ays, "Look at the bird! She dashes into the water, _falling like a
rock_ and raising a column of spray--she has _fallen from a great
height_. And now she rises again into the air--_what an extraordinary
sight_!" Nothing is so annoying as to be ordered to look at a sight
which, unless you shut your eyes, it is impossible for you not to see. A
person behaving in a boat like Poietes, deserved being flung overboard.
"Look at the bird!" Why, every eye was already upon her; and if Poietes
had had a single spark of poetry in his composition, he would have been
struck mute by such a sight, instead of bawling out, open-mouthed and
goggle-eyed, like a Cockney to a rocket at Vauxhall. Besides, an eagle
does not, when descending on her prey, fall like a rock. There is
nothing like the "_vis inertiae_" in her precipitation. You still see the
self-willed energy of the ravenous bird, as the mass of plumes flashes
in the spray--of which, by the by, there never was, nor will be, a
column so raised. She is as much the queen of birds as she sinks as when
she soars--her trust and her power are still seen and felt to be in her
pinions, whether she shoots to or from the zenith--to a falling star she
might be likened--just as any other devil--either by Milton or
Wordsworth--for such a star seems to our eye and our imagination ever
instinct with spirit, not to be impelled by exterior force, but to be
self-shot from heaven.

Upon our word, we begin to believe that we ourselves deserve the name of
Poietes much better than the gentleman who at threescore had never seen
an eagle. "She has fallen from a great height," quoth the
gentleman--"What an extraordinary sight!" he continueth--while we are
mute as the oar suspended by the up-gazing Celt, whose quiet eye
brightens as it pursues the Bird to her eyrie in the cliff over the cove
where the red-deer feed.

Poietes having given vent to his emotions in such sublime
exclamations--"Look at the bird!" "What an extraordinary sight!" might
have thenceforth held his tongue, and said no more about eagles. But
Halieus cries, "There! you see her rise with a fish in her talons"--and
Poietes, very simply, or rather like a simpleton, returns for answer,
"She _gives an interest which I hardly expected to have found in this
scene_. Pray, are there _many of these animals_ in this country?" A poet
hardly expecting to find interest in such a scene as a great Highland
loch--Loch Maree! "Pray, are there many _of thes