The Welsh have a tradition concerning the Birds of Rhianon,—a female personage who hath a principal part in carrying on the spells in Gwlad yr Hud or the Enchanted Land of Pembrokeshire. Whoso happened to hear the singing of her birds, stood seven years listening, though he supposed the while that only an hour or two had elapsed. Owen Pughe could have told us more of these Birds.
Some Romish legends speak of birds which were of no species known on earth and who by the place and manner of their appearances were concluded to have come from Paradise, or to have been celestial spirits in that form. Holy Colette of portentous sanctity, the Reformeress of the Poor Clares, and from whom a short-lived variety of the Franciscans were called Colettines, was favoured, according to her biographers, with frequent visits by a four-footed pet, which was no mortal creature. It was small, resembling a squirrel in agility, and an ermine in the snowy whiteness of its skin, but not in other respects like either; and it had this advantage over all earthly pets, that it was sweetly and singularly fragrant. It would play about the saint, and invite her attention by its gambols. Colette felt a peculiar and mysterious kind of pleasure when it showed itself; and for awhile not supposing that there was anything supernatural in its appearance, endeavoured to catch it, for she delighted in having lambs and innocent birds to fondle: but though the Nuns closed the door, and used every art and effort to entice or catch it, the little nondescript always either eluded them, or vanished; and it never tasted of any food which they set before it. This miracle being unique in its kind is related with becoming admiration by the chroniclers of the Seraphic Order; as it well may, for, for a monastic writer to invent a new miracle of any kind evinces no ordinary power of invention.
If this story be true, and true it must be unless holy Colette's reverend Roman Catholic biographers are liars, its truth cannot be admitted sans tirer à consequence; and it would follow as a corollary not to be disputed, that there are animals in the world of Angels. And on the whole it accorded with the general bearing of the Doctor's notions (notions rather than opinions he liked to call them where they were merely speculative) to suppose that there may be as much difference between the zoology of that world, and of this, as is found in the zoology and botany of widely distant regions here, according to different circumstances of climate: and rather to imagine that there were celestial birds, beasts, fishes, and insects, exempt from evil, and each happy in its kind to the full measure of its capacity for happiness, than to hold the immortality of brutes. Cudworth's authority had some weight with him on this subject, where the Platonical divine says that as “human souls could not possibly be generated out of matter, but were sometime or other created by the Almighty out of nothing preexisting, either in generations, or before them,” so if it be admitted that brute animals are “not mere machines, or automata (as some seem inclinable to believe), but conscious and thinking beings; then from the same principle of reason, it will likewise follow, that their souls cannot be generated out of matter neither, and therefore must be derived from the fountain of all life, and created out of nothing by Him: who, since he can as easily annihilate as create, and does all for the best, no man need at all to trouble himself about their permanency, or immortality.”
Now though the Doctor would have been pleased to think, with the rude Indian, that when he was in a state of existence wherein no evil could enter
His faithful dog should bear him company,
he felt the force of this reasoning; and he perceived also that something analogous to the annihilation there intended, might be discerned in his own hypothesis. For in what may be called the visible creation he found nothing resembling that animalcular world which the microscope has placed within reach of our senses; nothing like those monstrous and prodigious forms which Leeuwenhoeck, it must be believed, has faithfully delineated.—Bishop has a beautiful epigram upon the theme καλὰ πέφανται
When thro a chink,2 a darkened room
Admits the solar beam,
Down the long light that breaks the gloom,
Millions of atoms stream.
In sparkling agitation bright,
Alternate dies they bear;
Too small for any sense but sight,
Or any sight, but there.
Nature reveals not all her store
To human search, or skill;
And when she deigns to shew us more
She shows us Beauty still.
But the microscopic world affords us exceptions to this great moral truth. The forms which are there discovered might well be called
Abominable, inutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceived,
Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimæras dire.
Such verily they would be, if they were in magnitude equal to the common animals by which we are surrounded. But Nature has left all these seemingly misformed creatures in the lowest stage of existence,—the circle of inchoation; neither are any of the hideous forms of insects repeated in the higher grades of animal life; the sea indeed contains creatures marvellously uncouth and ugly, beaucoup plus de monstres, sans comparaison, que la terre, and the Sieur de Brocourt, who was as curious in collecting the opinions of men as our philosopher, though no man could make more dissimilar uses of their knowledge, explains it à cause de la facilité de la generation qui est en elle, dont se procreent si diverses figures, à raison de la grande chaleur qui se trouve en la mer, l'humeur y estant gras, et l'aliment abondant; toute generation se faisant par chaleur et humidité, qui produisent toutes choses. With such reasoning our Doctor was little satisfied; it was enough to know that as the sea produces monsters, so the sea covers them, and that fish are evidently lower in the scale of being than the creatures of earth and air. It is the system of Nature then that whatever is unseemly should be left in the earliest and lowest stages; that life as it ascends should cast off all deformity, as the butterfly leaves its exuviæ when its perfect form is developed; and finally that whatever is imperfect should be thrown off, and nothing survive in immortality but what is beautiful as well as good.