. The bird . petrels, or gulls, withwhose hoarse cries every waste resounds. Find me, ifyou can, creatures endowed with fuller liberty. Dayand night, south or north, sea or shore, dead prey orliving, all is one to them. Using everything, at home everywhere,they indifferently display their white sails from the waves to theheaven; the fresh breeze, ever shifting and changing, is the boun-teous wind which always blows in the direction they most desire. 102 TRIUMPH OF THE WING. Wliat are they but air, sea, the elements, which have taken wingand fly ? I know nothing of it. To see their gray eye, st
. The bird . petrels, or gulls, withwhose hoarse cries every waste resounds. Find me, ifyou can, creatures endowed with fuller liberty. Dayand night, south or north, sea or shore, dead prey orliving, all is one to them. Using everything, at home everywhere,they indifferently display their white sails from the waves to theheaven; the fresh breeze, ever shifting and changing, is the boun-teous wind which always blows in the direction they most desire. 102 TRIUMPH OF THE WING. Wliat are they but air, sea, the elements, which have taken wingand fly ? I know nothing of it. To see their gray eye, stern andcold (never successfully imitated in our museums), is to see the giay,indifferent sea of the north in all its icy impassiveness. What do 1say ? That sea exhibits more emotion. At times phosphorescentand electiical, it will rise into strong animation. Old Father Ocean,saturnine and passionate, often revolves, under his pale countenance,a host of thoughts. His sons, the goelands, have less of animal life. ikV^^K tlian he has. They fly, with their dead eyes seeking some dead prey ;and in congregated flocks they expedite the destruction of the greatcarcasses which float upon the sea for their behoof Not ferocious inaspect, amusing the voyager by their sports, by frequent glimpses oftheir snowy pinions, they speak to him of remote lands, of the shoreswhich he leaves behind or is about to visit, of absent or hoped-forfriends. And they are useful to him, also, by announcing and pre-dicting the coming storm. Ofttimes their sail expanded warns himto furl his own. For do not supi)Ose that when the tempest breaks they deign tofold their wings. Far from this : it is then that they set forth. Thestorm is their harvest time ; the more terrible the sea, so much theless easily can the fish escape from these daring fishers. In the Bayof Biscay, where the ocean-swell, driven from the north-west, after THE FRIGATE BIRD. 103 traversing the Atlantic, arrives in mighty billows, swollen to eno
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Keywords: ., bookauthormich, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1860, booksubjectbirds
