k! manifestly from
a thing with life. A pause of silence! and hollower and hoarser the
croak is heard from the opposite side of the glen. Eyeing the black
sultry heaven, he feels the warm plash on his face, but sees no bird on
the wing. By-and-by something black lifts itself slowly and heavily up
from a precipice, in deep shadow; and before it has cleared the
rock-range, and entered the upper region of air, he knows it to be a
Raven. The creature seems wroth to be disturbed in his solitude, and in
his strong straight-forward flight aims at the head of another glen; but
he wheels round at the iron barrier, and, alighting among the heather,
folds his huge massy wings, and leaps about as if in anger, with the
same savage croak--croak--croak! No other bird so like a demon--and
should you chance to break a leg in the desert, and be unable to crawl
to a hut, your life is not worth twenty-four hours' purchase. Never was
there a single hound in Lord Darlington's packs, since his lordship
became a mighty hunter, with nostrils so fine as those of that feathered
fiend, covered though they be with strong hairs or bristles, that grimly
adorn a bill of formidable dimensions, and apt for digging out
eye-socket and splitting skull-structure of dying man or beast. That
bill cannot tear in pieces like the eagle's beak, nor are its talons so
powerful to smite as to compress--but a better bill for
cut-and-thrust--- push, carte, and tierce--the dig dismal and the plunge
profound--belongs to no other bird. It inflicts great gashes; nor needs
the wound to be repeated on the same spot. Feeder foul and obscene! to
thy nostril upturned "into the murky air, sagacious of thy quarry from
afar," sweeter is the scent of carrion, than to the panting lover's
sense and soul the fragrance of his own virgin's breath and bosom, when,
lying in her innocence in his arms, her dishevelled tresses seem laden
with something more ethereally pure than "Sabean odours from the spicy
shores of Araby the Blest."

The Raven dislikes all animal food that has not a deathy smack. It
cannot be thought that he has any reverence or awe of the mystery of
life. Neither is he a coward; at least, not such a coward as to fear the
dying kick of a lamb or sheep. Yet so long as his victim can stand, or
sit, or lie in a strong struggle, the raven keeps aloof--hopping in a
circle that narrows and narrows as the sick animal's nostrils keep
dilating in convulsions, and its eyes grow dim