CHAPTER CCXIII.

BIRDS OF PARADISE.—THE ZIZ.—STORY OF THE ABBOT OF ST. SALVADOR DE VILLAR.—HOLY COLETTE'S NONDESCRIPT PET.—THE ANIMALCULAR WORLD.—GIORDANO BRUNO.

And so I came to Fancy's meadows, strow'd With many a flower; Fain would I here have made abode, But I was quickened by my hour.

HERBERT.

Hindoos and Mahommedans have stocked their heavens not only with mythological monsters but with beautiful birds of celestial kind. They who have read Thalaba will remember the

Green warbler of the bowers of Paradise:

and they who will read the history of the Nella-Rajah,—which whosoever reads or relates, shall (according to the author) enjoy all manner of happiness and planetary bliss,—that is to say, all the good fortune that can be bestowed by the nine great luminaries which influence human events,—they who read that amusing story will find that in the world of Daivers, or Genii, there are milk white birds called Aunnays, remarkable for the gracefulness of their walk, wonderfully endowed with knowledge and speech, incapable of deceit, and having power to look into the thoughts of men.

These creatures of imagination are conceived in better taste than the Rabbis have displayed in the invention of their great bird Ziz, whose head when he stands in the deep sea reaches up to Heaven; whose wings when they are extended darken the sun; and one of whose eggs happening to fall crushed three hundred cedars and breaking in the fall, drowned sixty cities in its yolk. That fowl is reserved for the dinner of the Jews in heaven, at which Leviathan is to be the fish, and Behemoth the roast meat. There will be cut and come again at all of them; and the carvers of whatever rank in the hierarchy they may be, will have no sinecure office that day.

The monks have given us a prettier tale;—praise be to him who composed,—but the lyar's portion to those who made it pass for truth. There was an Abbot of S. Salvador de Villar who lived in times when piety flourished, and Saints on earth enjoyed a visible communion with Heaven. This holy man used in the intervals of his liturgical duties to recreate himself by walking in a pine forest near his monastery, employing his thoughts the while in divine meditations. One day when thus engaged during his customary walk, a bird in size and appearance resembling a black bird alighted before him on one of the trees, and began so sweet a song, that in the delight of listening the good Abbot lost all sense of time and place, and of all earthly things, remaining motionless and in extasy. He returned not to the Convent at his accustomed hour, and the Monks supposed that he had withdrawn to some secret solitude; and would resume his office when his intended devotion there should have been compleated. So long a time elapsed without his reappearance that it was necessary to appoint a substitute for him _pro tempore_; his disappearance and the forms observed upon this occasion being duly registered. Seventy years past by, during all which time no one who entered the pine forest ever lighted upon the Abbot, nor did he think of any thing but the bird before him, nor hear any thing but the song which filled his soul with contentment, nor eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor feel either want or weariness or exhaustion. The bird at length ceased to sing and took flight: and the Abbot then as if he had remained there only a few minutes returned to the monastery. He marvelled as he approached at certain alterations about the place, and still more when upon entering the house, he knew none of the brethren whom he saw, nor did any one appear to know him. The matter was soon explained, his name being well known, and the manner of his disappearance matter of tradition there as well as of record: miracles were not so uncommon then as to render any proof of identity necessary, and they proposed to reinstate him in his office. But the holy man was sensible that after so great a favour had been vouchsafed him, he was not to remain a sojourner upon earth: so he exhorted them to live in peace with one another, and in the fear of God, and in the strict observance of their rule, and to let him end his days in quietness; and in a few days, even as he expected, it came to pass, and he fell asleep in the Lord.

The dishonest monks who for the honour of their Convent and the lucre of gain palmed this lay (for such in its origin it was) upon their neighbours as a true legend, added to it, that the holy Abbot was interred in the cloisters; that so long as the brethren continued in the observance of their rule, and the place of his interment was devoutly visited, the earth about it proved a certain cure for many maladies, but that in process of time both church and cloisters became so dilapidated through decay of devotion, that cattle strayed into them, till the monks and the people of the vicinity were awakened to a sense of their sin and of their duty, by observing that every animal which trod upon the Abbot's grave, fell and broke its leg.[1] The relics therefore were translated with due solemnity, and deposited in a new monument, on which the story of the miracle, _in perpetuam rei memoriam_, was represented in bas-relief.

[Footnote 1: Superstition is confined to no country, but is spread, more or less, over all. The classical reader will call to mind what Herodotus tells happened in the territory of Agyllæi. _Clio. c. 167, ἐγίνετο διάστροφα καὶ ἔμπηρα καὶ ἀπόπληκτα, ὁμοίως πρόβατα καὶ ὑποζύγια καὶ ἄνθρωποι._]

The Welsh have a tradition concerning the Birds of Rhianon,—a female personage who hath a principal part in carrying on the spells in Gwlad yr Hud or the Enchanted Land of Pembrokeshire. Whoso happened to hear the singing of her birds, stood seven years listening, though he supposed the while that only an hour or two had elapsed. Owen Pughe could have told us more of these Birds.

Some Romish legends speak of birds which were of no species known on earth and who by the place and manner of their appearances were concluded to have come from Paradise, or to have been celestial spirits in that form. Holy Colette of portentous sanctity, the Reformeress of the Poor Clares, and from whom a short-lived variety of the Franciscans were called Colettines, was favoured, according to her biographers, with frequent visits by a four-footed pet, which was no mortal creature. It was small, resembling a squirrel in agility, and an ermine in the snowy whiteness of its skin, but not in other respects like either; and it had this advantage over all earthly pets, that it was sweetly and singularly fragrant. It would play about the saint, and invite her attention by its gambols. Colette felt a peculiar and mysterious kind of pleasure when it showed itself; and for awhile not supposing that there was anything supernatural in its appearance, endeavoured to catch it, for she delighted in having lambs and innocent birds to fondle: but though the Nuns closed the door, and used every art and effort to entice or catch it, the little nondescript always either eluded them, or vanished; and it never tasted of any food which they set before it. This miracle being unique in its kind is related with becoming admiration by the chroniclers of the Seraphic Order; as it well may, for, for a monastic writer to invent a new miracle of any kind evinces no ordinary power of invention.

If this story be true, and true it must be unless holy Colette's reverend Roman Catholic biographers are liars, its truth cannot be admitted _sans tirer à consequence_; and it would follow as a corollary not to be disputed, that there are animals in the world of Angels. And on the whole it accorded with the general bearing of the Doctor's notions (notions rather than opinions he liked to call them where they were merely speculative) to suppose that there may be as much difference between the zoology of that world, and of this, as is found in the zoology and botany of widely distant regions here, according to different circumstances of climate: and rather to imagine that there were celestial birds, beasts, fishes, and insects, exempt from evil, and each happy in its kind to the full measure of its capacity for happiness, than to hold the immortality of brutes. Cudworth's authority had some weight with him on this subject, where the Platonical divine says that as “human souls could not possibly be generated out of matter, but were sometime or other created by the Almighty out of nothing preexisting, either in generations, or before them,” so if it be admitted that brute animals are “not mere machines, or _automata_ (as some seem inclinable to believe), but conscious and thinking beings; then from the same principle of reason, it will likewise follow, that their souls cannot be generated out of matter neither, and therefore must be derived from the fountain of all life, and created out of nothing by Him: who, since he can as easily annihilate as create, and does all for the best, no man need at all to trouble himself about their permanency, or immortality.”

Now though the Doctor would have been pleased to think, with the rude Indian, that when he was in a state of existence wherein no evil could enter

His faithful dog should bear him company,

he felt the force of this reasoning; and he perceived also that something analogous to the annihilation there intended, might be discerned in his own hypothesis. For in what may be called the visible creation he found nothing resembling that animalcular world which the microscope has placed within reach of our senses; nothing like those monstrous and prodigious forms which Leeuwenhoeck, it must be believed, has faithfully delineated.—Bishop has a beautiful epigram upon the theme _καλὰ πέφανται_

When thro a chink,[2] a darkened room Admits the solar beam, Down the long light that breaks the gloom, Millions of atoms stream.

In sparkling agitation bright, Alternate dies they bear; Too small for any sense but sight, Or any sight, but _there_.

Nature reveals not all her store To human search, or skill; And when she deigns to shew us more She shows us Beauty still.

But the microscopic world affords us exceptions to this great moral truth. The forms which are there discovered might well be called

Abominable, inutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceived, Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimæras dire.

Such verily they would be, if they were in magnitude equal to the common animals by which we are surrounded. But Nature has left all these seemingly misformed creatures in the lowest stage of existence,—the circle of inchoation; neither are any of the hideous forms of insects repeated in the higher grades of animal life; the sea indeed contains creatures marvellously uncouth and ugly, _beaucoup plus de monstres, sans comparaison, que la terre,_ and the Sieur de Brocourt, who was as curious in collecting the opinions of men as our philosopher, though no man could make more dissimilar uses of their knowledge, explains it _à cause de la facilité de la generation qui est en elle, dont se procreent si diverses figures, à raison de la grande chaleur qui se trouve en la mer, l'humeur y estant gras, et l'aliment abondant; toute generation se faisant par chaleur et humidité, qui produisent toutes choses._ With such reasoning our Doctor was little satisfied; it was enough to know that as the sea produces monsters, so the sea covers them, and that fish are evidently lower in the scale of being than the creatures of earth and air. It is the system of Nature then that whatever is unseemly should be left in the earliest and lowest stages; that life as it ascends should cast off all deformity, as the butterfly leaves its _exuviæ_ when its perfect form is developed; and finally that whatever is imperfect should be thrown off, and nothing survive in immortality but what is beautiful as well as good.

[Footnote 2: The Reader may not be displeased to read the following beautiful passage from Jeremy Taylor.

“If God is glorified in the sun and moon, in the rare fabric of the honeycombs, in the discipline of bees, in the economy of pismires, in the little houses of birds, in the curiosity of an eye, God being pleased to delight in those little images and reflexes of himself from those pretty mirrors, which, _like a crevice in the wall, through a narrow perspective, transmit the species of a vast excellency_: much rather shall God be pleased to behold himself in the glasses of our obedience, in the emissions of our will and understanding; these being rational and apt instruments to express him, far better than the natural, as being near communications of himself.”—_Invalidity of a late or Death-bed Repentance_, _Vol. v. p. 464_.]

He was not acquainted with the speculation, or conception (as the Philotheistic philosopher himself called it) of Giordano Bruno, that _deformium animalium formæ, formosæ sunt in cœlo_. Nor would he have assented to some of the other opinions which that pious and high minded victim of papal intolerance, connected with it. That _metallorum in se non lucentium formæ, lucent in planetis suis_, he might have supposed, if he had believed in the relationship between metals and planets. And if Bruno's remark applied to the Planets only, as so many other worlds, and did not regard the future state of the creatures of this our globe, the Doctor might then have agreed to his assertion that _non enim homo, nec animalia, nec metalla ut hic sunt, illic existunt_. But the Philotheist of Nola, in the remaining part of this his twelfth _Conceptus Idearum_ soared above the Doctor's pitch: _Quod nempe hic discurrit_, he says, _illic actu viget, discursione superiori. Virtutes enim quæ versus materiam explicantur: versus actum primum uniuntur, et complicantur. Unde patet quod dicunt Platonici, ideam quamlibet rerum etiam non viventium, vitam esse et intelligentiam quandam. Item et in Primâ Mente unam esse rerum omnium ideam. Illuminando igitur, vivificando, et uniendo est quod te superioribus agentibus conformans, in conceptionem et retentionem specierum efferaris._ Here the Philosopher of Doncaster would have found himself in the dark, but whether because “blinded by excess of light,” or because the subject is within the confines of uttermost darkness, is not for me his biographer to determine.