don't mean that it is disgraceful he
should not know the anatomy of it, but that he should never have looked
at it to see how the feathers lie.

Now Holbein paints men gloriously, but never looks at birds; Gibbons,
the wood-cutter, carves birds, but can't men;--of the two faults the
last is the worst; but the right is in looking at the whole of nature
in due comparison, and with universal candor and tenderness.

78. At the whole of nature, I say, not at _super_-nature--at what you
suppose to be above the visible nature about you. If you are not
inclined to look at the wings of birds, which God has given you to
handle and to see, much less are you to contemplate, or draw
imaginations of, the wings of angels, which you can't see. Know your
own world first--not denying any other, but being quite sure that the
place in which you are now put is the place with which you are now
concerned; and that it will be wiser in you to think the gods
themselves may appear in the form of a dove, or a swallow, than that,
by false theft from the form of dove or swallow, you can represent the
aspect of gods.

79. One sweet instance of such simple conception, in the end of the
Odyssey, must surely recur to your minds in connection with our subject
of to-day, but you may not have noticed the recurrent manner in which
Homer insists on the thought. When Ulysses first bends and strings his
bow, the vibration of the chord is shrill, "like the note of a
swallow." A poor and unwarlike simile, it seems! But in the next book,
when Ulysses stands with his bow lifted, and Telemachus has brought the
lances, and laid them at his feet, and Athena comes to his side to
encourage him,--do you recollect the gist of her speech? "You fought,"
she says, "nine years for the sake of Helen, and for another's
house:--now, returned, after all those wanderings, and under your own
roof, for it, and its treasures, will you not fight, then?" And she
herself flies up to the house-roof, and thence, _in the form of the
swallow_, guides the arrows of vengeance for the violation of the
sanctities of home.

80. To-day, then, I believe verily for the first time, I have been able
to put before you some means of guidance to understand the beauty of
the bird which lives with you in your own houses, and which purifies
for you, from its insect pestilence, the air that you breathe. Thus the
sweet domestic thing has done, for men, at least these four thousand
years. She has been