silence overtakes his flight, and then death is sudden and sure. Hawking is, or was, a noble pastime—and we have now prevented our eyes from glancing at Jer-falcon, Peregrine, or Goshawk; but Owling, we do not doubt, would be noways inferior sport; and were it to become prevalent in modern times, as Hawking was in times of old, why, each lady, as Venus already fair, with an Owl on her wrist, would look as wise as Minerva.
But our soul sickens at all those dreams of blood! and fain would turn away from fierce eye, cruel beak, and tearing talon—war-weapons of them that delight in wounds and death—to the contemplation of creatures whose characteristics are the love of solitude—shy gentleness of manner—the tender devotion of mutual attachment—and, in field or forest, a lifelong passion for peace.