Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

J >> John Wilson >> Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2




This is the Age of Confessions; and why, therefore, may we not make a
confession of first-love? We had finished our sixteenth year--and we
were almost as tall as we are now; for our figure was then straight as
an arrow, and almost like an arrow in its flight. We had given over
bird-nesting--but we had not ceased to visit the dell where first we
found the Grey Lintie's brood. Tale-writers are told by critics to
remember that the young shepherdesses of Scotland are not beautiful as
the fictions of a poet's dream. But SHE was beautiful beyond poetry. She
was so then, when passion and imagination were young--and her image, her
undying, unfading image, is so now, when passion and imagination are
old, and when from eye and soul have disappeared much of the beauty and
glory both of nature and life. We loved her from the first moment that
our eyes met--and we see their light at this moment--the same soft,
burning light, that set body and soul on fire. She was but a poor
shepherd's daughter; but what was that to us, when we heard her voice
singing one of her old plaintive ballads among the braes?--When we sat
down beside her--when the same plaid was drawn over our shoulders in the
rain-storm--when we asked her for a kiss, and was not refused--for what
had she to fear in her beauty, and her innocence, and her filial
piety?--and were we not a mere boy, in the bliss of passion, ignorant of
deceit or dishonour, and with a heart open to the eyes of all as to the
gates of heaven? What music was in that stream! Could "Sabean odours
from the spicy shores of Araby the Blest" so penetrate our soul, as that
breath, balmier than the broom on which we sat, forgetful of all other
human life! Father, mother, brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts, and
cousins, and all the tribe of friends that would throw us off--if we
should be so base and mad as to marry a low-born, low-bred, ignorant,
uneducated, crafty, ay, crafty and designing beggar--were all forgotten
in our delirium--if indeed it were delirium--and not an
everlastingly-sacred devotion to nature and to truth. For in what were
we deluded? A voice--a faint and dewy voice--deadened by the earth that
fills up her grave, and by the turf that, at this very hour, is
expanding its primroses to the dew of heaven--answers, "In nothing!"

"Ha! ha! ha!" exclaims some reader in derision. "Here's an attempt at
the pathetic!--a miserable attempt indeed; for who cares about the death
of a mean hut girl?--we are sick of low life." Why, as to that matter,
who cares for the death of any one mortal being? Who weeps for the death
of the late Emperor of all the Russias? Who wept over Napoleon the
Great? When Chatham or Burke, Pitt or Fox died--don't pretend to tell
lies about a nation's tears. And if yourself, who, perhaps, are not in
low life, were to die in half an hour (don't be alarmed), all who knew
you--except two or three of your bosom friends, who, partly from being
somewhat dull, and partly from wishing to be decent, might whine--would
walk along George Street, at the fashionable hour of three, the very day
after your funeral. Nor would it ever enter their heads to abstain from
a dinner at the Club, ordered perhaps by yourself a fortnight ago, at
which time you were in rude health, merely because you had foolishly
allowed a cold to fasten upon your lungs, and carry you off in the prime
and promise of your professional life. In spite of all your critical
slang, therefore, Mr Editor, or Master Contributor to some Literary
Journal, SHE, though a poor _Scottish Herd_, was most beautiful; and
when, but a week after taking farewell of her, we went, according to our
tryst, to fold her in our arms, and was told by her father that she was
dead,--ay, dead--that she had no existence--that she was in a
coffin,--when we awoke from the dead-fit in which we had lain on the
floor of that cottage, and saw her in her grave-clothes within an hour
to be buried--when we stood at her burial--and knew that never more were
we or the day to behold her presence--we learned then how immeasurably
misery can surpass happiness--that the soul is ignorant of its own
being, till all at once a thunder-stone plunges down its depths, and
groans gurgle upwards upbraiding heaven.

How easily can the heart change its mood from the awful to the
solemn--from the solemn to the sweet--and from the sweet to the
gay--while the mirth of this careless moment is unconsciously tempered
by the influence of that holy hour that has subsided but not died, and
continues to colour the most ordinary emotion, as the common things of
earth look all lovelier in imbibed light, even after the serene moon
that had yielded it is no more visible in her place! Most gentle are
such transitions in the calm of nature and of the heart; all true poetry
is full of them; and in music how pleasant are they, or how affecting!
Those alternations of tears and smiles, of fervent aspirations and of
quiet thoughts! The organ and the AEolian harp! As the one has ceased
pealing praise, we can list the other whispering it--nor feels the soul
any loss of emotion in the change--still true to itself and its wondrous
nature--just as it is so when from the sunset clouds it turns its eyes
to admire the beauty of a dewdrop or an insect's wing.

Now, we hear many of our readers crying out against the barbarity of
confining the free denizens of the air in wire or wicker Cages. Gentle
readers, do, we pray, keep your compassion for other objects. Or, if you
are disposed to be argumentative with us, let us just walk down stairs
to the larder, and tell the public truly what we there behold--three
brace of partridges, two ditto of moorfowl, a cock pheasant, poor
fellow,--a man and his wife of the aquatic or duck kind, and a woodcock,
vainly presenting his long Christmas bill,--

"Some sleeping kill'd--
All murder'd."

Why, you are indeed a most logical reasoner, and a most considerate
Christian, when you launch out into an invective against the cruelty
exhibited in our Cages. Let us leave this den of murder, and have a
glass of our home-made frontignac in our own Sanctum. Come, come,
sir,--look on this newly-married couple of CANARIES.--The architecture
of their nest is certainly not of the florid order, but my Lady
Yellowlees sits on it a well-satisfied bride. Come back in a day or two,
and you will see her nursing triplets. Meanwhile, hear the ear-piercing
fife of the bridegroom!--Where will you find a set of happier people,
unless perhaps it be in our parlour, or our library, or our nursery?
For, to tell you the truth, there is a cage or two in almost every room
of the house. Where is the cruelty--here, or in your blood-stained
larder? But you must eat, you reply. We answer--not necessarily birds.
The question is about birds--cruelty to birds; and were that sagacious
old wild-goose, whom one single moment of heedlessness brought last
Wednesday to your hospitable board, at this moment alive, to bear a part
in our conversation, can you dream that, with all your ingenuity and
eloquence, you could persuade him--the now defunct and disjected--that
you had been under the painful necessity of eating him with stuffing and
apple-sauce?

It is not in nature that an ornithologist should be cruel--he is most
humane. Mere skin-stuffers are not ornithologists--and we have known
more than one of that tribe who would have had no scruple in strangling
their own mothers, or reputed fathers. Yet if your true ornithologist
cannot catch a poor dear bird alive, he must kill it--and leave you to
weep for its death. There must be a few victims out of myriads of
millions--and thousands and tens of thousands are few; but the
ornithologist knows the seasons when death is least afflictive--he is
merciful in his wisdom--for the spirit of knowledge is gentle--and
"thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," reconcile him to the
fluttering and ruffled plumage blood-stained by death. 'Tis hard, for
example, to be obliged to shoot a Zenaida dove! Yet a Zenaida dove must
die for Audubon's Illustrations. How many has he loved in life, and
tenderly preserved! And how many more pigeons of all sorts, cooked in
all styles, have you devoured--ay, twenty for his one--you being a
glutton and epicure in the same inhuman form, and he being contented at
all times with the plainest fare--a salad perhaps of water-cresses
plucked from a spring in the forest glade, or a bit of pemmican, or a
wafer of portable soup melted in the pot of some squatter--and shared
with the admiring children before a drop has been permitted to touch his
own abstemious lips.

The intelligent author of the "Treatise on British Birds" does not
condescend to justify the right we claim to encage them; but he shows
his genuine humanity in instructing us how to render happy and
healthful their imprisonment. He says very prettily, "What are town
gardens and shrubberies in squares, but an attempt to ruralise the city?
So strong is the desire in man to participate in country pleasures, that
he tries to bring some of them even to his room. Plants and birds are
sought after with avidity, and cherished with delight. With flowers he
endeavours to make his apartments resemble a garden; and thinks of
groves and fields, as he listens to the wild sweet melody of his little
captives. Those who keep and take an interest in song-birds, are often
at a loss how to treat their little warblers during illness, or to
prepare the proper food best suited to their various constitutions; but
that knowledge is absolutely necessary to preserve these little
creatures in health: for want of it, young amateurs and bird-fanciers
have often seen, with regret, many of their favourite birds perish."

Now, here we confess is a good physician. In Edinburgh we understand
there are about five hundred medical practitioners on the human
race--and we have dog-doctors, and horse-doctors, who come out in
numbers--but we have no bird-doctors. Yet often, too often, when the
whole house rings, from garret to cellar, with the cries of children
teething, or in the hooping-cough, the little linnet sits silent on his
perch, a moping bunch of feathers, and then falls down dead, when his
lilting life might have been saved by the simplest medicinal food
skilfully administered. Surely if we have physicians to attend our
treadmills, and regulate the diet and day's work of merciless ruffians,
we should not suffer our innocent and useful prisoners thus to die
unattended. Why do not the ladies of Edinburgh form themselves into a
Society for this purpose?

Not one of all the philosophers in the world has been able to tell us
what is happiness. Sterne's Starling is weakly supposed to have been
miserable. Probably he was one of the most contented birds in the
universe. Does confinement--the closest, most uncompanioned
confinement--make one of ourselves unhappy? Is the shoemaker, sitting
with his head on his knees, in a hole in the wall from morning to night,
in any respect to be pitied? Is the solitary orphan, that sits all day
sewing in a garret, while the old woman for whom she works is out
washing, an object of compassion? or the widow of fourscore, hurkling
over the embers, with the stump of a pipe in her toothless mouth? Is it
so sad a thing indeed to be alone? or to have one's motions
circumscribed within the narrowest imaginable limits? Nonsense all!

Then, gentle reader, were you ever in a Highland shieling? Often since
you read our Recreations. It is built of turf, and is literally alive;
for the beautiful heather is blooming, wildflowers and walls and roof
are one sound of bees. The industrious little creatures must have come
several long miles for their balmy spoil. There is but one human
creature in that shieling, but he is not at all solitary. He no more
wearies of that lonesome place than do the sunbeams or the shadows. To
himself alone he chants his old Gaelic songs, or frames wild ditties of
his own to the raven or red-deer. Months thus pass on; and he descends
again to the lower country. Perhaps he goes to the
wars--fights--bleeds--and returns to Badenoch or Lochaber; and once
more, blending in his imagination the battles of his own regiment, in
Egypt, Spain, or Flanders, with the deeds done of yore by Ossian sung,
sits contented by the door of the same shieling, restored and
beautified, in which he had dreamt away the summers of his youth.

What has become--we wonder--of Dartmoor Prison? During that long war its
huge and hideous bulk was filled with Frenchmen--ay,

"Men of all climes--attach'd to none--were there;"

--a desperate race--robbers and reavers, and ruffians and rapers, and
pirates and murderers--mingled with the heroes who, fired by freedom,
had fought for the land of lilies, with its vine-vales and "hills of
sweet myrtle"--doomed to die in captivity, immured in that doleful
mansion on the sullen moor. There thousands pined and wore away and
wasted--and when not another groan remained within the bones of their
breasts, they gave up the ghost. Young heroes prematurely old in baffled
passions--life's best and strongest passions, that scorned to go to
sleep but in the sleep of death. These died in their golden prime. With
them went down into unpitied and unhonoured graves--for pity and honour
dwell not in houses so haunted--veterans in their iron age--some
self-smitten with ghastly wounds that let life finally bubble out of
sinewy neck or shaggy bosom--or the poison-bowl convulsed their giant
limbs unto unquivering rest. Yet there you saw a wild strange tumult of
troubled happiness--which, as you looked into its heart, was
transfigured into misery. There volatile spirits fluttered in their
cage, like birds that seem not to hate nor to be unhappy in confinement,
but, hanging by beak or claws, to be often playing with the glittering
wires--to be amusing themselves, so it seems, with drawing up, by small
enginery, their food and drink, which soon sickens, however, on their
stomachs, till, with ruffled plumage, they are often found in the
morning lying on their backs, with clenched feet, and neck bent as if
twisted, on the scribbled sand, stone-dead. There you saw pale
youths--boys almost like girls, so delicate looked they in that hot
infected air which, ventilate it as you will, is never felt to breathe
on the face like the fresh air of liberty--once bold and bright
midshipmen in frigate or first-rater, and saved by being picked up by
the boats of the ship that had sunk her by one double-shotted broadside,
or sent her in one explosion splintering into the sky, and splashing
into the sea, in less than a minute the thunder silent, and the fiery
shower over and gone--there you saw such lads as these, who used almost
to weep if they got not duly the dear-desired letter from sister or
sweetheart, and when they did duly get it, opened it with trembling
fingers, and even then let drop some natural tears--there we saw them
leaping and dancing, with gross gesticulations and horrid oaths obscene,
with grim outcasts from nature, whose mustached mouths were rank with
sin and pollution--monsters for whom hell was yawning--their mortal mire
already possessed with a demon. There, wretched, woe-begone, and wearied
out with recklessness and desperation, many wooed Chance and Fortune,
who they hoped might yet listen to their prayers--and kept rattling the
dice--cursing them that gave the indulgence--even in their cells of
punishment for disobedience or mutiny. There you saw some, who in the
crowded courts "sat apart retired,"--bringing the practised skill that
once supported, or the native genius that once adorned life, to bear on
beautiful contrivances and fancies elaborately executed with meanest
instruments, till they rivalled or outdid the work of art assisted by
all the ministries of science. And thus won they a poor pittance
wherewithal to purchase some little comfort or luxury, or ornament to
their persons; for vanity had not forsaken some in their rusty squalor,
and they sought to please her, their mistress or their bride. There you
saw accomplished men conjuring before their eyes, on the paper or the
canvass, to feed the longings of their souls, the lights and the shadows
of the dear days that far away were beautifying some sacred spot of "_la
belle France_"--perhaps some festal scene, for love in sorrow is still
true to remembered joy, where once with youths and maidens

"They led the dance beside the murmuring Loire."

There you heard--and hushed then was all the hubbub--some clear silver
voice, sweet almost as woman's, yet full of manhood in its depths,
singing to the gay guitar, touched, though the musician was of the best
and noblest blood of France, with a master's hand, "La belle Gabrielle!"
And there might be seen, in the solitude of their own abstractions, men
with minds that had sounded the profounds of science, and, seemingly
undisturbed by all that clamour, pursuing the mysteries of lines and
numbers--conversing with the harmonies and lofty stars of heaven, deaf
to all the discord and despair of earth. Or religious still even more
than they--for those were mental, these spiritual--you beheld there men,
whose heads before their time were becoming grey, meditating on their
own souls, and in holy hope and humble trust in their Redeemer, if not
yet prepared, perpetually preparing themselves for the world to come!

To return to Birds in Cages;--they are, when well, uniformly as happy as
the day is long. What else could oblige them, whether they will or no,
to burst out into song--to hop about so pleased and pert--to play such
fantastic tricks, like so many whirligigs--to sleep so soundly, and to
awake into a small, shrill, compressed twitter of joy at the dawn of
light? So utterly mistaken was Sterne, and all the other
sentimentalists, that his Starling, who he absurdly opined was wishing
to get out, would not have stirred a peg had the door of his cage been
flung wide open, but would have pecked like a very game-cock at the hand
inserted to give him his liberty. Depend upon it, that Starling had not
the slightest idea of what he was saying; and had he been up to the
meaning of his words, would have been shocked at his ungrateful folly.
Look at Canaries, and Chaffinches, and Bullfinches, and "the rest," how
they amuse themselves for a while flitting about the room, and then,
finding how dull a thing it is to be citizens of the world, bounce up to
their cages, and shut the door from the inside, glad to be once more at
home. Begin to whistle or sing yourself, and forthwith you have a duet
or a trio. We can imagine no more perfectly tranquil and cheerful life
than that of a Goldfinch in a cage in spring, with his wife and his
children. All his social affections are cultivated to the utmost. He
possesses many accomplishments unknown to his brethren among the
trees;--he has never known what it is to want a meal in times of the
greatest scarcity; and he admires the beautiful frostwork on the
windows, when thousands of his feathered friends are buried in the snow,
or, what is almost as bad, baked up into pies, and devoured by a large
supper-party of both sexes, who fortify their flummery and flirtation by
such viands, and, remorseless, swallow dozens upon dozens of the
warblers of the woods.

Ay, ay, Mr Goldy! you are wondering what we are now doing, and
speculating upon the scribbler with arch eyes and elevated crest, as if
you would know the subject of his lucubrations. What the wiser or better
wouldst thou be of human knowledge? Sometimes that little heart of thine
goes pit-a-pat, when a great, ugly, staring contributor thrusts his
inquisitive nose within the wires--or when a strange cat glides round
and round the room, fascinating thee with the glare of his fierce fixed
eyes;--but what is all that to the woes of an Editor?--Yes, sweet
simpleton! do you not know that we are the editor of _Blackwood's
Magazine_--Christopher North! Yes, indeed, we are that very man--that
self-same much-calumniated man-monster and Ogre. There, there!--perch on
our shoulder, and let us laugh together at the whole world.




CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.

SECOND CANTICLE.


The golden eagle leads the van of our Birds of Prey--and there she sits
in her usual carriage when in a state of rest. Her hunger and her thirst
have been appeased--her wings are folded up in a dignified
tranquillity--her talons, grasping a leafless branch, are almost hidden
by the feathers of her breast--her sleepless eye has lost something of
its ferocity--and the Royal Bird is almost serene in her solitary state
in the cliff. The gorcock unalarmed crows among the moors and
mosses--the blackbird whistles in the birken shaw--and the cony erects
his ears at the mouth of his burrow, and whisks away frolicsome among
the whins or heather.

There is no index to the hour--neither light nor shadow--no cloud. But
from the composed aspect of the Bird, we may suppose it to be the hush
of evening after a day of successful foray. The imps in the eyrie have
been fed, and their hungry cry will not be heard till the dawn. The
mother has there taken up her watchful rest, till in darkness she may
glide up to her brood--the sire is somewhere sitting within her view
among the rocks--a sentinel whose eye, and ear, and nostril are true, in
exquisite fineness of sense, to their trust, and on whom rarely, and as
if by a miracle, can steal the adventurous shepherd or huntsman, to
wreak vengeance with his rifle on the spoiler of sheep-walk and
forest-chase.

Yet sometimes it chanceth that the yellow lustre of her keen, wild,
fierce eye is veiled, even in daylight, by the film of sleep. Perhaps
sickness has been at the heart of the dejected bird, or fever wasted her
wing. The sun may have smitten her, or the storm driven her against a
rock. Then hunger and thirst--which in pride of plumage she scorned, and
which only made her fiercer on the edge of her unfed eyrie, as she
whetted her beak on the flint-stone, and clutched the strong
heather-stalks in her talons, as if she were anticipating prey--quell
her courage, and in famine she eyes afar off the fowls she is unable to
pursue, and with one stroke strike to earth. Her flight is heavier and
heavier each succeeding day--she ventures not to cross the great glens
with or without lochs--but flaps her way from rock to rock, lower and
lower down along the same mountain-side--and finally, drawn by her
weakness into dangerous descent, she is discovered at grey dawn far
below the region of snow, assailed and insulted by the meanest carrion;
till a bullet whizzing through her heart, down she topples, and soon is
despatched by blows from the rifle-butt, the shepherd stretching out his
foe's carcass on the sward, eight feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, with
leg thick as his own wrist, and foot broad as his own hand.

But behold the Golden Eagle, as she has pounced, and is exulting over
her prey! With her head drawn back between the crescent of her uplifted
wings, which she will not fold till that prey be devoured, eye glaring
cruel joy, neck-plumage bristling, tail-feathers fan-spread, and talons
driven through the victim's entrails and heart--there she is new lighted
on the ledge of a precipice, and fancy hears her yell and its echo. Beak
and talons, all her life long, have had a stain of blood, for the
murderess observes no Sabbath, and seldom dips them in loch or sea,
except when dashing down suddenly among the terrified water-fowl from
her watch-tower in the sky. The week-old fawn had left the doe's side
but for a momentary race along the edge of the coppice; a rustle and a
shadow--and the burden is borne off to the cliffs of Benevis. In an
instant the small animal is dead--after a short exultation torn into
pieces, and by eagles and eaglets devoured, its unswallowed or
undigested bones mingle with those of many other creatures, encumbering
the eyrie, and strewed around it over the bloody platform on which the
young demons crawl forth to enjoy the sunshine.

Oh for the life of an eagle written by himself! It would outsell the
Confessions even of the English Opium-Eater. Proudly would he, or she,
write of birth and parentage. On the rock of ages he first opened his
eyes to the sun, in noble instinct affronting and outstaring the light.
The Great Glen of Scotland--hath it not been the inheritance of his
ancestors for many thousand years? No polluting mixture of ignoble
blood, from intermarriages of necessity or convenience with kite,
buzzard, hawk, or falcon. No, the Golden Eagles of Glen-Falloch,
surnamed the Sun-starers, have formed alliances with the Golden Eagles
of Cruachan, Benlawers, Shehallion, and Lochnagair--the
Lightning-Glints, the Flood-fallers, the Storm-wheelers, the
Cloud-cleavers, ever since the deluge. The education of the
autobiographer had not been intrusted to a private tutor. Parental eyes,
beaks, and talons, provided sustenance for his infant frame; and in that
capacious eyrie, year after year repaired by dry branches from the
desert, parental advice was yelled into him, meet for the expansion of
his instinct, as wide and wonderful as the reason of earth-crawling man.
What a noble naturalist did he, in a single session at the College of
the Cliff, become! Of the customs, and habits, and haunts of all
inferior creatures, he speedily made himself master--ours included. Nor
was his knowledge confined to theory, but reduced to daily practice. He
kept himself in constant training--taking a flight of a couple of
hundred miles before breakfast--paying a forenoon visit to the farthest
of the Hebride Isles, and returning to dinner in Glenco. In one day he
has flown to Norway on a visit to his uncle by the mother's side, and
returned the next to comfort his paternal uncle, lying sick at the Head
of the Cambrian Dee. He soon learned to despise himself for having once
yelled for food, when food was none; and to sit or sail, on rock or
through ether, athirst and an hungered, but mute. The virtues of
patience, endurance, and fortitude, have become with him, in strict
accordance with the Aristotelian Moral Philosophy--habits. A Peripatetic
Philosopher he could hardly be called--properly speaking, he belongs to
the Solar School--an airy sect, who take very high ground, indulge in
lofty flights, and are often lost in the clouds. Now and then a light
chapter might be introduced, setting forth how he and other youngsters
of the Blood Royal were wont to take an occasional game at High-Jinks,
or tourney in air lists, the champions on opposite sides flying from the
Perthshire and from the Argyllshire mountains, and encountering with a
clash in the azure common, six thousand feet high. But the fever of love
burned in his blood, and flying to the mountains of another continent,
in obedience to the yell of an old oral tradition, he wooed and won his
virgin bride--a monstrous beauty, wider-winged than himself, to kill or
caress, and bearing the proof of her noble nativity in the radiant Iris
that belongs in perfection of fierceness but to the Sun-starers, and in
them is found, unimpaired by cloudiest clime, over the uttermost parts
of the earth. The bridegroom and his bride, during the honey-moon, slept
on the naked rock--till they had built their eyrie beneath its
cliff-canopy on the mountain-brow. When the bride was "as Eagles wish to
be who love their lords"--devoted unto her was the bridegroom, even as
the cushat murmuring to his brooding mate in the central pine-grove of a
forest. Tenderly did he drop from his talons, close beside her beak, the
delicate spring lamb, or the too early leveret, owing to the hurried and
imprudent marriage of its parents before March, buried in a living tomb
on April's closing day. Through all thy glens, Albyn! hadst thou reason
to mourn, at the bursting of the shells that Queen-bird had been
cherishing beneath her bosom. Aloft in heaven wheeled the Royal Pair,
from rising to setting sun. Among the bright-blooming heather they
espied the tartan'd shepherd, or hunter creeping like a lizard, and from
behind the vain shadow of a rock watching with his rifle the flight he
would fain see shorn of its beams. The flocks were thinned--and the
bleating of desolate dams among the woolly people heard from many a
brae. Poison was strewn over the glens for their destruction, but the
Eagle, like the lion, preys not on carcasses; and the shepherd dogs
howled in agony over the carrion in which they devoured death. Ha! was
not that a day of triumph to the Sun-starers of Cruachan, when
sky-hunting in couples, far down on the greensward before the ruined
gateway of Kilchurn Castle, they saw, left all to himself in the
sunshine, the infant heir of the Campbell of Breadalbane, the child of
the Lord of Glenorchy and all its streams! Four talons in an instant
were in his heart. Too late were the outcries from all the turrets; for
ere the castle-gates were flung open, the golden head of the royal babe
was lying in gore, in the Eyrie on the iron ramparts of Ben-Slarive--his
blue eyes dug out--his rosy cheeks torn--and his brains dropping from
beaks that revelled yelling within the skull!--Such are a few hints for
"Some Passages in the Life of the Golden Eagle, written by
Himself,"--in one volume crown octavo--Blackwoods, Edinburgh and
London.

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