7th.—My uncle has been obliged to go to London about business; he left us this morning, but his stay will not be very long, I hope, for we shall miss him excessively, and the more so, as winter is completely begun. We have now dark days, with frequent rain and storms; few trees have even a withered leaf remaining, and every thing out of doors has a forlorn and desolate appearance.
But though the leaves are all gone, we have still a few flowers; the China rose is still in bloom, and in the sheltered warm borders, we find a few wall-flowers, some lilac primroses, and many Neapolitan violets, which are delightfully sweet.
9th.—When we were walking this morning in the forest, Frederick made me take notice of a flock of crows, which were quite different in appearance from the common rook. The back is ash-coloured, while the head, throat, wings, and tail, are black. I was surprised at my own blindness in not having observed them before; but Frederick told me that they had only arrived lately, as they change their abode twice in the year. About the middle of autumn, they appear in the southern parts of England in flocks; and in the beginning of spring they depart in a northerly direction; though in some parts of Scotland and Ireland, they remain through the whole year. This species is still more familiar than the rook, and in winter will go even to the yards of houses to pick up food. It is called the hooded crow, or scare-crow. I heard it give two cries, one was the hollow hoarse note of the crow, but the other was shrill, and not very unlike the crowing of a cock. They are remarkable for this double cry.
Mr. Landt, in his description of the Feroe Islands, says that one or two hundred of these birds sometimes assemble, as if by general consent. A few of them sit with drooping heads, others seem as grave as if they were the judges, and others again very bustling and noisy. The meeting breaks up in about an hour, when one or two are generally found dead on the spot; and it has been supposed, by those who have observed them carefully, that they were criminals punished for their offences. Frederick says he has read that in the Orkneys, too, they meet in spring, as if to deliberate on concerns of importance; and after flying about in this collected state for eight or ten days, they separate into pairs, and retire to the mountains.
Along with those we saw several carrion crows with their glossy plumage of bluish black; they not only associate with rooks and other crows, but approach our dwellings and saunter among the flocks; and I really saw some hopping on the backs of pigs and sheep, with such apparent familiarity that one might have imagined they were domestic birds.
Towards the close of winter the hooded crow and the rook remove to other regions, but the carrion crows resort to the nearest woods, which they seem to divide into separate districts, one for each pair; and it is remarkable that they never intrude on each other’s portions.
Crows may well be called omnivorous birds, for they eat every thing—flesh, eggs, worms, grain, fish, and fruit. Shell fish, it is said, they very ingeniously crack by dropping them from a great height on a stone. Many people have seen this; and the great Mr. Watt, whose observation was always alive, watched one of these sagacious crows taking up a crab into the air, which it repeatedly let fall on a rock, till the shell w?as completely broken. The same ingenuity has been observed in another species of the crow family, in North America: a blue jay, which had been tamed, finding the dried seeds of Indian corn too hard to break, placed one in the corner of a shelf in the green-house, between the wall and a plant box: having thus secured it on three sides, he easily contrived to break it; and, having once succeeded, he continued ever after to apply the same means.
10th.—We have had a grand discussion in our walk this morning, on genius. Mary’s opinion is, that it never exists originally; and that wherever biography affords us the opportunity of learning the small circumstances of early life, we may observe that something had occurred to turn the attention, while young, to that pursuit, in which successful perseverance had been afterwards ascribed to genius. For instance, in the thirteenth century, some Greek painters being employed in the churches of Florence, the youthful Cimabue gazed for whole days in admiration of their work: he afterwards devoted himself to the art, and quickly surpassed his masters. Here, but for the circumstance of the Greek painters, his talent might have remained unknown even to himself.
“But,” said Caroline, “his own pupil, Giotto, may be opposed to your theory; you know he was a shepherd boy, whom Cimabue found accurately drawing the figures of his sheep on the sand.”
“I confess,” said Mary, “that does seem rather against me, but we do not know what previous opportunities he might have had. Canova’s genius, it is said, shewed itself in the obscurity of village life; yet we learn from his Memoirs that he lived with his grandfather, who, though only a common stone-cutter, was in the habit of designing and working architectural ornaments, and surely that accounts for the tendency of his pupil’s mind.”