to whose heart were known but the meanest No great moral or religious lesson can well charities of nature; yet mean as they were, be drawn, or say rather so well, from such how much better in such an hour, than all his anomalous death-beds, as from those of comimaginings most magnificent! For had he not mon unbelievers. To show, in all its divine suffered his own offspring to pass away from power, the blessedness of the Christian's faith, his eyes, even like the wood-shadows, only less it must be compared, rather than contrasted, beloved and less regretted? And in the very with the faith of the best and wisest of Deists. midst of the prodigality of love and passion, The ascendency of the heavenly over the which he had poured outover the creations of his earthly will then be apparent-as apparent as ever-distempered fancy, let his living children, the superior lustre of a star to that of a lighthis own flesh and blood, disappear as paupers ed-up window in the night. For above all in a chance-governed world?-A world in other things in which the Christian is happier which neither parental nor filial love were than the Deist-with the latter, the life beyond more than the names of nonentities-Father, the grave is but a dark hope-to the former, Son, Daughter, Child, but empty syllables," immortality has been brought to light by the which philosophy heeded not-or rather loved Gospel." That difference embraces the whole them in their emptiness, but despised, hated, or feared them, when for a moment they seemed pregnant with a meaning from heaven, and each in its holy utterance signifying God!

spirit. It may be less felt-less seen when life is quick and strong for this earth alone has much and many things to embrace and enchain our being-but in death the difference is as between night and day.

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.

FIRST CANTICLE.

in the most perfect harmony and order. Neophytes now range for themselves, according to THE present Age, which, after all, is a very their capacities and opportunities, the fields, pretty and pleasant one, is feelingly alive and woods, rivers, lakes, and seas; and proficients, widely awake to the manifold delights and ad- no longer confining themselves to mere vantages with which the study of Natural nomenclature, enrich their works with anecHistory swarms, and especially that branch of dotes and traits of character, which, without it which unfolds the character and habits, phy- departure from truth, have imbued bird-biosical, moral, and intellectual, of those most in-graphy with the double charm of reality and teresting and admirable creatures-Birds. It romance. is familiar not only with the shape and colour of beak, bill, claw, talon, and plume, but with the purposes for which they are designed, and with the instincts which guide their use in the beautiful economy of all-gracious Nature. We remember the time when the very word Ornithology would have required interpretation in mixed company; when a naturalist was looked on as a sort of out-of-the-way but amiable monster. Now, one seldom meets with man, woman, or child, who does not know a hawk from a handsaw, or even, to adopt the more learned reading, from a heron-shew; a black swan is no longer erroneously considered a rara avis any more than a black sheep; while the Glasgow Gander himself, no longer apocryphal, has taken his place in the national creed, belief in his existence being merely blended with wonder at his magnitude, and some surprise perhaps among the scientific, that he should be as yet the sole specimen of that

enormous Anser.

The chief cause of this advancement of knowledge in one of its most delightful departments, has been the gradual extension of its study from stale books written by men, to that book ever fresh from the hand of God. And the second-another yet the same-has been the gradual change wrought by a philosophical spirit in the observation, delineation, and arrangement of the facts and laws with which the science is conversant, and which it exhibits

Compare the intensity and truth of any natural knowledge insensibly acquired by observation in very early youth, with that corresponding to it picked up in later life from books! In fact, the habit of distinguishing between things as different, or of similar forms, colours, and characters, formed in infancy, and childhood, and boyhood, in a free intercourse and communion with Nature, while we are merely seeking and finding the divine joy of novelty and beauty, perpetually occurring before our eyes in all her haunts, may be made the foundation of an accuracy of judgment of inappreciable value as an intellectual endowment. So entirely is this true, that we know many observant persons, that is, observant in all things intimately related with their own pursuits, and with the experience of their own early education, who, with all the pains they could take in after-life, have never been able to distinguish by name, when they saw them, above half-a-dozen, if so many, of our British singing-birds; while as to knowing them by their song, that is wholly beyond the reach of their uninstructed ear, and a shilfa chants to them like a yellow yoldrin. On seeing a small bird peeping out of a hole in the eaves, and especially on hearing him chatter, they shrewdly suspect him to be a sparrow, though it does not by any means follow that their suspicions are always verified; and though, when sitting with her white breast so lovely out of the

"auld clay bigging" in the window-corner, he | silk, and the captive remains for ever happy cannot mistake Mistress Swallow, yet when in its bright prison-house. On this principle, flitting in fly-search over the stream, and ever it is indeed surprising at how early an age and anon dipping her wing-tips in the lucid children can be instructed in the most interestcoolness, 'tis an equal chance that he misnames ing parts of natural history-ay, even a babe her Miss Marten. in arms. Remember Coleridge's beautiful lines to the Nightingale :

"That strain again!

Full fain it would delay me! My dear babe,
Who, capable of no articulate sound,
Mars all things with his imitative lisp.
How he would place his hand beside his ear,
His little hand, the small forefinger up,
And bid us listen! and I deem it wise
To make him Nature's child.”

How we come to love the Birds of Bewick, and White, and the two Wilsons, and Montagu, and Mudie, and Knapp, and Selby, and Swainson, and Audubon, and many others familiar with their haunts and habits, their affections and their passions, till we feel that they are indeed our fellow-creatures, and part of one wise and wonderful system! If there be sermons in stones, what think ye of the hymns and psalms, matin and vesper, of the lark, who at heaven's gate sings-of the wren, who pipes her thanksgivings as the slant sunbeam shoots athwart the mossy portal of cave, in whose fretted roof she builds her nest above the waterfall! In cave-roof? Yea-we have seen it so -just beneath the cornice. But most frequently we have detected her procreant cradle on old mossy stump, mouldering walls or living

What constant caution is necessary during the naturalist's perusal even of the very best books! From the very best we can only obtain knowledge at second-hand, and this, like a story circulated among village gossips, is more apt to gain in falsehood than in truth, as it passes from one to another; but in field study we go at once to the fountain-head, and obtain our facts pure and unalloyed by the theories and opinions of previous observers. Hence it is that the utility of books becomes obvious. You witness with your own eyes some puzzling, perplexing, strange, and unaccountable-fact; twenty different statements of it have been given by twenty different ornithologists; you consult them all, and getting a hint from one, and a hint from another, here a glimmer of light to be followed, and there a gloom of darkness to be avoided-why, who knows but that in the end you do yourself solve the mystery, and absolutely become not only happy but illustrious? People sitting in their own parlour with their feet on the fender, or in the sanctum of some museum, staring at stuffed specimens, imagine themselves naturalists; and in their presumptuous and insolent ignorance, which is often total, scorn the wis-rock-sometimes in cleft of yew-tree or hawdom of the wanderers of the woods, who have for many studious and solitary years been making themselves familiar with all the beautiful mysteries of instinctive life. Take two boys, and set them respectively to pursue the two plans of study. How puzzled and perplexed will be the one who pores over the "interminable terms" of a system in books, having meanwhile no access to, or communion with nature! The poor wretch is to be pitied -nor is he any thing else than a slave. But the young naturalist who takes his first lessons in the fields, observing the unrivalled scene which creation everywhere displays, is perpetually studying in the power of delight and wonder, and laying up knowledge which can be derived from no other source. The rich boy is to be envied, nor is he any thing else than a king. The one sits bewildered among words, the other walks enlightened among things; the one has not even the shadow, the other more than the substance the very essence and life of knowledge; and at twelve years old he may be a better naturalist than ever the mere bookworm will be, were he to outlive old Tommy Balmer.

In education-late or early-for heaven's sake let us never separate things and words! They are married in nature; and what God hath put together let no man put asunder-'tis a fatal divorce. Without things, words accumulated by misery in the memory, had far better die than drag out an useless existence in the dark; without words, their stay and support, things unaccountably disappear out of the storehouse, and may be for ever lost. But bind a thing with a word, a strange link, stronger than any steel, and softer than any

thorn-for hang the globe with its impercepti ble orifice in the sunshine or the storm, and St. Catharine sits within heedless of the outer world, counting her beads with her sensitive breast that broods in bliss over the priceless pearls.

Ay, the men we have named, and many other blameless idolaters of Nature, have wor shipped her in a truly religious spirit, and have taught us their religion. All our great poets have loved the Minnesingers of the woodsThomson, and Cowper, and Wordsworth, as dearly as Spenser, and Shakspeare, and Milton. From the inarticulate language of the groves, they have inhaled the enthusiasm that inspired some of the finest of their own immortal strains. "Lonely wanderer of Nature" must every poet be-and though often self-wrapt his wanderings through a spiritual world of his own, yet as some fair flower silently asks his eye to look on it, some glad bird his ear solicits with a song, how intense is then his perception-his emotion how profound-while his spirit is thus appealed to, through all its human sensibilities, by the beauty and the joy perpetual even in the most solitary places!

Our moral being owes deep obligation to all who assist us to study nature aright; for be lieve us, it is high and rare knowledge to know and to have the true and full use of our eyes. Millions go to the grave in old age without ever having learned it; they were just beginning, perhaps, to acquire it, when they sighed to think that "they who look out of the windows were darkened;" and that while they had been instructed how to look, sad shadows had fallen on the whole face of Nature, and that the time for those intuitions was gone for ever. But the

science of seeing has now found favour in our | builders, the first spring of their full-fledged eyes; and blessings be with them who can dis- lives; with no other tools but a bill, unless we cover, discern, and describe the least as the count their claws, which however seem, and greatest of nature's works-who can see as that only in some kinds, to be used but in distinctly the finger of God in the lustre of the carrying materials. With their breasts and humming-bird murmuring round a rose-bush, whole bodies, indeed, most of them round off as in that of the star of Jove shining sole in the soft insides of their procreant cradles, till heaven. they fit each brooding bunch of feathers to a Take up now almost any book you may on hair's-breadth, as it sits close and low on eggs any branch of Natural History, and instead of or eyeless young, a leetle higher raised up above the endless, dry details of imaginary systems their gaping babies, as they wax from downy and classifications, in which the ludicrous lit- infancy into plumier childhood, which they do tlenesses of man's vain ingenuity used to be how swiftly, and how soon have they flown! set up as a sort of symbolical scheme of reve- You look some sunny morning into the bush, lation of the sublime varieties of the inferior- and the abode in which they seemed so cozcy as we choose to call it-creation of God, you the day before is utterly forsaken by the joyfind high attempts in an humble spirit rather to ous ingrates-now feebly fluttering in the narillustrate tendencies and uses, and harmonies, row grove, to them a wide world filled with and order, and design. With some glorious delight and wonder-to be thought of never exceptions, indeed, the naturalists of the day more. With all the various materials used by gone by showed us a science that was but a them in building their different domiciles, the skeleton-little but dry bones; with some in- Bishop is as familiar as with the sole material glorious exceptions, indeed, the naturalists of of his own wig-though, by the by, last time the day that is now, have been desirous to show we had the pleasure of seeing and sitting by us a living, breathing, and moving body-to him, he wore his own hair-" but that not explain, as far as they might, its mechanism much;" for, like our own, his sconce was and its spirit. Ere another century elapse, bald, and, like it, showed the organ of conhow familiar may men be with all the families structiveness as fully developed as Christopher of the flowers of the field, and the birds of the or a Chaffinch. He is perfectly well acquaintair, with all the interdependencies of their cha-ed, too, with all the diversities of their modes racters and their kindreds, perhaps even with the mystery of that instinct which is now seen working wonders, not only beyond the power of reason to comprehend, but of imagination to

conceive!

How deeply enshrouded are felt to be the mysteries of nature, when, thousands of years after Aristotle, we hear Audubon confess his utter ignorance of what migrations and nonmigrations mean-that 'tis hard to understand why such general laws as these should be though their benign operation is beautifully seen in the happiness provided alike for all whether they reside in their own comparatively small localities, nor ever wish to leave themor at stated seasons instinctively fly away over thousands of miles, to drop down and settle for a while on some spot adapted to their necessities, of which they had prescience afar off, though seemingly wafted thither like leaves upon the wind! Verily, as great a mystery is that Natural Religion by the theist studied in woods and on mountains and by sea-shores, as that Revelation which philosophers will not believe because they do not understand-"the blinded bigot's scorn" deriding man's highest and holiest happiness-Faith!

We must not now go a bird-nesting, but the first time we do we shall put Bishop Mant's "Months" in our pocket. The good Bishopwho must have been an indefatigable birdnester in his boyhood-though we answer for him that he never stole but one egg out of four, and left undisturbed the callow young-treats of those beauteous and wondrous structures in a style that might make Professor Rennie jealous, who has written like a Vitruvius on the architecture of birds. He expatiates with uncontrolled delight on the unwearied activity of the architects, who, without any apprenticeship to the trade, are journeymen, nay, master

of building their orders of architecture-and eke with all those of situation chosen by the kinds-whether seemingly simple, in cunning that deceives by a show of carelessness and heedlessness of notice, or with craft of concealment that baffles the most searching eyehanging their beloved secret in gloom not impervious to sun and air-or, trustful in man's love of his own home, affixing the nest beneath the eaves, or in the flowers of the lattice, kept shut for their sakes, or half-opened by fair hands of virgins whose eyes gladden with heartborn brightness as each morning they mark the growing beauty of the brood, till they smile to see one almost as large as its parents sitting on the rim of the nest, when all at once it hops over, and, as it flutters away like a leaf, seems surprised that it can fly!

Yet there are still a few wretched quacks among us whom we may some day perhaps drive down into the dirt. There are idiots who will not even suffer sheep,cows, horses, and dogs, to escape the disgusting perversions of their anile anecdotage-who, by all manner of drivelling lies, libel even the common domestic fowl, and impair the reputation of the bantam. Newspapers are sometimes so in fested by the trivial trash, that in the nostrils of a naturalist they smell on the breakfast table like rotten eggs; and there are absolutely volumes of the slaver bound in linen, and lettered with the names of the expectorators on the outside, resembling annuals-we almost fear with prints. In such hands, the ass loses his natural attributes, and takes the character of his owner; and as the anecdote-monger is seen astride on his cuddy, you wonder what may be the meaning of the apparition, for we defy you to distinguish the one donk from the other, the rider from the ridden, except by the more inexpressive countenance of the one, and

S

the ears of the other in uncomputed longitude | with awe, solemn but sweet, by the incompredangling or erect.

bird. Where a Thrush is, we defy you to an- | thine, thou fairest region of nature! happier ticipate his song in the morning. He is in- than when we rippled in our pinnace through deed an early riser. By the way, Chanticleer the billowy moonlight—than when we sat alone is far from being so. You hear him crowing on the mountain within the thunder-cloud. away from shortly after midnight, and, in your Why do the songs of the Blackbird and simplicity, may suppose him to be up and Thrush make us think of the songless STARstrutting about the premises. Far from it;- LING? It matters not. We do think of him, and he is at that very moment perched in his see him too-a loveable bird, and his abode is polygamy, between two of his fattest wives. majestic. What an object of wonder and awe is The sultan will perhaps not stir a foot for an old Castle to a boyish imagination! Its height several hours to come; while all the time the how dreadful! up to whose mouldering edges Thrush, having long ago rubbed his eyes, is his fear carries him, and hangs him over the on his topmast twig, broad awake, and charm- battlements! What beauty in those unapproaching the ear of dawn with his beautiful vocifera-able wall-flowers, that cast a brightness on the tion. During mid-day he disappears, and is mute; but again, at dewy even, as at dewy morn, he pours his pipe like a prodigal, nor ceases sometimes when night has brought the moon and stars.