SEA-EAGLE.

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The fierce sea-eaglets, humble in attire,

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In port terrific, from his lonely eyrie

(Itself a burden for the tallest tree)

Looked down o'er land and sea as his dominions :
Now from long chase descending with his prey,

Young seal or dolphin in his deadly clutch,

He fed his eagles in the noonday sun.

-Montgomery: Pelican Island.

High o'er the watery uproar, silent seen,
Sailing sedate in majesty serene,

Now 'midst the pillared spray sublimely lost,
And now, emerging, down the rapids tost,
Swept the grey eagles, gazing, calm and slow,
On all the horrors of the gulf below,

Intent alone to sate themselves with blood
From the torn victims of the raging flood.
-A. Wilson: The Foresters.

Of bulk more huge, and borne on broader vans,
The eagle of the sea from Atlas soars

Or Teneriffe's hoar peak.

...

The watchful helmsman from the stern descries
And hails her course, and many an eye is raised;
Loftier she flies than hundred times mast height,
Onward she floats, then plunges from her soar
Down to the ship, as if she aimed to perch
Upon the mainmast pinnacle, but up again
She mounts Alp-high, and with her lowered head
Suspended eyes the bulging sails, disdains
Their tardy course, outflies the hurrying rack,
And disappearing mingles with the clouds.

-Grahame: Birds of Scotland.

Firm on her perch,

Her ancient and accustomed seat, she sits

With wing-couched head, and to the morning light
Appears a frost-rent fragment coped with snow.

-Grahame: Birds of Scotland.

SEA-FOWL.

"Long as Man to parent Nature owes

Instinctive homage, and in times beyond

The power of thought to reach, bard after bard
Shall sing thy glory, Beatific Sea!"

Yet it is curious to note how very seldom the bards have sung of the birds of the sea, and when they do refer to them, how common-place, as a rule, the majority are. "The sea-birds' citadels," those "high and frowning scaurs, the haunts of sea-fowl," are each of them an open volume of poems. However populous they may be with "the ocean-fishing tribes," romances flock there just as thickly, and every wing in the cloud of birds that sweeps round "the storm-washed solitude" is feathered with legends of the sea.

For their voices, "the clamour" that the poets so often note, two admirable epithets are given-" clanging," which Milton first used (and a hundred borrowed from him), and "plaining discrepant," which Keats, our second Milton, hast left us.

The rest of the poets found it "shrill," "shrieking," "screaming," "shrill-moaning," "discordant,"-leaving the impression on the mind that they thought the birds out of harmony with the sea. This could hardly, of course, have been the case; for it does not even require a poet's imagination to feel how exactly these mariner birds accord in every mood with their inconstant element. Describing its. flight, Heber's "reeled on giddy pinions" is pleasantly in Nature, much more so than Scott's lines

"When the ocean rolls the proudest,

Through the foam the sea-bird glides ”–

They are disagreeably insipid. Those who stand at the stern of a vessel at sea, "where the ocean rolls the proudest," and see the birds riding on the waves that

pursue the ship, remark at once the exceeding majesty of the sea-bird's motion. They do not "glide" in the least. They triumph. There is even cruelty in the eagerness of their chase, as they shoot down the black incline and exult upon the opposing crest. But Scott's "My brave bird" is a touch for which we might forgive far more than a mere insipidity in terms. The courage of these brave seafarers is undeniably their great characteristic, and next to it their inconstancy :

"The sea-gulls not more constant,"

says Keats, but he means constant to the sea; and yet Eliza Cook, overreaching herself in simile (as she does so often) declares that—

"The white gull with its shriek and billow-kissing beak,
Shall be my type of constancy, of purity, and love!"

Even reverse her words, and the result would be nearer the truth of Nature, for horrors gather round the name of the sea-bird, just as the sea-birds gather round the floating carcase. Love! Can anything be more pitiless than a sea-gull? What is the last sound the dying sailor hears? Is it not the heartless glee of the sea-bird as it sweeps with its keen wing and keener glance close above his bewildered head? They even strike the dying man.

'I saw a frail vessel, all torn by the wave,

Drawn down with her crew to a fathomless grave,
And I heard the loud creak of her hull as I past,

And the flap of her sails and the crash of her mast;
And I raised my shrill voice on the cold midnight air,
To drown the last cry of the sailor's despair."

Yet in sunshine and calm, what swallow or halcyon would be more in keeping with the scene? But the sea knows more of unrest than of rest, more of storm than of sunshine; and the sea-bird, "sportive," "blithe," and

"gay" though he may be at times, is a bird of lowering sky and flashing wave, of tempest and of shipwreck. As a brave thing of the sea, it commands English sympathy; but those who know it best, our own English seamen, call it a pitiless bird.

Individually, very few sea-birds have found poetic immortality. Among these, naturally, are the stormy petrel and the albatross; but, except for Barry Cornwall's lines

"The petrel telleth her tale in vain,

For the mariner curseth the warning bird,

Who bringeth him news of the storm unheard".

the chief significance of the former is ignored, while the latter is only rescued by the "Ancient Mariner" from a disregard quite as complete and certainly not less remarkable.

The remainder of the sea-birds selected owe their preference, apparently, to their suitability to the metre of the moment or chance. They are the gannet (or solan goose), "gull" (used only generically), sheldrake, shoveller, booby, noddy, and penguin.

Except that the solan goose is misquoted for the barnacle goose, the three references which the poets make to the gannet, one of the most interesting of our sea-birds, are not worth notice. The beautiful sheldrake, "the foxgoose" of the Greeks, receives one mention; the shoveller (as good eating, by the way, as the canvas-back duck), one in an ornithological catalogue in Drayton; the booby and the noddy, each one in a joke in Byron

"At length they caught two boobies and a noddy,
And then they left off eating the dead body;"

and the penguin, one

"The heavy penguin, neither fish nor fowl,
With scaly feathers and with finny wings,
Plumped stone-like from the rock into the gulf."

As Indian-Britons were from penguins.-Hudibras.

SEA-GULLS (Seamews, Meaws), GOLDEN-EYE, SHELDRAKE, SHOVELLER, GANNET (Solan Goose), ALBATROSS, PETREL (Stormy Petrel, Fulmar).

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A high and frowning scaur,

The haunt of sea-fowl.-Mackay: Highland Rambie.

The sea-birds' citadels.-Montgomery: Greenland.

Yonder peopled rocks,

To whose wild solitude, from worlds unknown,
The birds of passage transmigrating come,
Unnumber'd colonies of foreign wing,

At Nature's summons their aerial state
Annual to found, and in bold voyage steer
O'er this wide ocean, through yon pathless sky,
One certain point to one appointed shore,
By Heav'n's directive spirit here to raise
Their temporary realm, and form secure,
Where food awaits them copious from the wave
And shelter from the rock, their nuptial leagues;
Each tribe apart, and all on tasks of love,
To hatch the pregnant egg, to rear and guard
Their helpless infants, piously intent.

-Mallet: Amyntor and Theodora.

Above, around, in cloudy circles wheel'd,
Or sailing level on the polar gale

That cool with evening rose, a thousand wings,
The summer nations of these pregnant cliffs,
Play'd sportive round, and to the sun outspread
Their various plumage, or in wild notes hail'd
His parent beam.—Mallet: Amyntor.

Noah. Hark! hark! the sea-birds' cry!
In clouds they overspread the lurid sky
And hover round the mountain, where before
Never a white wing wetted by the wave

Yet dared to soar,

Even when the waters waxed too fierce to brave.

Soon it shall be their only shore,

And then, no more!-Byron: Heaven and Earth.

Seamew's clang.-Milton.