O wonder of maternity! Through its influence the rudest woman becomes artistic, tenderly heedful. But the female is always heroic. It is one of the most affecting spectacles to see the bird of the eider--the eider-duck--plucking its down from its breast for a couch and a covering for its young. And if man steals the nest, the mother still continues upon herself the cruel operation. When she has stripped off every feather, when there is nothing more to despoil but the flesh and the blood, the father takes his turn; so that the little one is clothed of themselves and their substance, by their devotion and their suffering. Montaigne, speaking of a cloak which had served his father, and which he loved to wear in remembrance of him, makes use of a tender phrase, which this poor nest recalls to my mind--"I wrapped myself up in my father."
"Wings! wings! to sweep O'er mountain high and valley deep. Wings! that my heart may rest In the radiant morning's breast.
"Wings! to hover free O'er the dawn-empurpled sea. Wings! 'bove life to soar, And beyond death for evermore."
It is the cry of the whole earth, of the world, of all life; it is that which every species of animals or plants utters in a hundred diverse tongues--the voice which issues from the very rock and the inorganic creation: "Wings! we seek for wings, and the power of flight and motion!"
Yea; the most inert bodies rush greedily into the chemical transformations which will make them part and parcel of the current of the universal life, and bestow upon them the organs of movement and fermentation.
Yea; the vegetables, fettered by their immovable roots, expand their secret loves towards a winged existence, and commend themselves to the winds, the waters, the insects, in quest of a life beyond their narrow limits--of that gift of flight which nature has refused to them.
We contemplate pityingly those rudimentary animals, the unau and the aï, sad and suffering images of man, which cannot advance a step without a groan--sloths or _tardigrades_. The names by which we identify them we might justly reserve for ourselves. If slowness be relative to the desire of movement, to the constantly futile effort to progress, to advance, to act, the true _tardigrade_ is man. His faculty of dragging himself from one point of the earth to another, the ingenious instruments which he has recently invented in aid of that faculty--all this does not lessen his adhesion to the earth; he is not the less firmly chained to it by the tyranny of gravitation.