To many others among the inferior animals, man deals forth his unthinking reproaches. To the cuckoo, for example, he objects to her habit of obtruding her egg or eggs into other people's premises, and leaving them there to be hatched by sparrow, wry-neck, or starling, as the case may be. But while bearing thus hard upon the cuckoo, he forgets the terrible curse, under which, like another Cain, she walks about the earth, urged forward by some resistless impulse, and condemned to the eternal repetition of two analogous notes—cuckoo, cuckoo. What do those syllables mean? The Abbé de Nemours, who devoted twenty years to the language of birds, or one of the original doctors of the Hellenic mythology, might perhaps have explained, but has not; so we must be content to regard as a mystery the secret of the cuckoo, which in some respects resembles those ames damnées which fly for ever over the Black Sea, according to inconsiderate tradition, for if they never paused to build nests or lay eggs, it must have been all over with them long before this time. The cuckoo has some odd tricks which have seldom been noted; for instance, she seems to find out some small bird's nest, say, in a hole in the wall, too small by far for her to enter. In this case, she squats upon the ground, lays her egg, and then, with bill or claws, takes it up, and pokes it into the hole, after which she flies away, shrieking her awfully monotonous song. In a forest in France, we used day after day to watch this smoky-blue traveller, as, in the dawn of a summer's morning, she flew across the leafy glades, or down the glens, resting her weary feet for a moment on some giant bough, and then shooting away through the soft green light, repeating her strange and ominous cry. What is the original country of the cuckoo? Has she any original country? Or is she not one of those wretched cosmopolites who know no attachment to any hallowed spot, no love or knowledge of parents, having been brought up by strangers, who regarded her from her birth as an ugly changeling, thrust by some evil spirit into their nest? Surely the cuckoo is to be pitied, since she knows no home, has never seen a hearth, or experienced the soft care of fabricating a nest or hatching an egg.
Original.
The Father of Waters.
Some one has said that rivers are the great moving highways of the world. In the earlier ages, when, from a restless and feverish impulse, whole nations became nomadic, their migrations were doubtless influenced by the rivers lying in their track. History tells of barbaric people that wandered around the Euxine and along the banks of the lower Danube found their way to central Europe.
Before the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, rivers, and especially the Rhine, played a considerable part in that extensive commerce which found its way from India to the cities of the Hanseatic League. Weary caravans brought the spices, gems, and rich fabrics of the East to the shore of the Mediterranean, whence they were carried westward mainly by Venetian traders timidly skirting the coast in their frail barks, venturing up rivers or making long journeys wherever the prospect of traffic invited. The old castles on the Rhine were built by feudal robbers, who were wont to descend from their strongholds to plunder merchants travelling on this great thoroughfare of mediaeval commerce.
In time they were induced to forego the chances of occasional booty for the payment of a stipulated toll. Doubtless the princely Hohenzollern could trace back their genealogy to the feudal high-toll barons of the Rhine, who furnished the original idea of the modern Zollverein of Germany. La mer, c'est l'empire, and, after the great maritime discoveries had opened a new route to India, it, in good part, diverted that distant commerce from the rivers, which the ocean reaches like shining arms over the continents as if to grasp dominion. As the elements of modern civilization became developed, societies crystallized, and the nationalities hitherto disturbed by migrations and conquests settled down where we now find them, rivers came gradually to serve their legitimate purpose of internal and international communication—a purpose resembling that which they fulfil in the physical economy of the earth, they are the veins which bring back to the ocean, through innumerable brooks and rills, seeming to have their sources in the ground, yet having unseen springs in the air, the moisture that the sun has already drawn up from the seas in invisible buckets, and wafted away in shining clouds to be poured out in rain or dew upon the thirsty hills.
Our own country, however, furnishes the best illustration of the importance and use of rivers. Its great physical features, of which the river system is perhaps the most striking, seem to make it a fit arena for those wonderful triumphs over the elements and the forces of nature which it is our privilege to enjoy. Their vastness would have intimidated races of men, weak and cowardly from long habits of servility, superstitious, torn with fierce passions and hatreds, and able to contend with the fatality of material things only on that diminutive scale afforded by the physical conformation of Europe.
The traveller descending the lower Danube finds the ruins of old Roman towns, Trajan's way cut for a distance of thirty miles in the steep solid rock of the Carpathians for the passage of his Roman legions, and, below the Iron Gate, the piers of Trajan's bridge, erected by him for the same purpose nearly eighteen centuries ago. Hardly less remarkable are the memorials of the bloody wars between the Christians and the Turks, the places made memorable by the campaigns of Eugene and Suwarrow and the Eastern war. But, excepting now and then a walled town, there are to be seen comparatively few habitations of men, and none of that active, sleepless life which lines the banks of our great rivers.
There are no richer plains in the world than those of the lower Danube. Why is it that the pent-up millions of Western Europe do not find their way thither, as in the time of Trajan vast multitudes emigrated from slavery impoverished Italy to that Eldorado of the Roman world? The very facility afforded by the river for hostile inroads has driven or kept the inhabitants from its banks, and to a great extent left them desolate wastes. The feverish restlessness which once made barbarous nations nomadic now seizes upon the individual; and a constant stream of immigration, oppressed by the despotisms of the Old World, bursts forth in the midst of us like a new fountain of Arethusa.