O bells that madly toll to-night,
What is the meaning of your note?
Is disappointment or delight
The burden of each brazen throat?
And what the words my weary brain
Discovers in your vague refrain?
From the high casement of my room
I watch the world below asleep;
While from the belfries clothed in gloom
The clangor rolls from deep to deep,
Repeating, as afar 'tis flung,
A lesson from an unknown tongue.
O music that eludes the soul,—
Like that sweet sea which vexed the thirst
Of Tantalus, but never stole
Across his fevered lips accursed,—
Unfold your mysteries to-night,
Your misty meaning and your might.
It surging sweeps upon the air.
Besides the clamor of the bells
Are echoing strains from everywhere,
Past, present, future. How it swells
Into an endless sea which roars
And moans on lonely rock-bound shores!
Hoarse, hollow echoes from dead years
Of that which I have thought and done—
The discords of past sin and tears
Through e'en your fairest measures run.
Alas! when will those discords cease?
Does sorrow never lead to peace?
Chords of the present clash and jar
As though each note would never end;
Yet as their rhythms die afar,
They slowly unto beauty blend,
And the last cadence fades away
As fades a perfect summer day.
O vibrant strains of the to-be,
With promise pregnant and with hope,
You are a glad epitome
Of the hereafter's power and scope;
Yet 'neath your softest note appears
The thunder-march of coming years.
Ring, Christmas bells! The past is dead,
E'en though its requiem never die,
And God His endless love has spread
Upon the scenes that round us lie.
Ring loudly to the midnight air
That Love and Hope have slain Despair.
Ring out, O bells! The world is wide,
And Goodness sits upon a throne.
Ring out upon the Christmas-tide
That God will not forget His own,
And that on all, from far above,
Descends His never-failing love.
William E. S. Fales.
THE AMERICAN EAGLE UNDER DIFFICULTIES.
It seems to be a striking case of misunderstanding from the Romans down, or up, to the Americans. Every theory and supposition has curiously added to the misapprehension. Rightly judged, with the plainest facts of his life even casually considered, the Bird o' Freedom seems so disreputable a fowl that one wonders how he ever came to be chosen as a figure-head by Romans, Germans, Americans, or the Michigan Regiment that bore him alive as its standard through the smoke of a score of battles, and brought him home again unscathed to make a curious part of the history of a gallant State in the times that tried men's souls. Innumerable myths trail behind him as appendages to his unearned fame. He was the Bird of Jove. He has ever been the reputed king of an ethereal world of fancy. His eye alone may look upon the sun unwinking and undazed. And yet it is all in his eye, or rather in that of the credulous mortals who believe the ancient story. There never lived a poet, sticking to his business, that has not at some time in his career become a panegyrist of his extraordinary supposed qualities and a proclaimer of his magnificence. It is a curious fact, too, that all the moralists, save one, have at some time or other used him as a simile, a great example, a something to be imitated. That one, greatest of all, is content with the familiar and plebeian hen and chickens in one of the most eloquent and touching of his monologues, and uses the miserable sparrow in that illustration which has in all time since given comfort to forsaken souls.
With the poetry about this overrated fowl everybody is more or less familiar. There is nothing finer; and it is somewhat startling, and also destructive of our most cherished ideas, to say that it seems a case of mistaken identity almost from beginning to end. It cannot be the eagle, our eagle, that is meant. He has never in a single instance done anything to entitle him to a medal. Yet the idealism of the ages has been heaping honors on his crested head through the necessity, as yet unexplained, of having some winged creature to glorify, to use as an emblem, to paint, to describe incorrectly if poetically, to embellish a heroic national moral with. It has been done without regard to fact in all the school-readers and other truthful volumes intended for the use of the very young. Every boy regards the American Eagle as the king of birds even from a moral standpoint, and he is liable to at least a brief spell of disappointment if he has the faculty of observation and the love of nature sufficiently developed to find out by-and-by that he has been deceived.
The coparcener with the eagle in all this beautiful nonsense is a bird that never existed at all, and who, having at last fallen from her high estate, is now principally useful as a name for a hotel that has been too often burned, or as the escutcheon of an insurance company. Considered in a matter-of-fact way, and in the cold and unflattering light of natural history, our national emblem is no more a truth than the Phœnix is, and is almost as preposterous as the roc. One wonders why, in the course of so many ages in which the gradual drift has been toward common-sense and fact, men have not learned to turn for their animal ideals, if it is necessary to have them, to the beasts and birds entitled to some consideration for actual qualities; for both beauty and gallantry, for instance, to the male of the barn yard fowl; for devotion, to the grotesquely homely stork; for self-sacrifice, to any of the beautiful creatures who flutter along before you in the path, with the distressful pantomime of a broken wing and great distress, inviting you to kill them easily with a stick or stone if you have the heart, and offering you every inducement to pursue them that is latent in man's cruel heart, but only after all to lead the marauder further and further away from a nest that is cherished.
As to the first of these hastily-given examples, any country-raised boy will concede the point, and he has not been left entirely out in the poetry, and especially in the folk-lore, of the nations. He it was who marked with his clarion the moment when he upon whose name is founded the most powerful of the Christian Churches denied his master and his faith. He sings the coming of the dawn in every clime, and marks the hour when graveyards cease to yawn, or when Romeos must depart. He leads his harem abroad in the morning as he has ever done, ever ready to fight his rival from across the fence or to meet in unconsidered duel the marauding hawk. With a gallantry quite unknown to any other bird or human, he calls familiarly to others of his family to come and eat the choicest morsel he may find. He is gay. He has the natural gait and air of an acknowledged chieftain. The sun glints upon his neck. His tail is a waving plume the equal of which few birds can boast. He hath a bold and glittering eye. Sometimes retreating under the dictates of prudence, as many higher personages have often done and been commended therefor, he is yet the ideal of homely, home-defending courage. Withal, he will upon necessity demean himself to scratch for a brood of chirping orphans, and gather them to his gallant breast because they have no mother. Yet, forsooth, not this illustrious bird, but the eagle—the "American" Eagle—is the emblem of the foster-mother of all the nations.
There is a place where every visitor to Chicago may see this emblematic lordling near at hand. It is at Lincoln Park. There is a colossal cage there where there are a dozen or so of him, and he is not even restricted in certain limited flights which seem fully satisfying to him in his well-fed condition. If you go to see him there you will have the advantage of observing how absurdly draggle tailed and slovenly he may become with full leisure to make his toilet if he ever does, and that he evidently is not naturally a dandy. This trait is not common with any of his captive neighbors except the coyotes, and nobody who has known the coyote in his native wilderness expects anything better of him. You can also observe his grotesqueness when he is on the ground, where he often comes, and there is probably nothing more ridiculously abortive in all nature than his movements when so situated. But one cannot visit him often or observe him long without becoming convinced that none of the attitudes in which he is almost invariably depicted on flags, medals, seals, coins, and other ornamental and emblematic devices is natural to him. He never assumes them even by mistake or chance. "The poised eagle" becomes poetry like all the rest, when you observe that his "eagle glance" has taken in a piece of fresh meat somewhere, and he wishes to keep someone else from getting it. He then scrambles to the edge of a board, or hitches along to the end of a branch of the dead tree where he sits, and drops off like a hen, making an awkward flight toward the morsel that has attracted him. And when he gets there he edges suspiciously around it in the evident fear that it may be alive and may bite him.
You will, however, be able to observe some of his traits that seem more natural. There are the cruel eyes and the relentless expression; the "hooked claws" and the "bending beak." It is an eye whose expression never changes, and which regards with constant malice all its surroundings. The brow, which gives it the look so much admired, seems, according to Mr. Ruskin, to be merely a provision of nature to keep the sun from shining into it, thus disposing, Ruskin-like, at one fell swoop of one of the most striking of the poetical myths.
Still others will be disposed of if you stay long. Did any one of my readers ever read that neither the eagle nor the lion would eat anything they had not themselves slain? Well, later advices seem to indicate that both will upon occasion descend to carrion of the basest quality, and that both consume considerable time in their native haunts in catching and devouring bugs. Lizards and such small fry are assiduously looked for. Convincing proof of this, in the eagle's case, was not wanting in one brief visit to the above-mentioned famous and beautiful resort. In the same huge cage with the eagles were certain crocodiles, or alligators, or whatever name you may choose to call the Floridian saurian by. To me they all seem very much alike. I suppose this is because I do not care much about supra-orbital bones, or the number of teeth or toes, or minute particulars of anatomical conformation, but am disposed, after a blundering and non-technical fashion, to mostly regard looks and actions. The adult, or semi-adult, alligators lie all the time asleep, never moving, never winking, never so much as apparently breathing, and looking very much like chunks in a clearing. One wonders, in view of all the stories told, if they are really alive this fine summer weather, when there is no excuse for hibernation, and if so, how they ever manage to catch anything except possibly by lying with their mouth open and waiting until something mistakes the locality and crawls into it by inadvertance.