CHAPTER XI.

EAGLES AND ART.

MINNIE'S LAND, the residence of the late Mr. Audubon, the illustrious ornithologist, was situated near the high-water level of the Hudson, at the foot of a deep range of shelving hills, which form the Manhattan shore, and commence nearly opposite the foot of the noted Palisades.

Here, in the midst of a grove of native forest trees, and at some fifty paces from the water's edge, stood, embowered in characteristic seclusion, like the nest of one of his own favorite, solitude-haunting wild-birds, the simple and tasteful family mansion of the great illustrator of the feathered tribes.

You entered this hospitable home by a wide hall, which, opening upon a spacious portico fronting the river, divided the lower apartments into two ranges of rooms-those on the right hand consisting of atelier, library, and museum of specimens those on the left being, with a beautiful propriety, dedicated to the rights of hospitality-dining-room, parlors, etc.

The main hall of entrance was hung on both sides with pictures; among them all that most attracted my attention. in frequent visits, were two large oil paintings, one an origi nal Salvator Rosa-terrible as all that I had ever dreamed of that drear and mighty genius of desolation. A leaden, clouded sky, hurled by the drifting storm against the sharp peaks of pinnacled cliffs, seemed falling, shattered in huge eddied flakes about the head of a poor wayfarer, whose thin

cloak and long hair streaming beyond, made his figure seem the very counterpart of a blasted tree in the foreground, the only green limb upon which seemed to have just been partly torn from the trunk, and streamed, too, on the savage blast. I shall never forget that picture of desolation!

The other was a noble picture-pronounced by Christopher North, the noblest of all executed by Audubon-of a Golden Eagle, the full size of life, which, from a lofty crag of the White Mountains, was in the act of carrying off a lamb upon which it had just pounced, and which was clearly a vagrant from the white flock browsing peacefully beneath, which could be dimly seen through a break in the whirling chaos of vapor, which nearly compassed about the sun-lit rock, upon the grassy edges of which it had been tempted to feed.

With all this simplicity of elements, there was something indescribably majestic in the picture. In addition to the general effect, there was a degree of microscopic detail in the finish of the two figures of the eagle and the lamb, which has ever since left upon my mind an impression as of an actual scene.

Alas! for white-wooled innocence! it pleads in vain for mercy with the merciless. The full-winged tyrant is an hungered and athirst, and hath no bowels of compassion now that can be moved by piteous bleatings.

It is very nice, poor lamb! to have a snowy fleece, and such large, bright, gentle eyes, with such a meek appeal in them as might soften a heart of veriest adamant-very nice indeed! and one would think that of all creatures, it was least possible that thou couldst come to harm, even in a sinful world like this of ours!

But sad enough, these have all been in vain! A single crime has rendered the Ægis of purity powerless for thee, and forced thee to realize that, indeed,

"Some innocents 'scape not the thunderbolt !"-

for with a roar of sudden wings and gleam of a golden burnish, came it not down upon thee out of the still air-that fearful retribution-thou undutiful truant?

In the giddiness of thy wanton youth, didst thou not wander away from that fond and anxious sheep, which was to thee a mother? Regardless of the agonized bleatings by which she sought to recall thee to her dugs, didst thou not continue to climb the mountain-side, and in heedless aggravation of her tearful woe, frisk upon the perilous verge of bleakest rocks, where the strong winds made the grass to sing underneath thy hoofs?

In the blindness of thy obdurate pride of place, thou couldst not see the danger; but in a fell swoop it is upon thee now! Ay, it is too late to shrink! too late to turn back thy repentant heart to that poor deserted parent, whose prolonged and plaintive ba-a-a fills all the valley-too late!

Ah, rash ambition, it is ever thus! Thou Phaeton, thou Icarus of lambkins! why could not the lowly plain content thee? "The aspiration in thy heel" has been sad for thee; it has but brought thee to thy downfall!

Poor lamb! there is a vivid life here that makes thy pangs seem real, and we almost shudder while those terrible talons burn into the tender flesh; and while the aerial robber pauses with mighty wings outstretched, we can see the yellow shine of ravin in its eye, glow as pitiless as if we stood near the fierce bird alive, when it had just stooped from amidst the cloudy crags of the White Mountains upon some vagrant firstling of a New Hampshire farmer's flock.

This is no mere fable, but is a breathing and living truth out of the natural world; at least its life in form and colors is like breathing. It is more than the old fable, for our modern Esop is the artist, who tells his story with the pencil and the burin rather than the wagging tongue.

If he make bird and beast speak together, as they used to for our childhood in that old book, it is not by the unnatural use of human speech, but in action, real presentations of their

own physical expression! Thus we can have not only an allegory told, but an historical truth as well, and in a living language.

We can clearly remember how ludicrous it seemed even to our unsophisticated childhood, that these brute creatures should talk to one another "like people," and yet, we were intensely interested in what they said, because the rude wood-cuts of our copy gave the forms of each, and were more suggestive sometimes than the fable itself. With our faith thus helped along, we become reconciled to the reality, but we are sure it was through the wood-cuts more than the language of these fables that they have accompanied us all our life since; a whole folio of practical ethics was imbedded into our memory with each of those crude, but graphic pictures.

We doubt very much, if any child was ever very greatly impressed by the fables of Æsop, whose first copy was without the illustrations!

How very natural, when we remember that the first language which greets the awakening sense of infancy, is that of the mother earth-of form, color and action-and therefore it must continue to be most significant to the man. Who has not marked the antics of a baby over the first picturebook? how he sprawls upon it in a destructive ecstasy of sputtering delight? Look, too, at the first slate of the unwilling school-boy, covered with rude figures of bird and beast rather than with numerals or pot-hooks. He is struggling for the most direct mode of expression, just as the savage or natural man is doing through his hieroglyphics.

This is not all, for extremes meet, and the language of infants and of angels is the same, if we may trust to certain of the Old Fathers and the revelations of modern clairvoyThese unite in representing that such spiritual beings have no occasion for the use of speech after the manner of man, but that they possess such eloquence of look and form, as to communicate through these alone; every motion being

ance.