upon his drawings in
natural history, in which he has exhibited a perfection never before
attempted. In all our climates--in the clear atmosphere, by the dashing
waters, amid the grand old forests with their peculiar and many-tinted
foliage, by him first made known to art--he has represented our
feathered tribes, building their nests and fostering their young, poised
on the tip of the spray and hovering over the sedgy margin of the lake,
flying in the clouds in quest of prey or from pursuit, in love, enraged,
indeed in all the varieties of their motion and repose and modes of
life, so perfectly that all other works of the kind are to his as
stuffed skins to the living birds.

But he has also indisputable claims to a high rank as a man of letters.
Some of his written pictures of birds, so graceful, clearly defined,
and brilliantly colored, are scarcely inferior to the productions of his
pencil. His powers of general description are not less remarkable. The
waters seem to dance to his words as to music, and the lights and shades
of his landscapes show the practised hand of a master. The evanescent
shades of manners, also, upon the extreme frontiers, where the
footprints of civilization have hardly crushed the green leaves, have
been sketched with graphic fidelity in his journals.

No author has more individuality. The enthusiastic, trustful and loving
spirit which breathes through his works distinguished the man. From the
beginning he surrendered himself entirely to his favorite pursuit, and
was intent to learn every thing from the prime teacher, Nature. His
style as well as his knowledge was a fruit of his experiences. He had
never written for the press until after the age at which most authors
have established their reputation; and when he did write, his page
glowed like the rich wild landscape in the spring, when Nature, then
most beautiful, "bathes herself in her own dewy waters." We seem to hear
his expressions of wondering admiration, as unknown mountains, valleys
and lakes burst upon his view, as the deer at his approach leaped from
his ambush into the deeper solitudes, as the startled bird with rushing
wings darted from his feet into the sky; or his pious thanksgiving, as
at the end of a weary day the song of the sparrow or the robin relieved
his mind from the heavy melancholy that bore it down.

When the celebrated Buffon had completed the ornithological portion of
his great work on natural history, he announce