patience, endurance, and fortitude, have become with him, in strict
accordance with the Aristotelian Moral Philosophy--habits. A Peripatetic
Philosopher he could hardly be called--properly speaking, he belongs to
the Solar School--an airy sect, who take very high ground, indulge in
lofty flights, and are often lost in the clouds. Now and then a light
chapter might be introduced, setting forth how he and other youngsters
of the Blood Royal were wont to take an occasional game at High-Jinks,
or tourney in air lists, the champions on opposite sides flying from the
Perthshire and from the Argyllshire mountains, and encountering with a
clash in the azure common, six thousand feet high. But the fever of love
burned in his blood, and flying to the mountains of another continent,
in obedience to the yell of an old oral tradition, he wooed and won his
virgin bride--a monstrous beauty, wider-winged than himself, to kill or
caress, and bearing the proof of her noble nativity in the radiant Iris
that belongs in perfection of fierceness but to the Sun-starers, and in
them is found, unimpaired by cloudiest clime, over the uttermost parts
of the earth. The bridegroom and his bride, during the honey-moon, slept
on the naked rock--till they had built their eyrie beneath its
cliff-canopy on the mountain-brow. When the bride was "as Eagles wish to
be who love their lords"--devoted unto her was the bridegroom, even as
the cushat murmuring to his brooding mate in the central pine-grove of a
forest. Tenderly did he drop from his talons, close beside her beak, the
delicate spring lamb, or the too early leveret, owing to the hurried and
imprudent marriage of its parents before March, buried in a living tomb
on April's closing day. Through all thy glens, Albyn! hadst thou reason
to mourn, at the bursting of the shells that Queen-bird had been
cherishing beneath her bosom. Aloft in heaven wheeled the Royal Pair,
from rising to setting sun. Among the bright-blooming heather they
espied the tartan'd shepherd, or hunter creeping like a lizard, and from
behind the vain shadow of a rock watching with his rifle the flight he
would fain see shorn of its beams. The flocks were thinned--and the
bleating of desolate dams among the woolly people heard from many a
brae. Poison was strewn over the glens for their destruction, but the
Eagle, like the lion, preys not on carcasses; and the shepherd dogs
howled in agony over the carrion in which they devoured deat