room-ye noble benefactors of mankind, whose names are not inscribed upon the tablets of history and you, mothers, whose lot is to dwell in obscurity,-be not discouraged in the presence of the proud statesmen, the rich merchant princes, the haughty conquerors, be not discouraged, for you are the blossoms.

THE ATTRIBUTE OF WINGS.

[From the French of Toussenel.]

In some interesting tribes of insects, as that of the ants, who hold virginity in high esteem, the right of bearing wings and rising into the air belongs only to the choir of vestals. She who has loved punishes herself for her innocent weakness by tearing with her own hands her virginal tunic. An analogous custom is observed in Eutopia, whence the incomparable purity of morals has always excluded deceptions in love. The crown of white roses is the sign of the vestalate: the young girl who has registered her departure from the vestalate, and bravely renounced the numerous privileges attached to this title, a little later reveals this to all by appearing at public ceremonies with her brow garlanded with a crown of red roses. I do not dissimulate my lively admiration of an institution which introduces loyalty into all social affections, and banishes falsehood and hypocrisy from the hearth of our intimate affections. Respect for the rights of happy love instinctively seeks an environment of shade and solitude.

I remark in passing, that it is the history of the Ant which has lent to modern mythology the myth of the Sylphide — a graceful and charming myth, which Marie Taglioni, queen of the dance, formerly translated in immortal pirouettes on the choreographic scenes of the French Opera. The Sylphide is, like the winged Ant, a virgin of the air, whose wings fall at the first kiss of love. The history of the butterfly confirms still more vigorously than that of the Ant this view of the glorious attribute of wings.

When the foul caterpillar, which lives only for its belly, has devoured enough, the breath of the generative power which goes forth over the waters, the forests and the plains, to watch over the conservation of beings, warns the caterpillar that it is time to arrest the development of the individual, and to think of the interest of the species. The caterpillar, warned, stops eating, and fixing

crysa

itself at the extremity of the stalk it has denuded, weaves the lid where its mysterious transformation is accomplished. After which the crawling insect, which has sloughed its dress of misery, darts from its silken prison under form of an aërial sylph, with gold and azure wings, which only lives upon perfume, sunshine and love, and asks its companion of all the corollas of flowers, less coquettish, less adorned than itself.

This metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly symbolizes the passage from the lymbic society, ruled by men and by constraint, into the harmonian society, where every one obeys only the sovereign of his choice, and where the perfumed nectar of flowers images the refined delights of labor in a suitable environment, and shared by woman, for whom Nature reserves her most elaborate toilet. Now in our time is the dark and mysterious period of incubation for the future harmony.

Analogy, which is the mother of poetry and science, has also long represented this metamorphosis as the image of the immortality of the soul, and of the transition from the miseries of the terrestrial life to the delights of the ultra-mundane life. I regret not being free to elucidate this interesting question; but I have sworn to keep to myself all that I know about the endless charms of the aromal life.

O men, my fellows, you who have only to stoop, in order to see and to learn from the humblest creatures the secret of happy destinies, how long still will the silly blindness of pride condemn you to crawl in the sewers of misery? What bloody lessons, and what painful experiences do you still await in order to proclaim the advent of your Queen Woman, and to confess attractive labor? But let us at last grant speech to the Bird which asks it, impatient to sing in his turn all the virtues of Spring. Few are as bold as the bird in the definition of their dominant passion. It calls love the torch of virtue. This definition is very just. The birds love much, some of them love always. It is the tribe of creatures privileged by the Lord; for the favor of Heaven is measured for each being by the power of loving which it has received.

And as God has done nothing by halves, he has taken care to lavish on these charming creatures the gifts which attract love. He has expanded profusion on the mantle of the colibri, of the peacock, of the bird of paradise and the golden pheasant: rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topazes, the most brilliant and best assorted

tints of the scale of colors. So likewise He has chosen, in the gamut of sounds, the sweetest notes to accentuate the voice of the humble song-bird. The bird is after man the only creature that can thank God by its joyous songs. But the heart of man and that of the bird must be satisfied before their voice can sing. To pray is to sing one's happiness.

And as love is a passion of luxury, whose integral expansion requires for its first conditions wealth, a warm air, a blue and limpid heaven, God has gifted the bird with the faculty of rapid locomotion, which permits it to accompany the sun in its course, and to realize the Utopia of eternal Spring. The swallow and the turtledove, those happy models of fidelity or conjugal tenderness, ignore the cold of seasons as that of the heart. A woman has written that "the sighs of Eolian harps resounding in the warm countries of the South are the accords with which amorous Nature accompanies the songs of lovers." Love's tasks are easy for the birds, among whom health and beauty and abundance are common as the air and sunshine—so it is among men in the period of harmony.

When Liberty, that incompressible spring of the soul towards happiness, enkindles a human breast, the first movement of the inspired is to raise his eye towards heaven, the domain of the bird, and to open the arms like wings, to take possession of space.

At the age of prolonged hopes and roseate visions, when the bells sound in the air the name of the angel beloved; when the stars write it on the vault of heaven; when the two halves of one being, tremulously floating on the currents of their opposite electricities, seek each other and conspire to return within their primordial unity-then the ardent imagination of the lover experiences the desire of incarnating in an aërial form the adored ideal. The poets who invented angels were lovers, since all angels are female.

At your twentieth year, you have sometimes felt in sleep your lightened body leave the sod and glide off into space, defended by invisible spirits against the law of gravitation. It was a revelation which God then made to you and a foretaste of the enjoy ments of the aromal life, that life whence we have issued and to which we shall one day return, at the end of this terrestrial existence, which is to the superior life what sleep is to waking. We envy the lot of the birds, and we lend wings to her whom we love, because we feel by instinct that in the sphere of happiness,

our bodies will enjoy the faculty of traversing space, as the bird wings its way through the air.

And thus it will be with all our desires and all our aspirations. Since they are the promises of God who can not deceive.

The bird, lively, graceful and light, reflects by preference images adorable, young, sweet and pure.

Jehovah, the God of the Jews, said to his people by the mouth. of Isaiah: "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint."-(xl. 31.)

The blessed St. Francois d'Assise said to his sisters the birds, "Love God who has clothed you with feathers and given you power to fly in the heavens."

This perpetual aspiration of man, and especially of woman, towards the etherial spheres is, then, one of the most legitimate developments of human nature. The obscurantists of antiquity have with cowardice applauded the fall of Icarus, first inventor of the balloon, saying that the gods had punished him for going too near the sun. The obscurantists of those times were kneaded of the same dough as those of to-day, who suffer horribly at seeing any one rise above them; but we who are neither moralists nor envious, and who are better than our fathers, we should give tears to the fall of Icarus and erect statues to him, as well as to Prometheus, who discovered fire.

If man, from Icarus, down to Mongolfier and Petin, has constantly tended to invade the domain of the bird, which forms an integral part of his globe, it is because God has somewhere lodged in a secret corner of his brain the idea of this future conquest, so that it should serve as a compass and spur to his scientific efforts. Aërial locomotion is in fact the first condition of the realization of the unity and fraternity of peoples, the supreme aim of science. It is the normal locomotion in every direction, which resumes all the others. The light aërostat with immense proportions is the chariot of fire that passes over the waters, the vessel which sails over the surface of the continents, that smiles at the fury of the elements and glides above the storm, ignoring obstacles, but everywhere respecting the work of God, dispensing us from the toil of filling up valleys and boring through mountains, unlike the homicidal locomotive which the stock-jobber has dishonored. Now the genius of man, docile to the indications of instinet,

has already planted his banner in the region of clouds; he has climbed higher than the eagle and the condor, and the hour is not far when he will reign as sovereign master in the field of the Empyrean. On this day tariffs, tyrannies and nationalities will vanish as by enchantment from all points of the globe, and man will have nothing more to envy the bird, unless the privilege of eternal ardor. And still, who knows if this good fortune will not come like the rest? Women will be so adorable, so touching, and so proud, constancy will be so easy to them, when they shall be restored the right of freely disposing of their hearts!

The life of the bird is but an epithalamium. The bird exists only to love. Its splendid dress, its melodious songs, its talent as an architect, its courage, its cunning, are all gifts of Love. The people of birds is devoted soul and body to the worship of Venus, and the grateful goddess has never chosen to attach to her car any but winged coursers. The bird born of the egg naturally adopts the form of the ellipse, curve of love. The blood-globule, spherical in the beast and in man, is elliptical in the bird.

All birds change their plumes once a year. This is called moulting; many species moult twice: birds have the full costume for love and the common suit for traveling, the spring plumage and the fall plumage. Like the gallant gentleman, the male makes himself fine, and dons his most brilliant suit only in order to please. Like Anacreon's minstrel, he tunes his lyre only to draw from it love songs.

Η λύρη δέ

Έρωτας ἀντεφώνει.

The fine season past, adieu plumage, adieu song, adieu the passion for the fine arts, and for music in the open air. I know no two creatures more dissimilar in exterior and in mind than the Ruff in the month of May and the same bird in September. I defy the common hunter to recognize, at first sight, in the simple grey-coated Sandpiper, quietly pacing at mid-August the banks of Armorica, the ferocious Ruffler which he met under the same latitude three months before, casque on head and lance in vest, inspecting himself, parading, swelling in his ruffles, and challenging every knight of his own degree for the honor of his ladies. Between the amorous Ruffler of the spring and the same bird satiated in the fall, there is, alas! the same distance as between the adolescent and the old man.