sitting, about to lay an egg in an old eyry,
soon repaired and furbished up for the honey-week, with a number of
small birds lying on the edge of the hymeneal couch, with which, when
wearied with love, and yawp with hunger, Angelica may cram her maw till
she be ready to burst, by her bridegroom's breast.

Forgotten all human dwellings, and all the thoughts and feelings that
abide by firesides, and doorways, and rooms, and roofs--delightful was
it, during the long long midsummer holiday, to lie all alone, on the
greensward of some moor-surrounded mount, not far from the foot of some
range of cliffs, and with our face up to the sky, wait, unwearying, till
a speck was seen to cross the blue cloudless lift, and steadying itself
after a minute's quivering into motionless rest, as if hung suspended
there by the counteracting attraction of heaven and earth, known to be a
Falcon! Balanced far above its prey, and, soon as the right moment came,
ready to pounce down, and fly away with the treasure in its talons to
its crying eyry! If no such speck were for hours visible in the ether,
doubtless dream upon dream, rising unbidden, and all of their own wild
accord, congenial with the wilderness, did, like phantasmagoria, pass to
and fro, backwards and forwards, along the darkened curtain of our
imagination, all the lights of reason being extinguished or removed! In
that trance, not unheard, although scarcely noticed, was the cry of the
curlew, the murmur of the little moorland burn, or the din, almost like
dashing, of the far-off loch. 'Twas thus that the senses, in their most
languid state, ministered to the fancy, and fed her for a future day,
when all the imagery then received so imperfectly, and in broken
fragments, into her mysterious keeping, was to arise in orderly array,
and to form a world more lovely and more romantic even than the reality,
which then lay hushed or whispering, glittering or gloomy, in the
outward air. For the senses hear and see all things in their seeming
slumbers, from all the impulses that come to them in solitude gaining
more, far more, than they have lost! When we are awake, or half awake,
or almost sunk into a sleep, they are ceaselessly gathering materials
for the thinking and feeling soul--and it is hers, in a deep delight
formed of memory and imagination, to put them together by a divine
plastic power, in which she is almost, as it were, a very creator, till
she exult to look on beauty and on grande