And there might be seen, in the solitude of their own abstractions, men with minds that had sounded the profounds of science, and, seemingly undisturbed by all that clamour, pursuing the mysteries of lines and numbers--conversing with the harmonies and lofty stars of heaven, deaf to all the discord and despair of earth. Or religious still even more than they--for those were mental, these spiritual--you beheld there men, whose heads before their time were becoming grey, meditating on their own souls, and in holy hope and humble trust in their Redeemer, if not yet prepared, perpetually preparing themselves for the world to come!

To return to Birds in Cages;--they are, when well, uniformly as happy as the day is long. What else could oblige them, whether they will or no, to burst out into song--to hop about so pleased and pert--to play such fantastic tricks, like so many whirligigs--to sleep so soundly, and to awake into a small, shrill, compressed twitter of joy at the dawn of light? So utterly mistaken was Sterne, and all the other sentimentalists, that his Starling, who he absurdly opined was wishing to get out, would not have stirred a peg had the door of his cage been flung wide open, but would have pecked like a very game-cock at the hand inserted to give him his liberty. Depend upon it, that Starling had not the slightest idea of what he was saying; and had he been up to the meaning of his words, would have been shocked at his ungrateful folly.

Look at Canaries, and Chaffinches, and Bullfinches, and "the rest," how they amuse themselves for a while flitting about the room, and then, finding how dull a thing it is to be citizens of the world, bounce up to their cages, and shut the door from the inside, glad to be once more at home. Begin to whistle or sing yourself, and forthwith you have a duet or a trio. We can imagine no more perfectly tranquil and cheerful life than that of a Goldfinch in a cage in spring, with his wife and his children. All his social affections are cultivated to the utmost. He possesses many accomplishments unknown to his brethren among the trees;--he has never known what it is to want a meal in times of the greatest scarcity; and he admires the beautiful frostwork on the windows, when thousands of his feathered friends are buried in the snow, or, what is almost as bad, baked up into pies, and devoured by a large supper-party of both sexes, who fortify their flummery and flirtation by such viands, and, remorseless, swallow dozens upon dozens of the warblers of the woods.

Ay, ay, Mr Goldy! you are wondering what we are now doing, and speculating upon the scribbler with arch eyes and elevated crest, as if you would know the subject of his lucubrations. What the wiser or better wouldst thou be of human knowledge? Sometimes that little heart of thine goes pit-a-pat, when a great, ugly, staring contributor thrusts his inquisitive nose within the wires--or when a strange cat glides round and round the room, fascinating thee with the glare of his fierce fixed eyes;--but what is all that to the woes of an Editor?--Yes, sweet simpleton! do you not know that we are the editor of _Blackwood's Magazine_--Christopher North! Yes, indeed, we are that very man--that self-same much-calumniated man-monster and Ogre. There, there!--perch on our shoulder, and let us laugh together at the whole world.

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.

SECOND CANTICLE.

The golden eagle leads the van of our Birds of Prey--and there she sits in her usual carriage when in a state of rest. Her hunger and her thirst have been appeased--her wings are folded up in a dignified tranquillity--her talons, grasping a leafless branch, are almost hidden by the feathers of her breast--her sleepless eye has lost something of its ferocity--and the Royal Bird is almost serene in her solitary state in the cliff. The gorcock unalarmed crows among the moors and mosses--the blackbird whistles in the birken shaw--and the cony erects his ears at the mouth of his burrow, and whisks away frolicsome among the whins or heather.

There is no index to the hour--neither light nor shadow--no cloud. But from the composed aspect of the Bird, we may suppose it to be the hush of evening after a day of successful foray. The imps in the eyrie have been fed, and their hungry cry will not be heard till the dawn. The mother has there taken up her watchful rest, till in darkness she may glide up to her brood--the sire is somewhere sitting within her view among the rocks--a sentinel whose eye, and ear, and nostril are true, in exquisite fineness of sense, to their trust, and on whom rarely, and as if by a miracle, can steal the adventurous shepherd or huntsman, to wreak vengeance with his rifle on the spoiler of sheep-walk and forest-chase.

Yet sometimes it chanceth that the yellow lustre of her keen, wild, fierce eye is veiled, even in daylight, by the film of sleep. Perhaps sickness has been at the heart of the dejected bird, or fever wasted her wing. The sun may have smitten her, or the storm driven her against a rock. Then hunger and thirst--which in pride of plumage she scorned, and which only made her fiercer on the edge of her unfed eyrie, as she whetted her beak on the flint-stone, and clutched the strong heather-stalks in her talons, as if she were anticipating prey--quell her courage, and in famine she eyes afar off the fowls she is unable to pursue, and with one stroke strike to earth. Her flight is heavier and heavier each succeeding day--she ventures not to cross the great glens with or without lochs--but flaps her way from rock to rock, lower and lower down along the same mountain-side--and finally, drawn by her weakness into dangerous descent, she is discovered at grey dawn far below the region of snow, assailed and insulted by the meanest carrion; till a bullet whizzing through her heart, down she topples, and soon is despatched by blows from the rifle-butt, the shepherd stretching out his foe's carcass on the sward, eight feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, with leg thick as his own wrist, and foot broad as his own hand.

But behold the Golden Eagle, as she has pounced, and is exulting over her prey! With her head drawn back between the crescent of her uplifted wings, which she will not fold till that prey be devoured, eye glaring cruel joy, neck-plumage bristling, tail-feathers fan-spread, and talons driven through the victim's entrails and heart--there she is new lighted on the ledge of a precipice, and fancy hears her yell and its echo. Beak and talons, all her life long, have had a stain of blood, for the murderess observes no Sabbath, and seldom dips them in loch or sea, except when dashing down suddenly among the terrified water-fowl from her watch-tower in the sky. The week-old fawn had left the doe's side but for a momentary race along the edge of the coppice; a rustle and a shadow--and the burden is borne off to the cliffs of Benevis. In an instant the small animal is dead--after a short exultation torn into pieces, and by eagles and eaglets devoured, its unswallowed or undigested bones mingle with those of many other creatures, encumbering the eyrie, and strewed around it over the bloody platform on which the young demons crawl forth to enjoy the sunshine.

Oh for the life of an eagle written by himself! It would outsell the Confessions even of the English Opium-Eater. Proudly would he, or she, write of birth and parentage. On the rock of ages he first opened his eyes to the sun, in noble instinct affronting and outstaring the light.

The Great Glen of Scotland--hath it not been the inheritance of his ancestors for many thousand years? No polluting mixture of ignoble blood, from intermarriages of necessity or convenience with kite, buzzard, hawk, or falcon. No, the Golden Eagles of Glen-Falloch, surnamed the Sun-starers, have formed alliances with the Golden Eagles of Cruachan, Benlawers, Shehallion, and Lochnagair--the Lightning-Glints, the Flood-fallers, the Storm-wheelers, the Cloud-cleavers, ever since the deluge. The education of the autobiographer had not been intrusted to a private tutor. Parental eyes, beaks, and talons, provided sustenance for his infant frame; and in that capacious eyrie, year after year repaired by dry branches from the desert, parental advice was yelled into him, meet for the expansion of his instinct, as wide and wonderful as the reason of earth-crawling man.

What a noble naturalist did he, in a single session at the College of the Cliff, become! Of the customs, and habits, and haunts of all inferior creatures, he speedily made himself master--ours included. Nor was his knowledge confined to theory, but reduced to daily practice. He kept himself in constant training--taking a flight of a couple of hundred miles before breakfast--paying a forenoon visit to the farthest of the Hebride Isles, and returning to dinner in Glenco. In one day he has flown to Norway on a visit to his uncle by the mother's side, and returned the next to comfort his paternal uncle, lying sick at the Head of the Cambrian Dee. He soon learned to despise himself for having once yelled for food, when food was none; and to sit or sail, on rock or through ether, athirst and an hungered, but mute. The virtues of patience, endurance, and fortitude, have become with him, in strict accordance with the Aristotelian Moral Philosophy--habits. A Peripatetic Philosopher he could hardly be called--properly speaking, he belongs to the Solar School--an airy sect, who take very high ground, indulge in lofty flights, and are often lost in the clouds. Now and then a light chapter might be introduced, setting forth how he and other youngsters of the Blood Royal were wont to take an occasional game at High-Jinks, or tourney in air lists, the champions on opposite sides flying from the Perthshire and from the Argyllshire mountains, and encountering with a clash in the azure common, six thousand feet high. But the fever of love burned in his blood, and flying to the mountains of another continent, in obedience to the yell of an old oral tradition, he wooed and won his virgin bride--a monstrous beauty, wider-winged than himself, to kill or caress, and bearing the proof of her noble nativity in the radiant Iris that belongs in perfection of fierceness but to the Sun-starers, and in them is found, unimpaired by cloudiest clime, over the uttermost parts of the earth. The bridegroom and his bride, during the honey-moon, slept on the naked rock--till they had built their eyrie beneath its cliff-canopy on the mountain-brow. When the bride was "as Eagles wish to be who love their lords"--devoted unto her was the bridegroom, even as the cushat murmuring to his brooding mate in the central pine-grove of a forest. Tenderly did he drop from his talons, close beside her beak, the delicate spring lamb, or the too early leveret, owing to the hurried and imprudent marriage of its parents before March, buried in a living tomb on April's closing day. Through all thy glens, Albyn! hadst thou reason to mourn, at the bursting of the shells that Queen-bird had been cherishing beneath her bosom. Aloft in heaven wheeled the Royal Pair, from rising to setting sun. Among the bright-blooming heather they espied the tartan'd shepherd, or hunter creeping like a lizard, and from behind the vain shadow of a rock watching with his rifle the flight he would fain see shorn of its beams. The flocks were thinned--and the bleating of desolate dams among the woolly people heard from many a brae. Poison was strewn over the glens for their destruction, but the Eagle, like the lion, preys not on carcasses; and the shepherd dogs howled in agony over the carrion in which they devoured death. Ha! was not that a day of triumph to the Sun-starers of Cruachan, when sky-hunting in couples, far down on the greensward before the ruined gateway of Kilchurn Castle, they saw, left all to himself in the sunshine, the infant heir of the Campbell of Breadalbane, the child of the Lord of Glenorchy and all its streams! Four talons in an instant were in his heart. Too late were the outcries from all the turrets; for ere the castle-gates were flung open, the golden head of the royal babe was lying in gore, in the Eyrie on the iron ramparts of Ben-Slarive--his blue eyes dug out--his rosy cheeks torn--and his brains dropping from beaks that revelled yelling within the skull!--Such are a few hints for "Some Passages in the Life of the Golden Eagle, written by Himself,"--in one volume crown octavo--Blackwoods, Edinburgh and London.

O heavens and earth!--forests and barn-yards! what a difference with a distinction between a GOLDEN EAGLE and a GREEN GOOSE! There, all neck and bottom, splay-footed, and hissing in miserable imitation of a serpent, lolling from side to side, up and down like an ill-trimmed punt, the downy gosling waddles through the green mire, and, imagining that King George the Fourth is meditating mischief against him, cackles angrily as he plunges into the pond. No swan that "on still St Mary's lake floats double, swan and shadow," so proud as he! He prides himself on being a gander, and never forgets the lesson instilled into him by his parents, soon as he chipt the shell in the nest among the nettles, that his ancestors saved the Roman Capitol. In process of time, in company with swine, he grazes on the common, and insults the Egyptians in their roving camp. Then comes the season of plucking--and this very pen bears testimony to his tortures. Out into the houseless winter is he driven--and, if he escapes being frozen into a lump of fat ice, he is crammed till his liver swells into a four-pounder--his cerebellum is cut by the cruel knife of a phrenological cook, and his remains buried with a cerement of apple sauce in the paunches of apoplectic aldermen, eating against each other at a civic feast! Such are a few hints for "Some Passages in the Life of a Green Goose," written by himself--in foolscap octavo--published by Quack and Co., Ludgate Lane, and sold by all booksellers in town and country.

Poor poets must not meddle with eagles. In the "Fall of Nineveh," Mr Atherstone describes a grand review of his army by Sardanapalus. Two million men are put into motion by the moving of the Assyrian flag-staff in the hand of the king, who takes his station on a mount conspicuous to all the army. This flag-staff, though "tall as a mast"--Mr Atherstone does not venture to go on to say with Milton, "hewn on Norwegian hills,"

or "of some tall ammiral," though the readers' minds supply the deficiency--this mast was, we are told, for "_two strong men_ a task;"

but it must have been so for twenty. To have had the least chance of being all at once seen by two million of men, it could not have been less than fifty feet high--and if Sardanapalus waved the royal standard of Assyria round his head, Samson or O'Doherty must have been a joke to him. However, we shall suppose he did; and what was the result? Such shouts arose that the solid walls of Nineveh were shook, "and the firm ground made tremble." But this was not all.

"At his height, A speck scarce visible, the eagle heard, And felt his strong wing falter: terror-struck, Fluttering and wildly screaming, down he sank-- Down through the quivering air: another shout,-- His talons droop--his sunny eye grows dark-- His strengthless pennons fail--plump down he falls, Even like a stone. Amid the far-off hills, With eye of fire, and shaggy mane uprear'd, The sleeping lion in his den sprang up; Listen'd awhile--then laid his monstrous mouth Close to the floor, and breathed hot roarings out In fierce reply."

What think ye of that, John Audubon, Charles Buonaparte, J. Prideaux Selby, James Wilson, Sir William Jardine, and ye other European and American ornithologists? Pray, Mr Atherstone, did you ever see an eagle--a speck in the sky? Never again suffer yourself, oh, dear sir! to believe old women's tales of men on earth shooting eagles with their mouths; because the thing is impossible, even had their mouthpieces had percussion-locks--had they been crammed with ammunition to the muzzle.

Had a stray sparrow been fluttering in the air, he would certainly have got a fright, and probably a fall--nor would there have been any hope for a tom-tit. But an eagle--an eagle ever so many thousand feet aloft--poo, poo!--he would merely have muted on the roaring multitude, and given Sardanapalus an additional epaulette. Why, had a string of wild-geese at the time been warping their way on the wind, they would merely have shot the wedge firmer and sharper into the air, and answered the earth-born shout with an air-born gabble--clangour to clangour.

Where were Mr Atherstone's powers of ratiocination, and all his acoustics? Two shouts slew an eagle. What became of all the other denizens of air--especially crows, ravens, and vultures, who, seeing two millions of men, must have come flocking against a day of battle? Every mother's son of them must have gone to pot. Then what scrambling among the allied troops! And what was one eagle doing by himself "up-by yonder?" Was he the only eagle in Assyria--the secular bird of ages? Who was looking at him, first a speck--then faltering--then fluttering and wildly screaming--then plump down like a stone? Mr Atherstone talks as if he saw it. In the circumstances he had no business with his "sunny eye growing dark." That is entering too much into the medical, or rather anatomical symptoms of his apoplexy, and would be better for a medical journal than an epic poem. But to be done with it--two shouts that slew an eagle a mile up the sky, must have cracked all the tympana of the two million shouters. The entire army must have become as deaf as a post.

Nay, Sardanapalus himself, on the mount, must have been blown into the air as by the explosion of a range of gunpowder-mills; the campaign taken a new turn; and a revolution been brought about, of which, at this distance of place and time, it is not easy for us to conjecture what might have been the fundamental features on which it would have hinged--and thus an entirely new aspect given to all the histories of the world.

What is said about the lion, is to our minds equally picturesque and absurd. He was among the "far-off hills." How far, pray? Twenty miles?

If so, then without a silver ear-trumpet he could not have heard the huzzas. If the far-off hills were so near Nineveh as to allow the lion to hear the huzzas even in his sleep, the epithet "far-off" should be altered, and the lion himself brought from the interior. But we cannot believe that lions were permitted to live in dens within ear-shot of Nineveh. Nimrod had taught them "never to come there no more"--and Semiramis looked sharp after the suburbs. But, not to insist unduly upon a mere matter of police, is it the nature of lions, lying in their dens among far-off hills, to start up from their sleep, and "breathe hot roarings out" in fierce reply to the shouts of armies? All stuff! Mr Atherstone shows off his knowledge of natural history, in telling us that the said lion, in roaring, "laid his monstrous mouth close to the floor." We believe he does so; but did Mr Atherstone learn the fact from Cuvier or from Wombwell? It is always dangerous to a poet to be too picturesque; and in this case, you are made, whether you will or no, to see an old, red, lean, mangy monster, called a lion, in his unhappy den in a menagerie, bathing his beard in the sawdust, and from his toothless jaws "breathing hot roarings out," to the terror of servant-girls and children, in fierce reply to a man in a hairy cap and full suit of velveteen, stirring him up with a long pole, and denominating him by the sacred name of the great asserter of Scottish independence.

Sir Humphry Davy--in his own science the first man of his age--does not shine in his "Salmonia"--pleasant volume though it be--as an ornithologist. Let us see.

"POIET.--The scenery improves as we advance nearer the lower parts of the lake. The mountains become higher, and that small island or peninsula presents a bold craggy outline; and the birch-wood below it, and the pines above, make a scene somewhat Alpine in character. But what is that large bird soaring above the pointed rock, towards the end of the lake? Surely it is an eagle!

"HAL.--You are right; it is an eagle, and of a rare and peculiar species--the grey or silver eagle, a noble bird! From the size of the animal, it must be the female; and her eyrie is in that high rock. I dare say the male is not far off."

Sir Humphry speaks in his introductory pages of Mr Wordsworth as a lover of fishing and fishermen; and we cannot help thinking and feeling that he intends Poietes as an image of that great Poet. What! William Wordsworth, the very high-priest of nature, represented to have seen an eagle for the first time of his life only then, and to have boldly ventured on a conjecture that such was the name and nature of the bird!

"But what is that large bird soaring above the pointed rock, towards the end of the lake? Surely it is an eagle!" "Yes, you are right--it is an eagle." Ha--ha--ha--ha--ha--ha! Sir Humphry--Sir Humphry--that guffaw was not ours--it came from the Bard of Rydal--albeit unused to the laughing mood--in the haunted twilight of that beautiful--that solemn Terrace.

Poietes having been confirmed, by the authority of Halieus, in his belief that the bird is an eagle, exclaims, agreeably to the part he plays, "Look at the bird! She dashes into the water, _falling like a rock_ and raising a column of spray--she has _fallen from a great height_. And now she rises again into the air--_what an extraordinary sight_!" Nothing is so annoying as to be ordered to look at a sight which, unless you shut your eyes, it is impossible for you not to see. A person behaving in a boat like Poietes, deserved being flung overboard.

"Look at the bird!" Why, every eye was already upon her; and if Poietes had had a single spark of poetry in his composition, he would have been struck mute by such a sight, instead of bawling out, open-mouthed and goggle-eyed, like a Cockney to a rocket at Vauxhall. Besides, an eagle does not, when descending on her prey, fall like a rock. There is nothing like the "_vis inertiae_" in her precipitation. You still see the self-willed energy of the ravenous bird, as the mass of plumes flashes in the spray--of which, by the by, there never was, nor will be, a column so raised. She is as much the queen of birds as she sinks as when she soars--her trust and her power are still seen and felt to be in her pinions, whether she shoots to or from the zenith--to a falling star she might be likened--just as any other devil--either by Milton or Wordsworth--for such a star seems to our eye and our imagination ever instinct with spirit, not to be impelled by exterior force, but to be self-shot from heaven.

Upon our word, we begin to believe that we ourselves deserve the name of Poietes much better than the gentleman who at threescore had never seen an eagle. "She has fallen from a great height," quoth the gentleman--"What an extraordinary sight!" he continueth--while we are mute as the oar suspended by the up-gazing Celt, whose quiet eye brightens as it pursues the Bird to her eyrie in the cliff over the cove where the red-deer feed.

Poietes having given vent to his emotions in such sublime exclamations--"Look at the bird!" "What an extraordinary sight!" might have thenceforth held his tongue, and said no more about eagles. But Halieus cries, "There! you see her rise with a fish in her talons"--and Poietes, very simply, or rather like a simpleton, returns for answer, "She _gives an interest which I hardly expected to have found in this scene_. Pray, are there _many of these animals_ in this country?" A poet hardly expecting to find interest in such a scene as a great Highland loch--Loch Maree! "Pray, are there many _of these hanimals in this country_?" Loud cries of Oh! oh! oh! No doubt an eagle is an animal; like Mr Cobbett or Mr O'Connell--"a very fine animal;" but we particularly, and earnestly, and anxiously, request Sir Humphry Davy not to call her so again--but to use the term bird, or any other term he chooses, except animal. Animal, a living creature, is too general, too vague by far; and somehow or other it offends our ear shockingly when applied to an eagle. We may be wrong, but in a trifling matter of this kind Sir Humphry surely will not refuse our supplication. Let him call a horse an animal, if he chooses--or an ass--or a cow--but not an eagle--as he loves us, not an eagle; let him call it a bird--the Bird of Jove--the Queen or King of the Sky--or anything else he chooses--but not an animal--no--no--no--not an animal, as he hopes to prosper, to be praised in Maga, embalmed and immortalised.

Neither ought Poietes to have asked if there were "_many_ of these animals" in this country. He ought to have known that there are not _many_ of these animals in any country. Eagles are proud--apt to hold their heads very high--and to make themselves scarce. A great many eagles all flying about together would look most absurd. They are aware of that, and fly in "ones and twos"--a couple perhaps to a county.

Poietes might as well have asked Mungo Park if there were a great many lions in Africa. Mungo, we think, saw but one; and that was one too much. There were probably a few more between Sego and Timbuctoo--but there are not a "great many of those animals in that country"--though quite sufficient for the purpose. How the Romans contrived to get at hundreds for a single show, perplexes our power of conjecture.

Halieus says--with a smile on his lip surely--in answer to the query of Poietes--"Of this species I have seen but these two; and, I believe, the young ones migrate as soon as they can provide for themselves; for this solitary bird requires a large space to move and feed in, and does not allow its offspring to partake its reign, or to live near it." This is all pretty true, and known to every child rising or risen six, except poor Poietes. He had imagined that there were "many of these animals in this country," that they all went a-fishing together as amicably as five hundred sail of Manksmen among a shoal of herrings.

Throughout these Dialogues we have observed that Ornither rarely opens his mouth. Why so taciturn? On the subject of birds he ought, from his name, to be well informed; and how could he let slip an opportunity, such as will probably never be afforded him again in this life, of being eloquent on the Silver Eagle? Ornithology is surely the department of Ornither. Yet there is evidently something odd and peculiar in his idiosyncrasy; for we observe that he never once alludes to "these animals," birds, during the whole excursion. He has not taken his gun with him into the Highlands, a sad oversight indeed in a gentleman who "is to be regarded as generally fond of the sports of the field."

Flappers are plentiful over all the moors about the middle of July; and hoodies, owls, hawks, ravens, make all first-rate shooting to sportsmen not over anxious about the pot. It is to be presumed, too, that he can stuff birds. What noble specimens might he not have shot for Mr Selby!

On one occasion, "the SILVER EAGLE" is preying in a pool within slug range, and there is some talk of shooting him--we suppose with an oar, or the butt of a fishing-rod, for the party have no firearms--but Poietes insists on sparing his life, because "these animals" are a picturesque accompaniment to the scenery, and "give it an interest which he had not expected to find" in mere rivers, lochs, moors, and mountains. Genus Falco must all the while have been laughing in his sleeve at the whole party--particularly at Ornither--who, to judge from his general demeanour, may be a fair shot with number five at an old newspaper expanded on a barn-door twenty yards off, but never could have had the audacity to think in his most ambitious mood of letting off his gun at an Eagle.

But further, Halieus, before he took upon him to speak so authoritatively about eagles, should have made himself master of their names and natures. He is manifestly no scientific ornithologist. We are.

The general question concerning Eagles in Scotland may now be squeezed into very small compass. Exclusive of the true Osprey (Falco Haliaetus), which is rather a larger fishing-hawk than an eagle, there are two kinds, viz.--the GOLDEN EAGLE (F. Chrysaetos), and the WHITE-TAILED or CINEROUS EAGLE (F. Albicilla). The other two _nominal_ species are disposed of in the following manner:--First, the RING-TAILED EAGLE (F.

Fulvus) is the young of the Golden Eagle, being distinguished in early life by having the basal and central portion of the tail white, which colour disappears as the bird attains the adult state. Second, the SEA EAGLE (F. Ossifragus), commonly so called, is the young of the White-tailed Eagle above named, from which it differs in having a brown tail; for in this species the white of the tail becomes every year more apparent as the bird increases in age, whereas, in the Golden Eagle, the white altogether disappears in the adult.

It is to the RING-TAILED EAGLE, and, by consequence, to the GOLDEN EAGLE, that the name of BLACK EAGLE is applied in the Highlands.

The White-tailed or Sea Eagle, as it becomes old, attains, in addition to the pure tail, a pale or bleached appearance, from which it may merit and obtain the name of Grey or SILVER EAGLE, as Sir Humphry Davy chooses to call it; but it is not known among naturalists by that name. There is no other species, however, to which the name can apply; and, therefore, Sir Humphry has committed the very gross mistake of calling the Grey or Silver Eagle (to use his own nomenclature) a very rare Eagle, since it is the most common of all the Scots, and also--_a fortiori_--of all the English Eagles--being in fact the SEA EAGLE of the Highlands.

It preys often on fish dead or alive; but not exclusively, as it also attacks young lambs, and drives off the ravens from carrion prey, being less fastidious in its diet than the GOLDEN EAGLE, which probably kills its own meat--and has been known to carry off children; for a striking account of one of which hay-field robberies you have but a few minutes to wait.

As to its driving off its young, its habits are probably similar in this respect to other birds of prey, none of which appear to keep together in families after the young can shift for themselves; but we have never met with any one who has seen them in the act of driving. It is stated vaguely, in all books, of all eagles.

As to its requiring a large range to feed in--we have only to remark that, from the powerful flight of these birds, and the wild and barren nature of the countries which they inhabit, there can be no doubt that they fly far, and "prey in distant isles"--as Thomson has it; but Halieus needed not have stated this circumstance as a character of this peculiar eagle--for an eagle with a small range does not exist; and therefore it is to be presumed that they require a large one.

Further, all this being the case, there seems to be no necessity for the old eagles giving themselves the trouble to drive off the young ones, who by natural instinct will fly off of their own accord, as soon as their wings can bear them over the sea. If an eagle were so partial to his native vale, as never on any account, hungry or thirsty, drunk or sober, to venture into the next parish, why then the old people would be forced, on the old principle of self-preservation, to pack off their progeny to bed and board beyond Benevis. But an Eagle is a Citizen of the World. He is friendly to the views of Mr Huskisson on the Wool Trade, the Fisheries, and the Colonies--and acts upon the old adage,

"Every bird for himself, and God for us all!"

To conclude, for the present, this branch of our subject, we beg leave humbly to express our belief, that Sir Humphry Davy never saw the Eagle, by him called the Grey or Silver, hunting for fish in the style described in "Salmonia." It does not dislike fish--but it is not its nature to keep hunting for them so, not in the Highlands at least, whatever it may do on American continent or isles. Sir Humphry talks of the bird dashing down repeatedly upon a pool within shot of the anglers.

We have angled fifty times in the Highlands for Sir Humphry's once, but never saw nor heard of such a sight. He has read of such things, and introduced them into this dialogue for the sake of effect--all quite right to do--had his reading lain among trustworthy Ornithologists. The common Eagle--which he ignorantly, as we have seen, calls so rare--is a shy bird, as all shepherds know--and is seldom within range of the rifle. Gorged with blood, they are sometimes run in upon and felled with a staff or club. So perished, in the flower of his age, that Eagle whose feet now form handles to the bell-ropes of our Sanctum at Buchanan Lodge--and are the subject of a clever copy of verses by Mullion, entitled "All the Talons."

We said in "The Moors," that we envied not the eagle or any other bird his wings, and showed cause why we preferred our own feet. Had Puck wings? If he had, we retract, and would sport Puck.

_Oberon._

"Fetch me this herb--and be thou here again, Ere the Leviathan can swim a league."

_Puck._

"I'll put a girdle round about the earth In forty minutes."

How infinitely more poetical are wings like these than seven-league boots! We declare, on our conscience, that we would not accept the present of a pair of seven-league boots to-morrow--or, if we did, it would be out of mere politeness to the genie who might press them on us, and the wisest thing we could do would be to lock them up in a drawer out of the reach of the servants. Suppose that we wished to walk from Clovenford to Innerleithen--why, with seven-league boots on, one single step would take us up to Posso, seven miles above Peebles! That would never do. By mincing one's steps, indeed, one might contrive to stop at Innerleithen; but suppose a gad-fly were to sting one's hip at the Pirn--one unintentional stride would deposit Christopher at Drummelzier, and another over the Cruik, and far away down Annan water! Therefore, there is nothing like wings. On wings you can flutter--and glide--and float and soar--now like a humming-bird among the flowers--now like a swan, half rowing, half sailing, and half flying adown a river--now like an eagle afloat in the blue ocean of heaven, or shooting sunwards, invisible in excess of light--and bidding farewell to earth and its humble shadows. "O that I had the wings of a dove, that I might flee away and be at rest!" Who hath not, in some heavy hour or other, from the depth of his very soul, devoutly--passionately--hopelessly--breathed that wish to escape beyond the limits of woe and sin--not into the world of dreamless death; for weary though the immortal pilgrim may have been, never desired he the doom of annihilation, untroubled although it be, shorn of all the attributes of being--but he has prayed for the wings of the dove, because that fair creature, as she wheeled herself away from the sight of human dwellings, has seemed to disappear to his imagination among old glimmering forests, wherein she foldeth her wing and falleth gladly asleep--and therefore, in those agitated times when the spirits of men acknowledge kindred with the inferior creatures, and would fain interchange with them powers and qualities, they are willing even to lay down their intelligence, their reason, their conscience itself, so that they could but be blessed with the faculty of escaping from all the agonies that intelligence, and reason, and conscience alone can know, and beyond the reach of this world's horizon to flee away and be at rest!