BIRD HARMONIES.
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quaint fancies of Ovid with his metamorphoses; of Cygnus and
Halcyone and the rest, who for sins or sorrow were changed into
birds, swans, kingfishers, cormorants, and so on. There was a
good deal of nature shining through the fancies of the old Pagan
poets. Birds are indeed, in short, the winged voices of nature ; and
they are about us everywhere, in the old world and the new, in the
busy streets of great cities, and in wastes untrodden by man.
If we climb the mountain top, we hear the scream of the eagle;
the woods below ring with melody: in the marshes we hear the
plaintive cries of the peewit and the curlew ; the wet sands on the
ocean fringe are alive with sandpipers ; and out at sea are all the
winged fisher folk, gulls, terns, cormorants, and divers both great and
small.
If then we are to find harmony anywhere existing between the
animate and the inanimate parts of nature, we shall find some of its
most perfect chords in the bird world.
Now let us picture to ourselves one of those scenes of wild
grandeur which are found amidst the precipices and crags of a
mountain range. Above us the huge wall of rock rises in a sheer
precipice to a giddy height, weather worn, and seamed with the
scars of centuries of storms, and below is an awful succession of
chasm, ledge, and steep grassy slope, with here and there a stunted,
wind-twisted pine, clinging as if for very life to its scanty hold.
The scene is grand, but it is the sublimity of desolation. Life
seems out of place in such a solitude. Yet even in this desolation
living nature has its harmony with the dead. There is life here, for
suddenly we hear a wild scream which echoes through the silence,
and from under an overhanging cliff beneath us sails out a great golden
eagle, with mighty weather-beaten wings. She has left her brood
of hungry little eaglets in their nest on a ledge, where the rock over-
hangs and protects it, and she is looking for her mate, for the larder
is empty. Another scream, and then there comes an answer ringing
down from the crags above.
There he sits on the top of a jagged pinnacle of rock on the
serrated edge of the skyline.
" He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands."
Look at him now, his wings a little opened and his fierce head bent
forward as he answers the cry. Could any living creature be more in
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