ANIMAL EMOTIONS.
Through the emotions we are apt to judge ourselves somewhat superior to the animal creation, though perhaps a more thorough study and interest in the “smiles and tears” of the so-called creatures of lesser intelligence would teach us that the emotions play almost as important and distinctive a part in their organism as in our own oversensitive nerve force. I am not speaking of the emotion of fear and anger that is instinctive in all animals, but of the more subtle emotions of joy and grief as visibly expressed. The older epic writers made much of the grief expressed by horses, and their sorrows have formed many an heroic verse. Merrick, in his “Tryphiodorus,” says:
He stands, and careless of his golden grain,
Weeps his associates and his master slain.
Says Moschus:
Nothing is heard upon the mountains now
But pensive herds that for their master low,
Struggling and comfortless about they rove,
Unmindful of their pasture and their love.
Virgil, who was probably more conversant with the horse and his interests than almost any other writer of that faraway period, thus writes of the sorrow of Pallas’ steed: