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.