[THE WING.]
"Wings! wings! to sweep
O'er mountain high and valley deep.
Wings! that my heart may rest
In the radiant morning's breast.
"Wings! to hover free
O'er the dawn-empurpled sea.
Wings! 'bove life to soar,
And beyond death for evermore."
Ruckert.
It is the cry of the whole earth, of the world, of all life; it is that which every species of animals or plants utters in a hundred diverse tongues—the voice which issues from the very rock and the inorganic creation: "Wings! we seek for wings, and the power of flight and motion!"
Yea; the most inert bodies rush greedily into the chemical transformations which will make them part and parcel of the current of the universal life, and bestow upon them the organs of movement and fermentation.
Yea; the vegetables, fettered by their immovable roots, expand their secret loves towards a winged existence, and commend themselves to the winds, the waters, the insects, in quest of a life beyond their narrow limits—of that gift of flight which nature has refused to them.
We contemplate pityingly those rudimentary animals, the unau and the aï, sad and suffering images of man, which cannot advance a step without a groan—sloths or tardigrades. The names by which we identify them we might justly reserve for ourselves. If slowness be relative to the desire of movement, to the constantly futile effort to progress, to advance, to act, the true tardigrade is man. His faculty of dragging himself from one point of the earth to another, the ingenious instruments which he has recently invented in aid of that faculty—all this does not lessen his adhesion to the earth; he is not the less firmly chained to it by the tyranny of gravitation.