woods, lying at full length on the turf, while the green and blue lizards scruple not to scramble over him with their small feet, and the birds alight on the nearest twigs and sing their little roundelays, unbroken by any chirrup of alarm,-recognising him, may be, as something akin to themselves, or else fancying that he was rooted and grew there; for these wild pets of nature dreaded him no more in his buoyant life than if a mound of soil and grass and flowers had long since covered his dead body, converting it back to the sympathies from which human existence had estranged it.* No claim has Donatello to utter the lament of Shakspeare's Helena,

"No, no, I am as ugly as a bear;

For beasts that meet me run away for fear."

But until he is overtaken with a fault,-nay, a crime,―he has little else than this creature-sympathy in common with the Margrave of A Strange Story, whom we see familiarizing himself with deer and cattle, which group round him quite tame, and feed from his hand. Nor is Margrave the only criminal hero of Lord Lytton's to whom this congeniality is attributed. Of Eugene Aram, for instance, musing in tranquil

over the animal creation, by drawing towards him the birds and squirrels from the coverts of the forest, and giving them food.

A more benignant exercise of the peculiar gift than is predicable of honest old Tiff, in the same story; at whose volition, all sorts of wild game, squirrels, rabbits, coons, and possums, appeared to come with pleasure and put themselves into his traps and springes; so that where another man might starve, Tiff would look round him with unctuous satisfaction, contemplating all nature as his larder, where his provisions were wearing fur coats, and walking about on four legs, only for safe keeping till he got ready to eat them.

* "A bird happening to sing cheerily,”—this is on yet another occasion, "Donatello gave a peculiar call, and the little feathered creature came fluttering about his head, as if it had known him for many summers.-' How close he stands to nature!' said Miriam, observing this pleasant familiarity between her companion and the bird," etc.—Transformation, ch. ix. Cf. chapters viii. and xxvii., passim.

+ "In another moment he was half hid under the drooping boughs of a broad lime-tree, amidst the antlers of deer that gathered fondly round him I think I see him now as I saw him then: a white doe, that even my presence could not scare away from him, clung lovingly to his side, looking up at him with her soft eyes.”—A Strange Story, ch. xlix.

FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. 9

forest glades, we read that, as he roamed onward, “even the wild birds seemed to feel, by a sort of instinct, that in him there was no cause for fear," and therefore did not stir from the sprays that overhung his path. In salient contrast with the experience of Shakspeare's Helena is that of the laureate's Enone:

"Methinks I must be fair, for yesterday

When I pass'd by, a wild and wanton pard,
Eyed like the evening star, with playful tail
Crouch'd fawning in the weed.”

Shakspeare himself is the subject of a modern poet's picture,
in his Plea for the Midsummer Fairies, where wild things
neither fear nor astonish him, even the timid hares going
frankly near him, and the dappled does, without one start, and
their fawns, in hereditary confidence,*-while neither wrens
forsake at his footfall their nests among the leaves, nor
speckled thrushes flutter far apart.
So too when he goes the
nimble squirrel's visitor, that brown hermit brings his hoarded
nuts,-

"Nor yet shall bees uncase their jealous stings,
However he may watch their straw-built huts."

Manuel Phile, who takes a good place among the Greek Christian Poets of Mrs. Browning, has some verses on what his translator calls "a Philhellenic species of heron," with a nice ear for the Attic dialect; for,

"If some barbarian bark approach the shore,
They hate, they flee,- -no eagle can outsoar!
But if by chance an Attic voice be wist,

They grow soft-hearted straight, philhellenist;

* As in the French roman of the Lady of Monsoreau, who was familiar, as a girl, with the deer in the vast forests of the Duke of Anjou,-some of them even coming to her call, and one, "a doe, my favourite, Daphne, would come and eat out of my hand.-One spring I had missed her for a month, and was ready to weep for her as a friend, when she reappeared with two little fawns. At first they were afraid of me, but seeing their mother. caress me, they soon learnt to do the same."-Ch. xiii.

Press on in earnest flocks along the strand,

And stretch their wings out to the comer's hand."*

There is in the Idylls of the King emphatic record of a queenly nature, which not only drew, magnet-like, the rustiest iron of old fighters' hearts, but which beasts themselves would worship:

Unbidden, and the brutes of mountain back

That carry kings in castles, bow'd black knees
Of homage, ringing with their serpent hands,
To make her smile, her golden ankle-bells."

The River-god, in Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, promises his sweet charge, Amoret,

"Not a fish in all my brook

That shall disobey thy look,

But, when thou wilt, come sliding by,
And from thy white hand take a fly."

And he bids the privileged maiden, likewise,

"Do not fear to put thy feet

Naked in the river, sweet;

Think not leech, or newt, or toad,

Will bite thy foot, when thou hast trod."

Wordsworth, in his Prelude, sketches one whom

"Birds in the bower, and lambs in the green field,
Could they have known her, would have loved."

But the potential mood has a gratuitous aspect, when the indicative, with its actual verities, has been so well worked by him and by other poets. Lilian Ashleigh, in the prose romance, is pictured beneath a willow, the birds dropping

* A more auspicious greeting than the like semblance of it that welcomes Odysseus and his companions to Circe's realm,—

"Where mountain wolves and brindled lions roam,

(By magic tamed,) familiar to the dome :

With gentle blandishment our race they meet,

And wag their tails, and fawning lick their feet."

Not their own feet, as the structure of the other half of the line might imply, in the English of Mr. Pope's coadjutors.

FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. 11

from the boughs on the turf around her, so fearlessly that one alights amid the flowers in the little basket at her feet; and the picture is typical enough to be trite. The son of the painter of it gives us a younger figure, cast in the same mould. "I know now, little Ella," says he,

"Why the blackbird in our laurel bowers

Spake to you only; and the poor pink snail

Feared less your steps than those of the May shower.

It was not strange these creatures loved you so,

And told you so.

'Twas not so long ago

You were yourself a bird, or else a flower."

Mark again, in the typical instance of Gentleman Waife's child Sophy, how when her small foot once treads the sward, had she been really Queen of the Green People, sward and footstep could not more joyously have met together: how the grasshopper is said to have bounded, in fearless trust, upon the hem of her frock, and was tenderly caught by her, and how the gay insect, dear to poet and fairy, seemed to look at her from that quaint sharp face of his with sagacious recognition, resting calmly on the palm of her pretty hand; and how, when he sprang off, little moth-like butterflies, peculiar to the margins of running rivers, quivered up from the herbage, fluttering round her. Guy Darrell, in the same story, has, or seems to have, a spell of attraction over the swans on his lake, which claim his notice "with a low hissing salutation," sailing swiftly towards him when they descry him from afar; and while he communes with them, after his sort and theirs, a tame doe, catching sight of him from her covert at a distance, comes in light bounds to his side, and pushes her delicate nose into his drooping hand.* It is a young fawn that Mr. Disraeli makes

When Lady Montfort pays her shrinking visit to the Manor-house, as she winds her way through the stillness of its venerable groves, a heavy sigh of hers is said to rouse from its bed among the fern the same doe that Darrell had tamed into companionship; and, stealing close to the saddened woman, the creature touches her very dress. "Doubtless, as Darrell's companion in his most musing hours, the doe was familiarised to the sound of sighs, and associated the sound with the gentlest notions of humanity." -What will He do with It? Book ix., chap. i.

the first to follow Essper George, when that quaint worthy amuses himself, if not Vivian Grey as well, by imitating the peculiar sound of every animal they meet. Various birds are attracted almost as soon, and even a squirrel perches on his horse's neck. When the two travellers come to a farm-yard, anon half-a-dozen horses follow Essper George in the road.* "How marvellous is the sympathy which exists between some persons and the brute creation !" exclaims another notable novelist, who professes to think, in the case of one heroine, early in a long series of heroines, that horses and dogs understood every word she said to them, that they worshipped her from the dim depths of their inarticulate souls, and would have willingly gone to death to do her service. One interested gentleman observes all this with an uneasy sense of bewilderment, and takes to wondering whether these creatures are wiser than their masters, and so recognize some higher attributes in the girl. Were she mean, or cowardly, or false, or impure, he cannot believe the mastiff would love her as he does; nor can he think that in that case his thorough-breds would let her hands caress their velvet nostrils: the dog would snarl, and the horses would bite, as such animals used to do in those old days when they recognized witchcraft and evil spirits. "What an atmosphere of happiness she created about her wherever she went! How joyously the dogs barked and leaped at sight of her, straining their chains in the desperate effort to approach her! How fearlessly the thoroughbred mares and foals ran to the paddock-gates to bid her welcome, bending down their velvet nostrils to nestle upon her shoulder, responsive to the touch of her caressing hand!" The contributor to the Saturday Review of a series of essays

*

"A dog rushed out to seize the dangerous stranger, and recover his. charge; but Essper gave an amicable bark, and in a second the dog was jumping by his side, and engaged in earnest and friendly conversation." The pigs are next drawn to his side, and then three or four cows are seduced from keeping their appointment with the dairymaid. Broods of ducks and chickens are ready comers, while a flock of stately geese issue in solemn pomp from another gate of the farm-yard, and commence a cackling conversation with the delighted Essper.-Vivian Grey, Book vi., chap. ii.