and goes in again to sleep.
Character .? I know not how much variety of
character there may be between birds of the same
species: but between species and species the variety
is endless, and is shown — as I fondly believe — in the
difference of their notes. Each has its own speech,
inarticulate, expressing not thought but hereditary
feeling; save a few birds who, like those little
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CHARLES KINGSLEY
dumb darlings, the spotted flycatchers, seem to have
absolutely nothing to say, and accordingly have the
wit to hold their tongues; and devote the whole
of their small intellect to sitting on the iron rails,
flitting off them a yard or two to catch a butterfly
in air, and flitting back with it to their nest.
But to return, listen to birds in any sequestered
woodland, on a bright forenoon in June. As you
try to disentangle the medley of sounds, the first,
perhaps, which will strike your ear will be the loud,
harsh, monotonous, flippant song of the chaffinch;
and the metallic clinking of two or three sorts of
titmice. But above the tree-tops, rising, hovering,
sinking, the woodlark is fluting, tender and low.
Above the pastures outside the skylark sings — as he
alone can sing; and close by, from the hollies rings
out the blackbird's tenor — rollicking, audacious,
humorous, all but articulate. From the tree above
him rises the treble of the thrush, pure as the song
of angels: more pure, perhaps, in tone, though
neither so varied nor so rich, as the song of the
nightingale. And there, in the next holly, is the
nightingale himself: now croaking like a frog;
now talking aside to his wife on the nest below;
and now bursting out into that song, or cycle of
songs, in which if any man finds sorrow, he himself
surely finds none. All the morning he will sing;
and again at evening, till the small hours, and
the chill before the dawn: but if his voice sounds
melancholy at night, heard all alone, or only
mocked by the ambitious black-cap, it sounds in
72
"A CHARM OF BIRDS"
the bright morning that which it is, the fulness of
joy and love. True, our own living poet tells
us how
In the topmost height of joy
His passion clasps a secret grief.
Coleridge may have been too severe when he-
guessed that —
Some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced
With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,
Or slow distemper, or neglected love
(And so, poor wretch, filled all things with himself.
And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale
Of his own sorrow) — he, and such as he.
First named these sounds a melancholy strain,
And many a poet echoes the conceit.
But that the old Greek poets were right, and had
some grounds for the myth of Philomela, I do not
dispute; though Sophocles, speaking of the night-
ingales of Colonos, certainly does not represent
them as lamenting. The Elizabethan poets, how-
eve.'-, when they talked of Philomel, " her breast
against a thorn," were unaware that they and the
Greeks were talking of two different birds; that
our English Lusciola Luscinia is not Lusciola Philo-
mela, one of the various birds called Bulbul in the
East. The true Philomel hardly enters Venetia,
hardly crosses the Swiss Alps, ventures not into the
Rhine-land and Denmark, but penetrates (strangely
enough) farther into South Sweden than our own
Luscinia: ranging meanwhile over all Central
Europe, Persia, and the East, even to Egypt.
Whether his song be really sad, let those who have
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CHARLES KINGSLEY
heard him say. But as for our own Luscinia, who
winters not in Egypt and Arabia, but in Morocco
and Algeria, the only note of his which can be
mistaken for sorrow is rather one of too great joy;
that cry, which is his highest feat of art; which
he cannot utter when he first comes to our shores,
but practises carefully, slowly, gradually, till he has
it perfect by the beginning of June; that cry, long,
repeated, loudening and sharpening in the intensity
of rising passion, till it stops suddenly, exhausted
at the point where pleasure, from very keenness,
turns to pain.
How different in character from his song is that
of the gallant little black-cap in the tree above
him. A gentleman he is of a most ancient house,
perhaps the oldest of European singing birds. How
perfect must have been the special organisation
which has spread, seemingly without need of altera-
tion or improvement, from Norway to the Cape of
Good Hope, from Japan to the Azores. How many
ages must have passed since his forefathers first got
their black caps. And how intense and fruitful
must have been the original vitality which, after
so many generations, can still fill that little body
with so strong a soul, and make him sing as Milton's
new-created birds sang to Milton's Eve in Milton's
Paradise. Sweet he is, and various, rich, and strong,
beyond all English warblers, save the nightingale:
but his speciality is his force, his rush, his overflow,
not so much of love as of happiness. The spirit
carries him away. He riots up and down the gamut
74
"A CHARM OF BIRDS"
till he cannot stop himself; his notes tumble over
each other; he chuckles, laughs, shrieks with
delight, throws back his head, droops his tail, sets
up his back, and sings with every fibre of his body:
and yet he never forgets his good manners. He is
never coarse, never harsh, for a single note. Always
graceful, always sweet, he keeps perfect delicacy in
his most utter carelessness.
And why should we overlook, common though he
be, yon hedge-sparrow, who is singing so modestly,
and yet so firmly and so true ? Or cock-robin
himself, who is here, as everywhere, honest, self-
confident, and cheerful ? Most people are not
aware, one sometimes fancies, how fine a singer
is cock-robin now in the spring-time, when his
song is drowned by, or at least confounded with,
a dozen other songs. We know him and love him
best in winter, when he takes up (as he does some-
times in cold wet summer days) that sudden wistful
warble, struggling to be happy, half in vain, which
surely contradicts Coleridge's verse:
In Nature there is nothing melancholy.
But he who will listen carefully to the robin's
breeding song on a bright day in May will agree,
I think, that he is no mean musician; and that
for force, variety and character of melody he is
surpassed only by black-cap, thrush, and nightingale.
And what is that song, sudden, loud, sweet, yet
faltering, as if half ashamed ? Is it the willow wren
or the garden warbler ? The two birds, though very
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CHARLES KINGSLEY
remotely allied to each other, are so alike in voice,
that it is often difficult to distinguish them, unless
we attend carefully to the expression. For the
garden warbler, beginning in high and loud notes,
runs down in cadence, lower and softer, till joy
seems conquered by very weariness; while the
willow wren, with a sudden outbreak of cheer-
fulness, though not quite sure (it is impossible
to describe bird-songs without attributing to the
birds human passions and frailties) that he is not
doing a silly thing, struggles on to the end of his
story with a hesitating hilarity, in feeble imitation
of the black-cap's bacchanalian dactyls.
And now, again — is it true that
In Nature there is nothing melancholy ?
Mark that slender, graceful, yellow warbler, run-
ning along the high oak boughs like a perturbed
spirit, seeking restlessly, anxiously, something which
he seems never to find; and uttering every now
and then a long anxious cry, four or five times
repeated, which would be a squeal were it not so
â– sweet. Suddenly he flits away, and flutters round
the pendent tips of the beech-sprays like a great
yellow butterfly, picking the insects from the leaves;
then flits back to a bare bough, and sings, with
heaving breast and quivering wings, a short, shrill,
feeble, tremulous song; and then returns to his old
sadness, wandering and complaining all day long.
Is there no melancholy in that cry ? It sounds
sad: why should it not be meant to be sad.? We
76
"A CHARM OF BIRDS"
recognise joyful notes, angry notes, fearful notes^
They are very similar (strangely enough) in all
birds. They are very similar (more strangely still)
to the cries of human beings, especially children,,
when influenced by the same passions. And when
we hear a note which to us expresses sadness, why^
should not the bird be sad? Yon wood wren has
had enough to make him sad, if only he recollects
it; and if he can recollect his road from Morocco
hither, he maybe recollects likewise what happened
on the road — the long weary journey up the
Portuguese coast, and through the gap between
the Pyrenees and the Jaysquivel, and up the Landes
of Bordeaux, and across Brittany, flitting by night,
and hiding and feeding as he could by day; and how
his mates flew against the lighthouses, and were
killed by hundreds; and how he essayed the British
Channel, and was blown back, shrivelled up by
bitter blasts; and how he felt, nevertheless, that
" that wan water he must cross," he knew not
why: but something told him that his mother had
done it before him, and he was flesh of her flesh,
life of her life, and had inherited her " instinct "
— as we call hereditary memory, in order to avoid
the trouble of finding out what it is, and how it
comes. A duty was laid on him to go back to the
place where he was bred; and he must do it: and
now it is done; and he is weary, and sad, and
lonely; and, for aught we know, thinking already
that when the leaves begin to turn yellow, he must
go back again, over the Channel, over the Landes,
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CHARLES KINGSLEY
over the Pyrenees, to Morocco once more. Why
should he not be sad ? He is a very delicate bird,
as both his shape and his note testify. He can
hardly keep up his race here in England; and is
accordingly very uncommon, while his two cousins,
the willow wren and the chifF-chaff, who, like him,
build for some mysterious reason domed nests upon
the ground, are stout, and busy, and numerous,
and thriving everywhere. And what he has gone
through may be too much for the poor wood wren's
nerves; and he gives wav; while willow wren,
black-cap, nightingale, who have gone by the same
road and suffered the same dangers, have stoutness
of heart enough to throw off the past, and give
themselves up to present pleasure. Whv not ? —
who knows ^ There is labour, danger, bereave-
ment, death in nature; and why should not some,
at least, of the so-called dumb things know it, and
grieve at it as well as we ?
Why not ? — Unless we yield to the assumption
(for it is nothing more) that these birds act by
some unknown thing called instinct, as it might be
called X or y; and are, in fact, just like the singing
birds which spring out of snuff-boxes, only so much
better made, that they can eat, grow, and propagate
their species. The imputation of acting by instinct
cuts both ways. We, too, are creatures of instinct.
We breathe and eat by instinct: but we talk and
build houses by reason. And so may the birds. It
is more philosophical, surelv, to attribute actions
in them to the same causes to which we attribute
78
"A CHARM OF BIRDS"
them (from experience) in ourselves. " But if so,"
some will say, " birds must have souls." We must
define what our own souls are, before we can define
what kind of soul or no-soul a bird may or may
not have. The truth is, that we want to set up
some "dignity of human nature"; some innate
superiority to the animals, on which we may
pride ourselves as our own possession, and not
return thanks with fear and trembling for it, as
the special gift of Almighty God. So we have
given the poor animals over to the mechanical
philosophy, and allowed them to be considered as
only mere cunningly devised pieces of watch-work,
if philosophy would only spare us, and our fine
human souls, of which we are so proud, though
they are doing all the wrong and folly they can
from one week's end to the other. And now our
self-conceit has brought its own Nemesis. The
mechanical philosophy is turning on us, and saying,
" The bird's ' nature ' and your ' human nature '
diff^er only in degree, but not in kind. If they are
machines, so are you. They have no souls, you
confess. You have none either."
But there are those who neither yield to the
mechanical philosophy nor desire to stifle it. While
it is honest and industrious, as it is now, it can do
nought but good, because it can do nought but
discover facts. It will only help to divide the light
from the darkness, truth from dreams, health from
disease. Let it claim for itself all that it can prove
to be of the flesh, fleshly. That which is spiritual
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CHARLES KINGSLEY
will stand out more clearly as of the Spirit. Let
it thrust scalpel and microscope into the most sacred
penetralia of brain and nerve. It will only find
everywhere beneath brain and beneath nerve that
substance and form which is not matter nor pheno-
menon, but the Divine cause thereof; and while
it helps, with ruthless but wholesome severity, to
purge our minds from idols of the cave and idols
of the fane, it will leave untouched, more clearly
defined, and therefore more sacred and important
than ever —
Those first affections.
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they raa}^
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet the master light of all our seeing ;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence; truths that wake
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor man nor boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy.
Then sing, ye birds, sing out with joyous sound,
as the poet-philosopher bids you. Victorious analysis
will neither abolish you, nor the miraculous and
unfathomable in you and in your song, which has
stirred the hearts of poets since first man was man.
And if any one shall hint to us that we and the birds
may have sprung originally from the same type;
that the difference between our intellect and theirs
80
"A CHARM OF BIRDS"
is one of degree, and not of kind, we may believe
or doubt: but in either case we shall not be greatly
moved. " So much the better for the birds," we will
say, " and none the worse for us. You raise the
birds towards us: but you do not lower us towards
them. What we are, we are by the grace of God.
Our own powers and the burden of them we know
full well. It does not lessen their dignity or their
beauty in our eyes to hear that the birds of the air
partake, even a little, of the same gifts of God as
we. Of old said St. Guthlac in Crowland, as the
swallows sat upon his knee, " He who leads his
life according to the will of God, to him the wild
deer and the wild birds draw more near "; and this
new theory of yours may prove St. Guthlac right.
St. Francis too, he called the birds his brothers.
Whether he was correct, either theologically or
zoologically, he was plainly free from that fear of
being mistaken for an ape which haunts so many
in these modern times. Perfectly sure that he
himself was a spiritual being, he thought it at least
possible that birds might be spiritual beings like-
wise, incarnate like himself in mortal flesh; and
saw no degradation to the dignity of human nature
in claiming kindred lovingly with creatures so
beautiful, so wonderful, who (as he fancied in his
old-fashioned way) praised God in the forest, even
as angels did in heaven. In a word, the saint, though
he was an ascetic, and certainly no man of science,
was yet a poet, and somewhat of a philosopher;
and would have possibly — so do extremes meet —
I 8i G
CHARLES KINGSLEY
have hailed as orthodox, while we hail as truly
scientific, Wordsworth's great saying —
Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear — both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In Nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse.
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
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OLD AGE
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
On the anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society
at Cambridge, in 1861, the venerable President
Quincy, senior member of the Society, as vuell as
senior alumnus of the University, w^as received at
the dinner v^^ith peculiar demonstrations of respect.
He replied to these compliments in a speech; and,
gracefully claiming the privileges of a literary
society, entered at some length into an Apology for
Old Age; and, aiding himself by notes in his hand,
made a sort of running commentarv on Cicero's
chapter De Senectute. The character of the
speaker, the transparent good faith of his praise
and blame, and the naivete of his eager preference
of Cicero's opinions to King David's, gave unusual
interest to the College festival. It was a discourse
full of dignity, honouring him who spoke and
those who heard.
The speech led me to look over at home — an
easy task — Cicero's famous essay, charming by
its uniform rhetorical merit; heroic with Stoical
precepts; with a Roman eye to the claims of the
State; happiest, perhaps, in his praise of life on
the farm; and rising at the conclusion to a lofty
83
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
strain. But he does not exhaust the subject; rather
invites the attempt to add traits to the picture
from our broader modern life.
Cicero makes no reference to the illusions which
cling to the element of time, and in which Nature
delights. Wellington, in speaking of military men,
said, " What masks are these uniforms to hide
cowards! " I have often detected the like deception
in the cloth shoe, wadded pelisse, wig, spectacles,
and padded chair of Age. Nature lends herself to
these illusions, and adds dim sight, deafness, cracked
voice, snowy hair, short memory, and sleep. These
also are masks, and all is not Age that wears them.
Whilst we yet call ourselves young, and our mates
are yet youths, with even boyish remains, one good
fellow in the set prematurely sports a grey or a
bald head, which does not impose on us who know
how innocent of sanctity or of Platonism he is,
but does deceive his juniors and the public, who
presently distinguish him with a most amusing
respect; and this lets us into the secret, that the
venerable forms that so awed our childhood were
just such impostors. Nature is full of freaks, and
now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then
a young heart beating under fourscore winters.
For if the essence of age is not present, these
signs, whether of Art or Nature, are counterfeit
and ridiculous; and the essence of age is intellect.
Wherever that appears, we call it old. If we look
into the eyes of the youngest person, we sometimes
discover that here is one who knows already what
84
OLD AGE
you would go about with much pains to teach him;
there is that in him which is the ancestor of all
around him: which fact the Indian Vedas express
when they say, " He that can discriminate is the
father of his father." And in our old British
legends of Arthur and the Round Table, his friend
and counsellor. Merlin the Wise, is a babe found
exposed in a basket by the river-side; and, though
an infant of only a few days, speaks articulately
to those who discover him, tells his name and
history, and presently foretells the fate of the
bystanders. Wherever there is power, there is age.
Don't be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you
that babe is a thousand years old.
Time is, indeed, the theatre and seat of illusion:
nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches
an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.
Saadi found in a mosque at Damascus an old Persian
of a hundred and fifty years, who was dying, and
was saying to himself, " I said, coming into the
world by birth, ' I will enjoy myself for a few
moments.' Alas; at the variegated table of life I
partook of a few mouthfuls, and the Fates said,
' Enough ! ' " That which does not decay is so
central and controlling in us, that, as long as one
is alone by himself, he is not sensible of the inroads
of time, which always begin at the surface-edges.
If, on a winter day, you should stand within a
bell-glass, the face and colour of the afternoon
clouds would not indicate whether it were June
or January; and if we did not find the reflection
85
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
of ourselves in the eyes of the young people, we
could not know that the century-clock had struck
seventy instead of twenty How many men habitu-
ally believe that each chance passenger with whom
they converse is of their own age, and presently
find it was his father, and not his brother, whom
they knew!
But not to press too hard on these deceits and
illusions of Nature, which are inseparable from our
condition, and looking at age under an aspect more
conformed to the common sense, if the question
be the felicity of age, I fear the first popular judg-
ments will be unfavourable. From the point of
sensuous experience, seen from the streets and
markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the
estimate of age is low, melancholy, and sceptical.
Frankly face the facts, and see the result. Tobacco,
coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine,
are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time. This
cup, which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful
virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It
opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted
dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science:
especially, it creates a craving for larger draughts
of itself. But they who take the larger draughts
are drunk with it, lose their stature, strength,
beauty, and senses, and end in folly and delirium.
We postpone our literary work until we have more
ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover
that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence
which we have now lost. We had a judge in
86
OLD AGE
Massachusetts who at sixty proposed to resign,
alleging that he perceived a certain decay in his
faculties; he was dissuaded by his friends, on
account of the public convenience at that time.
At seventy it was hinted to him that it v^s time
to retire; but he now replied, that he thought his
judgment as robust, and all his faculties as good
as ever they were. But besides the self-deception,
the strong and hasty labourers of the street do not
work well with the chronic valetudinarian. Youth
is everywhere in place. Age, like woman, requires
fit surroundings. Age is comely in coaches, in
churches, in chairs of state, and ceremony, in
council chambers, in courts of justice, and historical
societies. Age is becoming in the country. But in
the rush and uproar of Broadway, if you look into
the faces of the passengers, there is dejection or indig-
nation in the seniors, a certain concealed sense of
injury, and the lip made up with a heroic deter-
mination not to mind it. Few envy the considera-
tion enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant. We do not
count a man's years until he has nothing else to
count. The vast inconvenience of animal immor-
tality was told in the fable of Tithonus. In short,
the creed of the street is. Old Age is not disgraceful,
but immensely disadvantageous. Life is well enough,
but we shall all be glad to get out of it, and they
will all be glad to have us.
This is odious on the face of it. Universal con-
victions are not to be shaken by the whimseys of
overfed butchers and firemen, or by the sentimental
87
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
fears of girls who would keep the infantile bloom
on their cheeks. We know the value of experience.
Life and art are cumulative; and he who has
accomplished something in any department alone
deserves to be heard on that subject. A man of
great employments and excellent performance used
to assure me that he did not think a man worth
anything until he was sixty; although this smacks
a little of the resolution of a certain " Young Men's
Republican Club," that all men should be held
eligible who were under seventy. But in all govern-
ments, the councils of power were held by the old;
and patricians or patres^ senate or series, seigneurs
or seniors, gerousia, the senate of Sparta, the pres-
bytery of the Church, and the like, all signify
simply old men.
The cynical creed or lampoon of the market is
refuted by the universal prayer for long life, which
is the verdict of Nature, and justified by all history.
We have, it is true, examples of an accelerated pace
by which young men achieved grand works; as
in the Macedonian Alexander, in Raffaelle, Shake-