year; but under her careful
nurture of twenty years it had risen to nearly one hundred pounds
annually. It requires about one pound and a half to make a coverlet for
a single bed, and the down is worth from twelve to fifteen shillings
per pound. Most of the eggs are taken and pickled for winter
consumption, one or two only being left to hatch."

But here, again, pulverulent Dr. Hartwig leaves us untold who
'consumes' all these pickled eggs of the cooing and downy-breasted
creatures; (you observe, in passing, that an eider-duck coos instead of
quacking, and must be a sort of Sea-Dove,) or what addition their price
makes to the good old lady's feather-nesting income of, as I calculate
it, sixty to seventy-five pounds a year,--all her twenty years of skill
and humanity and moderate plucking having got no farther than that. And
not feeling myself able, on these imperfect data, to offer any
recommendations to the Icelandic government touching the duck trade, I
must end my present chapter with a rough generalization of results. For
a beginning of which, the time having too clearly and sadly come for
me, as I have said in my preface, to knit up, as far as I may, the
loose threads and straws of my raveled life's work, I reprint in this
place the second paragraph of the chapter on Vital Beauty in the second
volume of 'Modern Painters,' premising, however, some few necessary
words.

130. I intended never to have reprinted the second volume of 'Modern
Painters'; first, because it is written in affected imitation of
Hooker, and not in my own proper style; and, secondly, yet chiefly,
because I did not think the analytic study of which it mainly consists,
in the least likely to be intelligible to the general student, or,
therefore, profitable to him. But I find now that the 'general student'
has plunged himself into such abysses, not of analytic, but of
dissolytic,--dialytic--or even diarrhoeic--lies, belonging to the
sooty and sensual elements of his London and Paris life, that, however
imperfectly or dimly done, the higher analysis of that early work of
mine ought at least to be put within his reach; and the fact, somehow,
enforced upon him, that there were people before _he_ lived, who knew
what 'aesthesis' meant, though they did not think that pigs' flavoring
of pigs'-wash was ennobled by giving it that Greek name: and that there
were also people before his time who knew what vital beauty meant,
though they did not seek it eith