(142)

(143)

(144)

(145)

(146)

(147)

It was upon the eagle's plundered store

That Wallace fed, when haunted from his home.
Grahame: Birds of Scotlan

For by his name my verse shall be preferr'd,

Borne like a lark upon this eagle's wing.-Congreve: King.

There stands an eagle, at the feet

Of the fair image wrought,

A kingly emblem, nor unmeet

To make yet deeper thought.

She whose high heart finds rest below

Was royal in her birth and woe.-Hemans: Women..

Some day I'll burst abroad,

And take a flight, as the wild eagles do,

When from the summit of some giddiest crag

They plunge into the immeasurable air,
And dare all things, and never turn aside,
Nor shrink, nor stop, nor close their orbs until
They rest upon the chariot of the sun!

-Cornwall: Poet's Reply.

And that French muse's eagle eye and wing

Hath soared to heav'n, and there hath learn'd the art

To frame angelick strains, and canyons sing.

--Phineas Fletcher: The Purple Island.

Behold a vision of the days to be!

(148)

Cruel and eager of dominion,

The mighty eagle lies with bleeding pinion,
And shrieks in the death-agony

That no one pities.—Mackay: Iphianassa.

Where the chieftain's spirit hovers,
Pausing while his pinions quiver,
Stretched to quit our land for ever.
-Scott: Ronald Macdonald.

(149) My shield is an eagle's wing to cover the king of Dun-lora.... The eyes of Morven do not sleep, They are watchful as eagles on their mossy rocks. . . . I rush forth, on eagle's wings, to seize my beam of fame. As meet two broad-winged eagles, in their sounding strife,

...

...

in winds, so rush the two chiefs on Moilena into gloomy fight. . . . Fingal is there in his strength; the eagle-wing of his helmet sounds. ... Descending like the eagle of heaven, with all his rustling wings, when he forsakes the blast, with joy the son of Trenmor came; Conar, arm of death, from Morven of the groves (Ossian: Temora).

(153)

(154)

(155)

(156)

Like eagle's plumage, ruffled by the air,

Veiled a sad wreck of grandeur and of grace.

-Montgomery: Before the Flood.

In anger valiant; gently came in Love;
He soar'd an Eagle; but he stoop'd a Dove.

-Davenant: To the Queen.

1 Thus arrayed

As with the plumes of overshadowing wings,
From its dark gulph of chains, earth like an eagle springs.
-Shelley: Revolt of Islam.

False learning wanders upward more and more,
Knowledge (for such there is in some degree),
Still vainly, like the eagle, loves to soare,
Though it can never to the highest see.

-Davenant: Dying Christian.

So the struck eagle, stretched upon the plain,
No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
Viewed his own feather on the fatal dart,
And winged the shaft that quivered in his heart;
Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel

(157)

(158)

He nursed the pinion which impelled the steel,
While the same plumage that had warm'd his nest
Drank the last life drop of his bleeding breast.

-Byron: On Kirke White.

Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale
Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain
Her mighty youth with morning doth complain,
Soaring and screaming round her empty nest.

-Shelley: Adonais.

A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,

And the wolf tracks her there.-Shelley: Mont Blanc.

Her feet both thick, and eagle-like displaid.

-Suckling: The Deformed Mistress.

(159)

(160)

Vexed like a morning eagle, lost and weary
And purblind amid foggy midnight wolds.

-Keats: Endymion.

(161)

An eagle so caught, in some bursting cloud,
On Caucasus, his thunder-baffled wings
Entangled in the whirlwind, and his eyes,
Which gazed on the undazzling sun, now blinded
By the white lightning, while the ponderous hail
Beats on his struggling form, which sinks at length
Prone, and the aërial ice clings over it.

-Shelley: Prometheus Unbound.

(162)

A hooded eagle, among blinking owls.
-Shelley: Letter to Maria Gisborne.

Sown by some eagle on the topmost stone.-Shelley: Islam.

(165)

Where falling stars dart their artillery forth,

And eagles struggle with the buffeting north

That balances the heavy meteor-stone.-Keats: Endymion.

(166)

Kill an eagle when crushing an egg.—Cook: Greatness.

And shrieked the night-crow from the oak,

The screech-owl from the thicket broke

And fluttered down the dell.

So fearful was the sound, and stern,

The slumbers of the full-gorged erne

Were startled.-Scott: Harold the Dauntless.

Where Echo slumbers.-Burns: Elegy on Henderson.

(168)

Ye cliffs, the haunts of sailing yearns,

(169)

(170)

The dark-winged erne impetuous glanced to view.
-Leyden: Scenes of Infancy.

His aged brows are crowned with curling fern,
Where perches, grave and lone, the hooded erne.
Majestic bird! by ancient shepherds styled
The lonely hermit of the russet wild,

That loves amid the stormy blast to soar,

Where through disjointed cliffs the tempests roar,

Climbs on strong wing the storm, and, screaming high,
Rides the dim rack that sweeps the darken'd sky.
-Leyden: Scenes of Infancy.

FALCONS.1

The falcon of the poets is a purely artificial bird, a thing of bells and hood. Indeed, there is very little positive evidence at all to show that a poet even saw a wild hawk. Scott must have known it, but you could hardly guess so from his verse; and, except for Burns, Wordsworth,

1 Not used as equivalent to the Falconida of naturalists, but only as a comprehensive term for the poets' "hawks."

Grahame, and Jean Ingelow, the hawk-had it not been a bird of sport-might have found no place in our poetry. Burns, beyond doubt, had seen the "griping goshawk” (as Quarles calls it) sweeping on to its prey on the Ayrshire downs; and Grahame had certainly watched it "skim forth from the cliff, eyeing the furzy slope." Wordsworth notes "a pair of falcons, wheeling on the wing, in clamorous agitation round the crest of a tall rock, their airy citadel," and elsewhere has

"Smoothly as a hawk,

That, disentangled from the shady boughs

Of some thick wood, her place of covert, cleaves,
With corresponding wings, the abyss of air;"

and sweet Jean Ingelow had often scared "the bold marshharrier" from the ducklings on the river. Of Philips, also, there may be admitted a generous doubt :

"Now swifter from Plinlimmon's steepy top

The stanch ger-falcon thro' the buxom air
Stoops on the steerage of his wings to truss
The quarry, hern or mallard;"

but of all the rest it is not unfair to say that the trained bird engaged their fancy so completely that they do not refer to the wild falcons at all. Very numerous, indeed, are references to doves that "cower" when they espy soaring" and "towering" hawks; and equally common are allusions to the rapidity and ferocity of falcons, but these allusions are not such as to warrant us in supposing them to be vignettes from nature.

Specially mentioned by name, as birds of sport (in which aspect our poets are always, as I have already said, punctiliously exact as to species), are the goshawk, hobby, merlin, peregrine, and sparrow-hawk, with their technical sub divisions of tiercel, lanrell, coystrell, gentle, haggard,