condition--feelings which have an admixture of something like a sense of shame or guilt, as if an injustice had been done, and I had stood by consenting. I did not do it, but we did it. I remember Matthew Arnold's feeling lines on his dead canary, "Poor Matthias," and quote:
Yet, poor bird, thy tiny corse
Moves me, somehow, to remorse;
Something haunts my conscience, brings
Sad, compunctious visitings.
Other favourites, dwelling here,
Open lived with us, and near;
Well we knew when they were glad
Plain we saw if they were sad;
Sympathy could feel and show
Both in weal of theirs and woe.
Birds, companions more unknown,
Live beside us, but alone;
Finding not, do all they can,
Passage from their souls to man.
Kindness we bestow and praise,
Laud their plumage, greet their lays;
Still, beneath their feathered breast
214 BIRDS IN TOWN AND VILLAGE
Stirs a history unexpressed.
Wishes there, and feeling strong,
Incommunicably throng;
What they want we cannot guess.
This, as poetry, is good, but it does not precisely fit my case; my "compunctious visitings" being distinctly different in origin and character from the poet's. He--Matthew Arnold--is a poet, and the author of much good verse, which I appreciate and hold dear. But he was not a naturalist--all men cannot be everything. And I, a naturalist, hold that the wishes, thronging the restless little feathered breast are not altogether so incommunicable as the melodious mourner of "Poor Matthias" imagines. The days--ay, and years--which I have spent in the society of my feathered friends have not, I flatter myself, been so wasted that I cannot small my soul, just as the preacher smalled his voice, to bring it within reach of them, and establish some sort of passage.
And so, thinking that a little more knowledge of birds than most people possess, and consideration for them--for I will not be so harsh to speak of justice--and time and attention given to their
THE EAGLE AND THE CANARY 215
wants, might remove this reproach, and silence these vague suggestions of a too fastidious conscience, I have taken the trouble to add something to the seed with which these little prisoners had been supplied. For we give sweetmeats to the child that cries for the moon--an alternative which often acts beneficially--and there is nothing more to be done. Any one of us, even a philosopher, would think it hard to be restricted to dry bread only, yet such a punishment would be small compared with that which we, in our ignorance or want of consideration, inflict on our caged animals--our pets on compulsion. Small, because an almost infinite variety of flavours drawn from the whole vegetable kingdom--a hundred flavours for every one in the dietary which satisfies our heavier mammalian natures--is a condition of the little wild bird's existence and essential to its well-being and perfect happiness. And so, to remedy this defect, I went out into the garden, and with seeding grasses and pungent buds, and leaves of a dozen different kinds, I decorated the cage until it looked less like a prison than a bower. And now for an hour the little creatures have been busy with their varied green