O stay here! Who would not be such a city's citizen?
1890.
[THE CAPTIVES]
THE lions at the Zoo "bring sad thoughts to the mind": they chiefly, for they are the most impressive figures among our poor hostages. The pretty moons of color, cream or bronze, pulsating along their tawny sides, seem but so many outer ripples of a heart-ache subtle enough to move your own. Couchant, with a droop of the bearded chest, or erect, with an eternal restless four steps and back again, they drag through, in public, their defeated days. It is inconceivable that we should attach the idea of depravity to a lion. Surely, it is no count against him that he can kill those of us who are adjacent, and juicy! In the roomy name of reciprocity, why not? Yet what he can do, he leaves undone. A second glance at him corrects inherited opinion:
"I trow that countenance cannot lie."
Benignity sits there, and forbearance; else we know not what such things mean. Those golden eyes, pools of sunlit water, make one remember no blood-curdling hap; but rather the gracious legendry of long ago: how a lion buried the Christian penitent in the lone Egyptian sands, and another gambolled in the thronged Coliseum, kissing the feet of the Christian youth, when the task laid upon him, in his hunger, was to rend his body in twain. Something about the lion reminds one of certain sculptured Egyptian faces. This great intellectual mildness, when blended with enormous power (power which in him must be expressed physically, or we were too dull to feel it), appears to some merely sly and sinister. Incredible goodness we label as hypocrisy. For the ultimate quality in the expression of the lion is its sweetness. He may be, as one hears him called, the king of brutes, but the gentleman among brutes he is, beyond a doubt. He has tolerance, dignity, and an oak-leaf cleanliness. With passing accuracy, Landor or William Morris, is often described as "leonine"; but the real lion-men of England are the thin and mild dynamos: Pitt, Newman, Nelson. In these are the long austere lines of the cheek, the remote significant gaze, the look of inscrutable purpose and patience. As Theseus says, smiling upon his Hippolyta, of the lion in the masque of the Midsummer Night's Dream: "A very gentle beast, and of a good conscience."