Chapter Six.
Face to Face with Ice-Bears.
“Why, ye tenants of the lake,
For me your wat’ry haunts forsake?
Tell me, fellow-creatures, why
At my presence thus you fly?
Conscious, blushing for our race,
Soon, too soon, your fears I trace;
Man, your proud usurping foe,
Would be lord of all below,
Plumes himself in Freedom’s pride,
Tyrant stern to all beside.”
Burns.
“If ever a true lover of Nature lived,” said Frank one winter’s evening, as we all sat round the fire as usual, “it was your Scottish bard, the immortal Burns.”
“Yes,” I said, “no one was ever more sensible than he that a great gulf is fixed between our lower fellow-creatures and us—a gulf formed and deepened by ages of cruelty towards them. We fain—some of us at least—would cross that gulf and make friends with the denizens of field and forest, but ah! Frank, they will not trust us. I can fancy the gentle Burns walking through the woods, silently, on tiptoe almost, lest he should disturb any portion of the life and love he saw all about him, or cause distress to any one of God’s little birds or beasts. See the wounded hare limp past him!—poor wee wanderer of the wood and field—look at the tears streaming over the ploughman’s cheeks as he says:
“‘Seek, mangled wretch, some place of wonted rest—
No more of rest, but now thy dying bed!
The sheltering rushes whistling o’er thy head,
The cold earth with thy bleeding body prest.’”
“And what,” said Frank, “can equal the pitiful pathos and simplicity of his address to the mouse whose nest in autumn has been turned up by the ploughshare?
“‘Thy wee bit housie too in ruin,
It’s silly wa’s, the winds are strewin’,
An’ naething, now to big a new ane
O’ foggage green,
An bleak December’s winds ensuin’,
Both snell and keen.’”
(Big means build; snell means keen.)
“Yes, Frank, and he says in that same sweet and tender poem: