Hatchling

“ The hunter saw the glittering blue masses of ice with their crown of snow, pushing through the green of his forest abode and crushing down vast trees in many a sheltered glen or favorite hunting ground. Gradually these savage men of early Europe were forced to accustom themselves to a cold climate, but many of the animals familiar to the hunter retreated to the warmer south, never to return. ”

“ The whole land seemed stirring with perpetual movement, all in one direction;—from the bright hills at its commencement, to the dark mountains at the end. Earth and sky seemed moving, as when an enormous flight of migratory birds is passing by, but earth and sky were really stationary. This movement was one constant tide of human life, ceaselessly streaming across the land. ”

“ And, indeed, it is not impossible that more and more of the foaming waters may rush in between you and yonder forest, until you are so far removed from the rest of the world, that your small fishing-canoe may be incapable of passing over, and the inhabitants of the continent entirely forget you in your old age amid the dissipation and diversions of life. ”

“ Thereafter, when now strengthening age hath wrought thee into man, the very voyager shall cease out of the sea, nor the sailing pine exchange her merchandise: all lands shall bear all things, the ground shall not suffer the mattock, nor the vine the pruning-hook ”

“ The tendrils of that fragile plant just strong enough to resist the sea breezes which sweep up the valley, yet form a link in an enduring chain which binds the memory of the exiles to the land of their birth. ”

“ But night o'erwhelms the lands with vasty murk Either when sun, after his diurnal course, Hath walked the ultimate regions of the sky And wearily hath panted forth his fires, Shivered by their long journeying and wasted By traversing the multitudinous air, Or else because the self-same force that drave His orb along above the lands compels Him then to turn his course beneath the lands. ”

“ Aloof, aloft, alone, the wayfarer stands here, and breathes or breasts the ceaseless wind that saunters or like a live thing thunders down its track; and has on either hand a spreading valley, whence curls the smoke of scattered hamlets, uprise the spires, come the faint sounds of creature life and gleam the fields, as spread upon a palette, coloured in obedience to this and that design of husbandry. ”

“ The slumbering, or at best slowly awakening, consciousness of the plant, makes of it little more than an idle traveller, whereas the nature spirits, alert and active, attend to the upkeep and navigation of the craft, and the voyage through the kingdom means a growth and development for both. ”

“ BARDS of approaching Dawn who know the heavens are come with hymns to throw the mountain open. The Sun hath risen and open the stable portals: the doors of men, too, hath the God thrown open. 2. Surya hath spread his light as splendour: hither came the Cows' Mother, conscious, from the stable, To streams that flow with biting waves to deserts; and heaven is stablished like a firm-set pillar. ”

“ Generally we were upheld by the knowledge that we were making progress towards the land where we would be, but there were days and nights when we lay hove to, drifting across the storm-whitened seas and watching with eyes interested rather than apprehensive the uprearing masses of water, flung to and fro by Nature in the pride of her strength. ”

“ At a given moment the entire mass stirs, divides and sets forth; and then, in one sustained and impetuous flight that this time knows no obstacle, it steers its straight course, over hedges and cornfields, over haystack and lake, over river and village, to its fixed and always far-away goal. ”

“ The forests, too, are ready with story hid in the fastness of their solitude, and it is a joy to think that those great pines, pointing ever upwards, go for the most part to carry the sails of great ships seeking afar under open sky. ”

“ Travel-worn pioneers, who have been tossed about like boulders in flood time, are thronging hither as to a kind of a terrestrial heaven, resolved to rest. They build, and plant, and settle, and so come under natural influences. ”

“ Let us save the Nation!' and the swift-winged winds will bear the sound from pole to pole, from sea to sea, and from continent, island, and floating barks, from hills, valleys, and mountains, from hut, hovel, and dismal swamps, will come a vast and fearful host, in numbers like unto the leaves of the forest ”

“ And being thus met again together we travelled on still westward, sometimes through such thick woods that we were enforced with cudgels to break away the brambles and bushes from tearing our naked bodies; other sometimes we should travel through the plains in such high grass that we could scarce see one another. ”

“ Every river-bed was full of mighty reeds, whose stems clattered together when the wind blew like swords on shields, and every now and then a bit of forest was woven together with the ropey stems of giant creepers till no man or beast could have passed save for the paths which constant use had kept open through the mazes. ”

“ In an extend of hundreds, and thousands of square miles, no other surface of smiling green attested the presence of civilization. The hunter's path crossed mighty rivers, flowing in solitary grandeur, whose sources lay in remote and unknown regions of the wilderness. ”

“ Nor did their descendants, exploring interminable caves, learning to tame the internal fires, always evolving, always growing, have any remote conception of a people who sailed strange seas to find new lands and live and multiply and build up a country of sky-reaching cities and peaceful farmlands, of sunlit valleys and hills. ”

“ Or, at least, if turn we must, since school and office call back hunter and camper and sailor to desk and bench, we may yet keep a hand stretched out to the rough grip of nature, and a backward eye on her nights of stars and days of lusty winds, ripening orchards and reaped grain, yellow woods and white-laced brown brooks running under the dark pines. ”

“ Or, in the pauses between the swish-dash-dashings of the waters, sound faint and clear voices singing intermittently, calls, distant notes of laughter, as though many canoes were working against the current; only the flotilla never gets any nearer, nor the voices louder. The voyageurs call these mist people the Huntsmen, and look frightened. To each is his vision, according to his experience. The nations of the earth whisper to their exiled sons through the voices of the rapids. ”

“ We can best realize the perfection of this instinct when we consider that all these migrants, including the young which have never hitherto strayed beyond the small area of their home where every tree and bush and spring and rock is familiar to them, rush suddenly away as if blown by a wind to unknown lands and continents beyond the seas to a distance of from a thousand to six or seven thousand miles ”

“ It is easy, then, to picture successive hordes of dusky wanderers pouring over from the old, old East upon the virgin soil of what was then emphatically a new world, since no human beings roamed its vast plains or traversed its stately forests. ”

“ On the old supposition of migration from the ark, that the lower animals, as well as men, should have ‘agreed to differ’ on the opposite sides of a narrow deep-sea channel, was indeed a remarkable bundle of coincidences. ”

“ As the stern, patient smith of the wilderness, amid the melancholy moan of pine forests, and the roar of the stream, wrought out by sheer pluck and perseverance, a mechanical trade, so his earnest grandson, completely absorbed in his chosen pursuit, strove to verify, by experiment upon the bodies of such animals as he could procure, the theories he studied. ”

“ Behold, waters rise up out of the north, and shall become an overflowing stream, and shall overflow the land and all that is therein, the city and those who dwell therein; and the men shall cry, and all the inhabitants of the land shall wail. 47:3 At the noise of the stamping of the hoofs of his strong ones, at the rushing of his chariots, at the rumbling of his wheels, the fathers don't look back to their children for feebleness of hands ”

“ But the rest wander over vast deserts, knowing neither ploughtime nor seedtime; but living in cold and frost, and feeding like great beasts. They place their relations, their homes, and their wretched furniture on waggons covered with bark, and, whenever they choose, they migrate without hindrance, driving off these waggons wherever they like. ”

“ We should know what never man hath known, nor eye of man hath scanned.
Nought beyond these coiling clouds that melt like fume of shrines that steam
Breaks or stays the strength of waters till they pass our bounds of dream.
Where the waste Land’s End leans westward, all the seas it watches roll
32 Find their border fixed beyond them, and a worldwide shore’s control:
These whereby we stand no shore beyond us limits: these are free.
Gazing hence, we see the water that grows iron round the Pole,
From the shore that hath no shore beyond it set in all the sea. ”

“ So long indeed has this instinct of migration been at work, that often we are quite baffled in trying to understand why they take this or that particular route for their flight, because probably, when the first stragglers chose it, even the areas of land and water were not divided as now, so that we must study the whole history of the changing geography of the earth to understand the yearly route of the swallow or the stork. ”

“ In the daytime, the mountains were wrapped in smoke so dense and blinding, that the explorers, if by chance they separated, could only find each other by shouting. Often, too, they had to grope their way through the yet burning forests, in constant peril from the limbs and trunks of trees, which frequently fell across their path. ”

“ To-day, I make no doubt that the Road is tramped over by a hundred different species of vagrants, each having its own particular name, and, perhaps, even territory. The world has its shifts and changes among the outcast's as well as in the aristocrat's domain, and I hear now of strange clans of rovers that had not yet been organized when I began tramping. ”

“ From all that is known of the slowness with which such alterations take place anywhere in the lie of the land, the climate, and the wild animals, we cannot suppose changes so vast to have happened without a long lapse of time before the newer stone age came in, when the streams had settled down to near their present levels, and the climate and the wild creatures had become much as they were within the historical period. It is also plain from the actual remains found, that these most ancient known tribes were wild hunters and fishers, such as we should now class as savages. ”

“ To have witnessed the industry and perseverance of these emigrants, must at once have proved the vigour of their minds. Regardless of the fatigue attending every movement which they made, they pushed through an unexplored region of dark and tangled forests, guiding themselves by the sun alone, and reposing at night on the bare ground. ”

“ Then the expedition started: over a steep and stony rise through narrow roads, past precipitous headlands they went, till they came to a bare rock and a cheerless wood, below which lay the water, dreary and troubled. ”

“ He hath taught himself speech and thought swift as the wind, hath learnt the moods of a city life and can avoid the shafts of the frost; he hath a device for every problem save Death—though disease he can escape. ”

“ When the call of nature is answered and the spawn is laid they die. They never seek the salt sea again, but carpet the rivers with their bones. When they feel the homing impulse they come from the remotest depths, heading unerringly for the particular parent stream whence they originated. ”

“ Little birds which we judged to have lost the shore, by reason of thick fogs which that country is much subject unto, came flying to our ships, which causeth us to suppose that the country is both more tolerable and also habitable within than the outward shore maketh show or signification. ”

“ Here then, in the mountains, must we look for the origin of animals. For, at the time of the great deluge, all animals in the plains were, certainly, the first to perish, and those in the mountains were, in all probability, left for posterity. ”

“ Assuming as the antecedent of migration a great geologic change, such as upheaval of the East Indian Archipelago step by step into a continent, it was argued, in an essay I then wrote, that, subjected primarily to new influences in its original habitat, each kind of plant and animal would secondarily be subjected to the altered conditions consequent on spreading over the upheaved regions. ”

“ Over the round of earth, down from the flattened summit, pour the living streams, bearing south the tribes and gathered nations, the peoples and flocks, the clans and families, the young and the old. And the dying grasslands, the October snows, and the forests fall behind, and presently the nations behold a first far glint of the sea. ”

“ We hastened our march, and for the first time since our shipwreck, a smiling picture presented itself to our view.—The trees always green, with which that noble river is shaded, the humming birds, the red birds, the paroquets, the promerops, &c. who flitted among their long yielding branches, caused in us emotions difficult to express. ”