in miserable contradiction to its better being, to turn them as proofs against the power and goodness of the Holy One who inhabiteth eternity-is now palsy-stricken as that of an idiot, and knows not even the sound of the name of its once vain and proud possessor-when crowded theatres had risen up with one rustle to honour, and then, with deafening acclamations, "Raised a mortal to the skies!" There he is-it matters not now whether on down or strawstretched, already a skeleton, and gnashing—may it be in senselessness, for otherwise what pangs are these!-gnashing his teeth, within lips once so eloquent, now white with foam and slaver; and the whole mouth, of yore so musical, grinning ghastly like the fleshless face of fear-painted death! Is that Voltaire? He who, with wit, thought to shear the Son of God of all His beams?—with wit, to loosen the dreadful fastenings of the Cross?-with wit, to scoff at Him who hung thereon, while the blood and water came from the wound in His blessed side ?—with wit, to drive away those Shadows of Angels, that were said to have rolled off the stone from the mouth of the sepulchre of the resurrection ?—with wit, to deride the ineffable glory of transfigured Godhead on the Mount, and the sweet and solemn semblance of the Man Jesus in the garden ?—with wit, to darken all the decrees of Providence?—and with wit, "To shut the gates of Mercy on mankind?” Nor yet will the Christian poet long dwell in his religious strains, though awhile he may linger there, "and from his eyelids wipe the tears that sacred pity hath engendered," beside the dying couch of Jean Jaques Rousseau-a couch of turf beneath trees-for he was ever a lover of Nature, though he loved all things living or dead as madmen love. His soul, while most spiritual, was sensual still, and with tendrils of flesh and blood embraced-even as it did embrace the balm-breathing form of voluptuous woman-the very phantoms of his most etherealised imagination. Vice stained all his virtues—as roses are seen, in some certain soils, and beneath some certain skies, always to be blighted, and their fairest petals to bear on them something like blots of blood. Over the surface of the mirror of his mind, which reflected so much of the imagery of man and nature, there was still, here and there, on the centre or round the edges, rust-spots, that gave back no image, and marred the proportions of the beauty and the grandeur that yet shone over the rest of the circle set in the rich carved gold. His disturbed, and distracted, and defeated friendships, that all vanished in insane suspicions, and seemed to leave his soul as well satisfied in its fierce or gloomy void, as when it was filled with airy and glittering visions, are all gone for ever now. Those many thoughts and feelings-so melancholy, yet still fair, and lovely, and beautiful-which, like bright birds encaged, with ruffled and drooping wings, once so apt to soar, and their music mute, that used to make the wide woods to wring, were confined within the wires of his jealous heart-have now all flown away, and are at rest! Who sits beside the wild and wondrous genius, whose ravings entrance the world? Who wipes the death-sweat from that capacious forehead, once filled with such a multitude of disordered but aspiring fancies? Who, that his beloved air of heaven may kiss and cool it for the last time, lays open the covering that hides the marble sallowness. of Rousseau's sin-and-sorrow-haunted breast? One of Nature's least-gifted children-to whose eyes nor earth nor heaven ever beamed with beauty-to whose heart were known but the meanest charities of nature; yet mean as they were, how much better in such an hour than all his imaginings most magnificent! For had he not suffered his own offspring to pass away from his eyes, even like the wood-shadows, only less beloved and less regretted? And in the very midst of the prodigality of love and passion, which he had poured out over the creations of his ever-distempered fancy, let his living children, his own flesh and blood, disappear as paupers in a chance-governed world? A world in which neither parental nor filial love were more than the names of nonentitiesFather, Son, Daughter, Child, but empty syllables, which philosophy heeded not—or rather loved 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! No great moral or religious lesson can well be drawn, or say rather so well, from such anomalous deathbeds, as from those of common unbelievers. To show, in all its divine power, the blessedness of the Christian's faith, it must be compared, rather than contrasted, with the faith of the best and wisest of Deists. The ascendancy of the heavenly over the earthly will then be apparent as apparent as the superior lustre of a star to that of a lighted-up window in the night. For above all other things in which the Christian is happier than the Deist-with the latter, the life beyond the grave is but a dark hope-to the former, "immortality has been brought to light by the Gospel." That difference embraces the whole 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. NOTE. In the later editions of "The Omnipresence of the Deity," the passage animadverted on in the preceding chapter has been altered as follows: "Lo! there, in yonder spectre-haunted room, CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY. FIRST CANTICLE. THE present Age, which, after all, is a very pretty and pleasant one, is feelingly alive and widely awake to the manifold delights and advantages with which the study of Natural History swarms, and especially that branch of it which unfolds the character and habits, physical, moral, and intellectual, of those most interesting and admirable creatures-Birds. It 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 secondanother 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 in the most perfect harmony and order. Neophytes now range for themselves, according to their capacities and opportunities, the fields, woods, rivers, lakes, and seas; and proficients, no longer confining themselves to mere nomenclature, enrich their works with anecdotes and traits of character, which, without departure from truth, have imbued bird-biography with the double charm of reality and romance. 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 cannot mistake Mistress Swallow, yet when flitting in fly-search over the stream, and ever and anon dipping her wing-tips in the lucid coolness, 'tis an equal chance that he misnames her Miss Marten. 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; |