Note.—In the later editions of "The Omnipresence of the Deity," the passage animadverted on in the preceding chapter has been altered as follows:—
"Lo! there, in yonder spectre-haunted room,
What sightless demons horrified the gloom,
When pale and shivering, and bedew'd with fear,
The dying Sceptic felt his hour draw near!
Ere the last throes with anguish lined his cheek,
He yell'd for mercy with a hollow shriek,
Mutter'd some accents of unmeaning prayer,
Lock'd his white lips—let God the rest declare.
Go, child of Darkness! see a Christian die;
No horror pales his lip, or dims his eye;
No fiend-shaped phantoms of destruction start
The hope Religion pillows on his heart,
When with a falt'ring hand he waves adieu
To hearts as tender as their tears are true;
Meek as an infant to the mother's breast
Turns, fondly longing for its wonted rest,
So to our God the yielding soul retires,
And in one sigh of sainted peace expires."
CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.
FIRST CANTICLE.
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 History 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; 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 heron-shew; 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. Neophytes now range for themselves, according to their capacities and opportunities, the 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.
Compare the intensity and truth of any natural knowledge insensibly acquired by observation in very early youth, with that corresponding to it picked up in later life from books! In fact, the habit of distinguishing between things as different, or of similar forms, colours, and characters, formed in infancy, and childhood, and boyhood, in a free intercourse and communion with Nature, while we are merely seeking and finding the divine joy of novelty and beauty, perpetually occurring before our eyes in all her haunts, may be made the foundation of an accuracy of judgment of inappreciable value as an intellectual endowment. So entirely is this true, that we know many observant persons—that is, observant in all things intimately related with their own pursuits, and with the experience of their own early education—who, with all the pains they could take in after life, have never been able to distinguish by name, when they saw them, above half-a-dozen, if so many, of our British singing-birds; while as to knowing them by their song, that is wholly beyond the reach of their uninstructed ear, and a shilfa chants to them like a yellow yoldrin. On seeing a small bird peeping out of a hole in the eaves, and especially on hearing him chatter, they shrewdly suspect him to be a sparrow, though it does not by any means follow that their suspicions are always verified; and though, when sitting with her white breast so lovely out of the "auld clay bigging" in the window-corner, he cannot mistake Mistress Swallow, yet when flitting in fly-search over the stream, and ever and anon dipping her wing-tips in the lucid coolness, 'tis an equal chance that he misnames her Miss Marten.