in phrase and application, in the human, and the result is often absurdity. Thus, "This was taught me by the dove, One mate, and one alone, will take." Now fidelity" on principle" to the memory of a beloved deceased has no place in nature, hardly even in human nature, still less in bird nature. It is an accepted fact of natural history that if the male bird of a wild pair be killed during the nesting season, the widow finds a new mate; and the cruel experiment has actually been tried, with the result of a bird losing five mates in succession, and completing her complement of eggs and hatching her brood only by a sixth marriage. Individual instances of a noble constancy, where other circumstances allowed of its indulgence, are of course abundantly on record, and in the East the abominable rite of suttee-although in most cases forced upon the woman by violence and the self-interest of relatives-might be accepted in part as a sacrifice to the fidelity idea. But men and women cannot inflict perpetual bereavement upon themselves, and still less die of a lost love, without opposing nature. In the bird-world such opposition to nature is even more impracticable. The stupidity of instinct alone prevents it. In captivity, birds have often pined to death for the loss of a mate, but quite as often for the loss of a companion or friend of another species, a cat or dog or human being. Indeed, the strongest attachments of the animal world are unnatural ones—namely, to man; and the ties of bird love have little in common with our own, and attempts to find a sentimental analogy are to be deplored. PART II. BIRD OF PARADISE. As the bird of paradise is a crow, it shares its congeners' clumsiness of leg and foot. The poetical savage of New Guinea recognised these appendages as a blemish, and when preparing the bird's skin for sale, used to cut them off. So the "bird of paradise "—the "Phoenix "--bird of the sun-"bird of God "for these are among its titles-always came into the European market legless, and, still legless, found its way into heraldry and poetry. Whenever used as a crest (and it has splendid heraldic traditions) it bore some such motto as, "Nil mihi terra," "Semper sublimis," "Terram indignita fugit," "Non sum terra tua ;" and whenever it occurs in poetry, it is either as being perpetually afloat, feeding on dew, sleeping on the wing, or resting in mid-air. Linnæus himself gave an apparent confirmation to the myth by naming the emerald birds of paradise "apoda; and Buffon seems really to have believed they were legless; while Tavernier, recording the fiction of their becoming intoxicated on nutmegs, and of ants eating off their legs as they lay helpless on the ground, misled Moore into singing of "Those golden birds that, in the spice time, drop About the gardens, drunk with that sweet food Whose scent hath lured them o'er the summer flood." The plumage of the birds of paradise has always been in great request all over the East, their price being paid by Indian princes in pearls or in slaves. The perfect skin of one of the "emerald" species was considered a fair equivalent for a beautiful girl. In one solitary instance its flesh also was placed beyond price, for Heliogabalus, being determined to eat "the Phoenix," ordered "the rare fowl in Arabian woods embost "That no second knows or third " to be caught for his table. Eventually he received a bird of paradise, and convinced from its beauty that it must be the veritable Phoenix, he ate it up and went to his fathers contented. In Nature, nothing can be more strangely poetical than this feathered wonder, and never surely was any beauty so fatal, for the pride that it takes in its own loveliness often betrays the bird of paradise to the hunter, whilst its floating, trailing plumes prevent it from finding refuge in thickets where other birds are safe. In conspicuous contrast to such exquisite adornments is its coarse beak, harsh raven's voice, and favourite cockroach diet. Altogether, it abounds with such "morals" as poets usually delight to draw, but in this case they have been rejected, even by Eliza Cook and Mrs. Hemans. It is very difficult to discover any principle in such rejection of opportunities. (1) Legless birds of paradise.-Keats: Eve of St. Mark. (2) (3) Like a bird of paradise, Or herald's martlet, has no legs, Nor hatches young ones, nor lays eggs.—Butler: Hudibras. Too exquisite For gross delights, the birds of paradise -Montgomery: Pelican Island. (4) (5) (6) Birds of paradise that live on morning dew.1 -Dryden: Threnodia. Their forms all symmetry, their motions grace; Thick without burden, close as fishes' scales, The bird of hundred dyes, Whose plumes the dames of Ava prize.-Heber: Walk in Bengal, (7) Hail, bird of paradise! (8) That name I bear, Though I am nothing but a bird of air: Thou art a child of earth, and yet to thee Lost and recovered paradise is free : Oh that such glory were vouchsafed to me!-Montgomery: Birds. Mark those gorgeous crowds, Like birds of paradise, the clouds.-Hood: To Mr. Graham. (9) And from her breath, her cheeke, and lip Swept all the incense, and the spice, (10) (11) And grew a bird of paradise.-Carew: The Fly. Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, Heaven in ordinary, man well drest, The Milky Way, the bird of paradise.-Herbert: Prayer. Thou sing'st with so much gravity and ease, -Marvell: On Milton. 1 The poets of King Charles the Second's reign. BITTERN. Among the more curious birds for which the poets find little use are the bittern, coot, corncrake, curlew, and woodpecker; all of them, from the ordinary lover of nature's point of view, delightfully significant and picturesque. The bittern's very name is poetry. It suggests a supplement to Zimmermann; another volume of the "Night Thoughts." Think of it, and whole leagues of rush-grown. fenland immediately settle round the name; the stream flows by a reedy Simois and the bittern stands there, the thane of the only fragment of wild English country left us. But the solitude of the bittern in nature and its ruinous desolation in poetry are two very different matters, and it is difficult to understand how Churchill, for instance, should have gone so far wrong as to make the bitterns perching on the sails of a ship (itself an absurd misconception of the bird) the very crisis of commercial ruin. By mistranslation, it is true, the bittern has wandered into Holy Writ, and is there one of the symbols of desolation, and, as the author of "British Birds in their Haunts" says, this "accounts in a measure for its introduction into modern poems on kindred subjects. But it is questionable whether any of our modern English poets, with the exception perhaps of Sir W. Scott, ever heard what they describe so circumstantially." The writer here refers to the frequency of the poets' references to that "booming" of the bittern which has given the "mere-drum" a resonant name in nearly every language in Europe, and led all the poets wrong one after the other. For the tradition that this bird fixes its bill in the ground, and, by snorting through it when in this position, "makes the quagmire reel," is, of course, only a tradition. But it helps the poets to another touch of mysterious dreadfulness. |