  Undoubtedly the swallow has seized upon our dwellings without ceremony; she lodges under our windows, under our eaves, in our chimneys. She does not hold us in the slightest fear. It might have been said that she trusted to her unrivalled wing, had she not placed her nest and her children within our reach. The true reason why she has become the mistress In the rural mansion where my father-in-law educated his children, he would hold his class during summer in a greenhouse in which the swallows rested without disturbing themselves about the movements of the family, quite unconstrained in their behaviour, wholly occupied with their brood, passing out at the windows and returning through the roof, chattering very loudly with one another, and still more loudly when the master would make a pretence of saying, as St. Francis said, "Sister swallows, can you not be silent?" Theirs is the hearth. Where the mother has built her nest, the daughter and the grand-daughter build. They return there every year; their generations succeed to it more regularly than do our own. A family dies out or is dispersed, the mansion passes into other hands; but the swallow constantly returns to it, and maintains its right of occupation. It is thus that our traveller has come to be accepted as a symbol of the permanency of home. She clings to it with such fidelity, that though the house may be repaired, or partially demolished, or long disturbed by masons, it is still retaken possession of, re-occupied by these faithful birds of persevering memory. She is the bird of return. And if I bestow this title upon her, it is not alone on account of her annual return, but on account of her general conduct, and the direction of her flight, so varied, yet nevertheless circular, and always returning upon itself. She incessantly wheels and veers, indefatigably hovers about the same area and the same locality, describing an infinity of graceful curves, which, however varied, are never far distant from one another. Is it to pursue her prey, the gnat which dances and floats in the air? Is it to exercise her power, her unwearying wing, without going too far from her nest? It matters not; this revolving flight, this incessantly returning movement, has always attracted our eyes and heart, throwing us into a reverie, into a world of thought. We see her flight clearly, but never, or scarcely ever, her little But let us not anticipate, nor let loose the waters of bitterness. Rather let us trace this bird in the people's thoughts, in the good old popular wisdom, close akin, undoubtedly, to the wisdom of Nature. The people have seen in her only the natural dial, the division of the seasons, of the two great hours of the year. At Easter and at Michaelmas, at the epochs of family gatherings, of fairs and markets, of leases and rent-paying, the black and white swallow appears, and tells us the time. She comes to separate and define the past and the coming seasons. At these epochs families and friends meet together, but not always to find the circle complete; in the last six months this friend has disappeared, and that. The swallow returns, but not for all; many have gone a very long journey, longer than the tour of France. To Germany? No; further, further still. Our companions, industrious travellers, followed the swallow's "De la jeunesse, de la jeunesse, Un chant me revient toujours— Oh! que c'est loin! Oh! que c'est loin Tout ce qui fut autrefois; "Ce que chantait, ce que chantait Celle qui ramÈne le printemps, Rasant le village de l'aile, rasant le village de l'aile. Est-ce bien ce qu'elle chante encore? "'Quand je partis, quand je partis, Etaient pleins l'armoire et le coffre. Quand je revins, quand je revins, Je ne trouvai plus que le vide.' "O mon foyer de famille, Laisse-moi seulement une fois M'asseoir À la place sacrÉe Et m'envoler dans les songes! "Elle revient bien l'hirondelle, Et l'armoire vidÉe se remplit. Mais le vide du coeur reste, mais reste le vide du coeur, Et rien ne le remplira. "Elle rase pourtant le village, Elle chante comme autrefois— 'Quand je partis, quand je partis, Coffre, armoire, tout Était plein. Quand je revins, quand je revins Je ne trouvai plus que le vide.'" Imitated:— From childhood gay, from childhood gay, E'er breathes to me a strain, How far the day, how far the day Which ne'er may come again! And is her song, and is her song— She who brings back the spring, The hamlet touching with her wing, the hamlet touching with her wing— Is it true what she doth sing? "When I set forth, when I set forth, Both barn and chest were brimming o'er; When I came back, when I came back, I found a piteous lack of store." Oh, my own home, so dearly loved, Kind Heaven grant that I may kneel Again upon thy sacred hearth, While dreams the happy past reveal! The swallow surely will return, Coffer and barn will brim once more; But blank remains the heart, empty the heart remains, And none may the lost restore! The swallow skims through the hamlet, She sings as she sang of yore:— "When I set out, when I set out, Both barn and chest were brimming o'er; When I came back, when I came back, I found a piteous lack of store." The swallow, caught in the morning, and closely examined, is seen to be a strange and ugly bird, we confess; but this fact perfectly well agrees with what is, par excellence, the bird—the being among all beings born for flight. To this object Nature has sacrificed everything; she has laughed at form, thinking only of movement; and has succeeded so well that this bird, ugly in repose, is, when flying, the most beautiful of all. Scythe-like wings; projecting eyes; no neck (in order to treble her strength); feet, scarcely any, or none: all is wing. These are her great general features. Add a very large beak, always open, which, in flight, snaps at its prey without stopping, closes, and again re-opens. Thus she feeds while flying; she drinks, she bathes while flying; while flying, she feeds her young. If she does not equal in accuracy of line the thunderous swoop of the falcon, by way of compensation she is freer; she wheels, makes a hundred circles, a labyrinth of undefined figures, a maze of varied curves, which she crosses and re-crosses, ad infinitum. Her enemy is dazzled, lost, confused, and knows not what to do. She wearies and exhausts him; he gives up the chase, but leaves her unfatigued. She is the true queen of the air; the incomparable agility of her motions makes all space her own. Who, like her, can change in the very moment of springing, and turn abruptly? No one. The infinitely varied and capricious pursuit of a prey which is ever fluttering—of the gnat, the fly, the beetle, the thousand insects that waver to and fro and never keep in the same direction—is, undoubtedly, the best training school for flight, and renders the swallow superior to all other birds. Nature, to attain this end, to achieve this unique wing, has adopted an extreme resolution, that of suppressing the foot. In the large church-haunting swallow, which we call the martin, the foot is reduced to a mere nothing. The wing gains in proportion; the martin, it is said, accomplishes eighty leagues in an hour. This astounding swiftness equals even that of the frigate-bird. The foot, remarkably short in the latter, is but a stump in the martin; if he rests, it is on his belly; so that he never perches. With him it is To take the range of a place is a great difficulty for him: so, if he fixes his nest aloft, at his departure from it he is constrained to let himself fall into his natural element. Afloat in the air he is free, he is sovereign; but until then he is a slave, dependent on everything, at the disposal of any one who lays hand upon him. The true name of the genus, which is a full explanation in itself, is the Greek A-pode, "Without feet." The great race of swallows, with its sixty species which fill the earth, charms and delights us with its gracefulness, its flight, and its soft chirping, owes all its agreeable qualities to the deformity of a very little foot; it is at once the foremost among the winged tribes by the gift of the perfect art of flight, and the most sedentary and attached to its nest. Among this peculiar genus, the foot not supplying the place of the wing, the training of the young being confined to the wing alone and a protracted apprenticeship in flying, the brood keep the nest for a long time, demanding the cares and developing the foresight and tenderness of the mother. The most mobile of birds is found fettered by her affections. Her nest is not a transient nuptial bed, but a home, a dwelling-place, the interesting theatre of a difficult education and The finest thing is, that this sentiment of kinship expands. In danger, every swallow is a sister; at the cry of one, all rush to her aid; if one be captured, all lament her, and torture their bosoms in the attempt to release her. That these charming birds extend their sympathy to birds foreign to their own species one easily conceives. They have less cause than any others to dread the beasts of prey, from their lightness of wing, and they are the first to warn the poultry-coops of their appearance. Hen and pigeon cower and seek an asylum as soon as they hear the swallow's warning voice. No; man does not err in considering the swallow the best of the winged world. And why? She is the happiest, because the freest. Free by her admirable flight. Free by her facility of nourishment. Free by her choice of climate. Also, whatever attention I have paid to her language (she speaks amicably to her sisters, rather than sings), I have never heard her do aught but bless life and praise God. LibertÀ! molto e desiato bene! I revolved these words in my heart on the great piazza of Turin, where we never wearied of watching the flight of innumerous swallows, hearing a thousand little joyous cries. On their descent from the Alps they found there convenient habitations all prepared for their reception, in the apertures left by the scaffold-beams in the very walls of the palaces. At times, and frequently in the evening, they chattered very loudly and cried shrilly, to prevent us from understanding them. Often they darted down headlong, just skimming the ground, but rising again so quickly that one might have thought them loosened from a spring or We travellers regarded with pleased eyes these other travellers, which bore their pilgrimage so gaily and so lightly. The horizon, nevertheless, was heavy, and ringed by the Alps, which at that hour seemed close at hand. The black pine-woods were already darkened and overshadowed by the evening; the glaciers glittered again with a ghastly whiteness. The sorrowful barrier of these grand mountains separated us from France, towards which we were soon about to travel slowly. HARMONIES OF THE TEMPERATE ZONE. |
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