Jules Michelet

“ Oh, it is then that envy seizes us, when, amid the glowing azure of the Tropics, at incredible altitudes, almost imperceptible in the dim remoteness, we see him triumphantly sweeping past us—this black, solitary bird, alone in the waste of heaven: or, at the most, at a lower elevation, the snow-white sea-swallow crosses his flights in easy grace!
Why dost not thou take me upon thy pens, O king of the air, thou fearless and unwearied master of space, whose wondrously swift flight annihilates time? Who more than thou is raised above the mean fatalities of existence? ”

“ As soon as it dawns, when the horizon reddens and the sun breaks forth, she springs from her furrow like an arrow, and bears to heaven's gate her hymn of joy. Hallowed poetry, fresh as the dawn, pure and gleeful as a childish heart! That powerful and sonorous voice is the reapers' signal. "We must start," says the father; "do you not hear the lark?" She follows them, and bids them have courage; in the hot sunny hours invites them to slumber, and drives away the insects. Upon the bent head of the young girl half awakened she pours her floods of harmony. ”

“ From high, from low, on the right, on the left, these predatory tribes, échelonned by legions which succeed one another and relieve one another each in its month, in its day—the immense, the irresistible conscription of nature—will march to the conquest of man's works. The division of labour is perfect. Each has his post marked out, and will make no mistake. Each will go straight to his tree or his plant. And such will be their tremendous numbers, that not a leaf but will have its legion.
What wilt thou do, poor man? How wilt thou multiply thyself? Hast thou wings to pursue them? ”

“ Nature seems to have treated the lark with harshness. Owing to the arrangement of her claws, she cannot perch on the trees. She rests on the ground, close to the poor hare, and with no other shelter than the furrow. How precarious, how riskful a life, at the time of incubation! What cares must be hers, what inquietudes! Scarcely a tuft of grass conceals the mother's fond treasure from the dog, the hawk, or the falcon. She hatches her eggs in haste; with haste she trains the trembling brood. Who would not believe that the ill-fated bird must share the melancholy of her sad neighbour, the hare? ”

“ The traditional esteem which man cherishes for the courage of the great Raptores is much diminished when we read, in Wilson, that a tiny bird, a fly-catcher, such as the purple martin, will hunt the great black eagle, pursue it, harass it, banish it from its district, give it not a moment's repose. It is a truly extraordinary spectacle to see this little hero, adding all his weight to his strength, that he may make the greater impression, rise and let himself drop from the clouds on the back of the large robber, mount without letting go, and prick him forward with his beak in lieu of a spur. ”

“ The lord of the winged race is he who does not rest. The chief of navigators is he who never reaches his bourne. Earth and sea are almost equally prohibited to him. He is for ever banished.
Let us envy nothing. No existence is really free here below, no career is sufficiently extensive, no power of flight sufficiently great, no wing can satisfy. The most powerful is but a temporary substitute. The soul waits, demands, and hopes for others:—
"Wings to soar above life:
Wings to soar beyond death!" ”

“ Old Father Ocean, saturnine and passionate, often revolves, under his pale countenance, a host of thoughts. His sons, the goëlands, have less of animal life than he has. They fly, with their dead eyes seeking some dead prey; and in congregated flocks they expedite the destruction of the great carcasses which float upon the sea for their behoof. Not ferocious in aspect, amusing the voyager by their sports, by frequent glimpses of their snowy pinions, they speak to him of remote lands, of the shores which he leaves behind or is about to visit, of absent or hoped-for friends. ”

“ He alone is a creator; he alone varies, enriches, amplifies his song, and augments it by new strains. He alone is fertile and diverse in himself; other birds are so by instruction and imitation. He alone resumes, contains almost all; each of them, of the most brilliant, suggests a couplet to the nightingale.
Only one other bird, like him, attains sublime results in the bold and simple—I mean the lark, the daughter of the sun. And the nightingale also is inspired by the light; so that, when in captivity, alone, and deprived of love, it suffices to unloose his song. ”

“ We fixed our transitory nest in a fold of the Apennines, two leagues from Genoa.
An admirable situation, a secure and well-defended shelter, which, in the variable climate of that coast, enjoys the astonishing boon of an equable temperature. Although one could not entirely dispense with fires, the winter sun, warm in January, encouraged the lizard and the invalid to think it was spring. Shall I confess it, however? These oranges, these citrons, harmonizing in their changeless foliage with the changeless blue of heaven were not without monotony. Animated life was very rare. ”

“ France is not cruel. Why, then, this love of murder, this extermination of the animal world?
It is the impatient people, the young people, the childish people, in a rude and restless childhood. If they cannot be doing in creating, they will be doing by destroying.
But what they most fatally injure is—themselves! A violent education, stormily impassioned in love or severity, crushes in the child, withers, chokes up the first moral flower of natural sensitiveness, all that was purest of the maternal milk, the germ of universal love which rarely blooms again. ”

“ In the fathomless forest, in the deep morasses, under the impure shadow of mangoes and mangroves, where ferment the corpses of two worlds, dashed to and fro by the sea, the great purifying army seconds and shortens the action both of the waves and the insects. Woe to the inhabited world, if their mysterious and unknown toil ceased but for an instant!
In America these public benefactors are protected by the law.
Egypt does more for them; she reveres, she loves them. If the ancient worship no longer exists, they receive from men as kindly an hospitality as in the time of Pharaoh. ”

“ Some may trust to their arms, the weakest to their numbers, and abandon themselves to fate. The stock-dove says: "Out of ten or a hundred thousand the assassin cannot slay more than ten, and doubtlessly I shall not be one of the victims." They seize their opportunity; the flying cloud passes at night; if the moon rise, against her silver radiance the black wings stand out clear and distinct; they escape, confused, in her pale lustre. The valiant lark, the national bird of our ancient Gaul and of the invincible hope, also trusts to his numbers ”

“ Wilt thou be a man, and share in that royalty of the globe which men have won by art and toil?
No, he will immediately reply. Without calculating the immense exertion, the labour, the sweat, the care, the life of slavery by which we purchase sovereignty, he will have but one word to say: "A king myself, by birth, of space and light, why should I abdicate when man, in his loftiest ambition, in his highest aspirations after happiness [Pg 84] and freedom, dreams of becoming a bird, and taking unto himself wings?" ”

“ The melody, now vibrating with a glowing appeal to the senses, anon grows sublime and amplified by the effects of the wind; it is a strain of sacred harmony which swells through all the forest. Near at hand, it is occupied with the nest, their love, the son which will be born; but afar, another is the beloved, another is the son: it is Nature, mother and daughter, eternal love, which hymns and glorifies itself; it is the infinite of love which loves in all things and sings in all ”

“ Is it to pursue her prey, the gnat which dances and floats in the air? Is it to exercise her power, her unwearying wing, without going too far from her nest? It matters not; this revolving flight, this incessantly returning movement, has always attracted our eyes and heart, throwing us into a reverie, into a world of thought.
We see her flight clearly, but never, or scarcely ever, her little [Pg 195] black face. Who, then, art thou, thou who always concealest thyself, who never showest me aught but thy trenchant wings—scythes rapid as that of Time? But Time goes forward without pause ”

“ I speak of those myriads of petrels, or gulls, with whose hoarse cries every waste resounds. Find me, if you can, creatures endowed with fuller liberty. Day and night, south or north, sea or shore, dead prey or living, all is one to them. Using everything, at home everywhere, they indifferently display their white sails from the waves to the heaven; the fresh breeze, ever shifting and changing, is the bounteous wind which always blows in the direction they most desire. ”

“ Watch on the one side the woman's delight at the first step of her infant, and on the other the swallow at the first flight of her little nursling.
You see in both the same anxiety, the same encouragements, examples, and counsels, the same pretended security and lurking fear, the trembling "Take courage, nothing is more easy;"—in truth, the two mothers are inwardly shivering.
The lessons are curious. The mother raises herself on her wings; the fledgling regards her intently, and also raises himself a little; then you see her hovering—he looks, he stirs his wings. ”

“ Hence the prolonged and disquieted labour of incubation, the self-inflicted captivity, the motionlessness of the most mobile of beings. And all this so very pitiful! A stone pressed so long to the heart, to the flesh—often the live flesh!
It is born, but born naked. While the baby-quadruped, even from his first day of life, is clothed, and crawls, and already walks, the young bird (especially in the higher species) lies motionless upon its back, without the protection of any feathers. ”

“ The chaffinch raises with all his energy his clear and sonorous note; the robin sings from the summit of the larch, the goldfinch amid the alder-groves, the blackbird and the bullfinch beneath the leafy arbours. The tomtit, the wren, and the troglodyte mingle their voices. The stockdove coos, and the woodpecker smites his tree. But far above these joyous utterances re-echo the melodious strains of the woodlark and the inimitable song of the thrush. ”

“ And this mother will think it admirable that her son, kept confined to his room, shall drive off ennui by plucking the wings from flies, by torturing a bird or a little dog.
Far-seeing mother! She will know when too late the evil of having formed a hard heart. Aged and weak, rejected of the world, she will experience in her turn her son's brutality.
But rifle practice? They will object to you. Must not the child grow skilful in killing, that, from murder to murder, he may at last arrive at the surpassing feat of killing the flying swallow? ”

“ Rain, mire, storm, I accept them all; so that from sky or earth the idea of movement may return to me—the idea of renovation; that every year the spectacle of a new creation may refresh my heart, may restore to me the hope that my soul shall enjoy a similar resurrection, and, by the alternations of sleep, of death, or of winter, create for itself a new spring!
Man, bird, all nature, utter the same desire. We exist through change. ”

“ I do not see, let me add, why we should extend to infinity our massacre of birds, or, at least, of these species which are represented in our museums, or in the museums painted by Wilson, and his disciple Audubon, whose truly royal book, exhibiting both race, and the egg, the nest, the forest, the very landscape, is a rivalry with nature.
These great observers have one speciality which separates them from all others. Their feeling is so delicate, so precise, that no generalities could satisfy it; they must always examine the individual. ”

“ That powerful fairy which endows man with most of his blessings and misfortunes, Imagination, sets herself to work to travestie nature for him in a hundred ways. In all which exceeds his energies or wounds his sensations, in all the necessities which overrule the harmony of the world, he is tempted to see and to curse a maleficent will. One writer has made a book against the Alps; a poet has foolishly placed the throne of evil among those beneficent glaciers which are the reservoir of the waters of Europe, which pour forth its rivers and make its fertility. ”

“ It is the little ocean-eagle, first and chief of the winged race, the daring navigator who never furls his sails, the lord of the tempest, the scorner of all peril—the man-of-war or frigate-bird.
We have reached the culminating point of the series commenced by the wingless bird. Here we have a bird which is virtually nothing more than wings: scarcely any body—barely as large as that of the domestic cock—while his prodigious pinions are fifteen feet in span. The great problem of flight is solved and overpassed, for the power of flight seems useless. ”

“ The eye and the wing—sight and flight—that exalted degree of puissance which enables you incessantly to embrace in a glance, and to overleap, immense landscapes, vast countries, kingdoms—which permits you to see in complete detail, and not to contract, as in a geographical chart, so grand a variety of objects—to possess and to discern, almost as if you were the equal of God;—oh, what a source of boundless enjoyment! ”

“ I know not what moral instinct raises and supports him above it. His grand and formidable voice, which sways the desert, announces from afar the gravity and dignified heroism of the noble and haughty purifier. The kamichi (Palamedéa cornuta) , as he is called, is rare; he forms a genus of himself, a species which is not divided.
Despising the ignoble promiscuousness of the low world in which he lives, he lives alone, with but one mate. Undoubtedly, in his career of war, his mate is also a companion-in-arms. They love, they fight together; they follow the same destiny. ”

“ Through the thick calcareous shell, where your rude hand perceives nothing, she feels by a delicate tact the mysterious being which she nourishes and forms. It is this feeling which sustains her during the arduous labour of incubation, during her protracted captivity. She sees it delicate and charming in its soft down of infancy, and she predicts with the vision of hope that it will be vigorous and bold, when, with outspread wings, it shall eye the sun and breast the storm. ”

“ A good writer, a minutely accurate artist, with a delicate and certain hand, he seemed, under the guidance of Nature, his mother and mistress, less to learn than to remember.
Provided with these weapons, he plunges into the desert, the forest, and the pestiferous savannahs; becomes the friends of buffaloes and the guest of bears; lives upon wild fruits, under the splendid ceiling of heaven. Wherever he chances to observe a rare bird, he halts, encamps, and is "at home." ”

“ Others will come, and again others, for ever, and without end. For if the climate is less severe than in the zones of the South, in revenge, the eternal rain—that ocean of soft warm water incessantly flooding our meadows—hatches in a hopeless fecundity those nascent and greedy lives, which are impatient to rise, to be born, and to finish their career by the destruction of superior existences. ”

“ No races are of purer or gentler disposition, none more fraternal towards their kin, more tender towards their offspring. Cruel ignorance of man! How can he have slain without horror the walrus and the seal, which in so many points are like himself?
The giant man of the old ocean, the whale—a being as gentle as man the dwarf is brutal—enjoys this advantage over him: sure of species whose fecundity is alarming, it can accomplish the mission of destruction which nature has ordained, without inflicting upon them any pain. ”