ed isles,

"Placed far amid the melancholy main,"

or vast inland glens, where not a summer shieling smiles beneath the
region of eternal snows. But eagles are subject to diseases in flesh,
and bone, and blood, just like the veriest poultry that die of croup and
consumption on the dunghill before the byre-door. Sickness blinds the
eye that God framed to pierce the seas, and weakens the wing that
dallies with the tempest. Then the eagle feels how vain is the doctrine
of the divine right of kings. He is hawked at by the mousing owl, whose
instinct instructs him that these talons have lost their grasp and these
pinions their deathblow. The eagle lies for weeks famished in his eyry,
and, hunger-driven over the ledge, leaves it to ascend no more. He is
dethroned, and wasted to mere bones--a bunch of feathers--his flight is
now slower than that of the buzzard--he floats himself along now with
difficulty from knoll to knoll, pursued by the shrieking magpies,
buffeted by the corby, and lying on his back, like a recreant, before
the beak of the raven, who, a month ago, was terrified to hop round the
carcass till the king of the air was satiated, and gave his permission
to croaking Sooty to dig into the bowels he himself had scorned. Yet he
is a noble aim to the fowler still; you break a wing and a leg, but fear
to touch him with your hand; Fro feels the iron-clutch of his talons
constricted in the death-pang; and holding him up, you wonder that such
an anatomy--for his weight is not more than three pounds--could drive
his claws through that shaggy hide till blood sprung to the
blow--inextricable but to yells of pain, and leaving gashes hard to
heal, for virulent is the poison of rage in a dying bird of prey.

Sublime solitude of our boyhood! where each stone in the desert was
sublime, unassociated though it was with dreams of memory, in its own
simple native power over the human heart! Each sudden breath of wind
passed by us like the voice of a spirit. There were strange meanings in
the clouds--often so like human forms and faces threatening us off, or
beckoning us on, with long black arms, back into the long-withdrawing
wilderness of heaven. We wished then, with quaking bosoms, that we had
not been all alone in the desert--that there had been another heart,
whose beatings might have kept time with our own, that we might have
gathered courage in the silent and sullen gloom from the light in a
brother's eye--the smile on a