head
above the foam, his gathered prey seized--all four--by their limber
necks, and brightening, like a bunch of flowers, as they glitter towards
the shore! With one bold body-shake, felt to the point, of each
particular hair, he scatters the water from his coat like mist,
reminding one of that glorious line in Shakespeare,

"Like dewdrops from the Lion's mane,"

advancing with sinewy legs seemingly lengthened by the drenching flood,
and dripping tail stretched out in all its broad longitude, with hair
almost like white hanging plumes--magnificent as tail of the Desert-Born
at the head of his seraglio in the Arabian Sands. Half-way his master
meets his beloved Fro on the slope; and first proudly and haughtily
pausing to mark our eye, and then humbly, as beseemeth one whom nature,
in his boldest and brightest bearing, hath yet made a slave--he lays the
offering at our feet, and having felt on his capacious forehead the
approving pressure of our hand,

"While, like the murmur of a dream,
He hears us breathe his name,"

he suddenly flings himself round with a wheel of transport, and in many
a widening circle pursues his own uncontrollable ecstasies with
whirlwind speed; till, as if utterly joy-exhausted, he brings his
snow-white bulk into dignified repose on a knoll, that very moment
illuminated by a burst of sunshine!

Not now--as fades upon our pen the solemn light of the dying day--shall
we dare to decide, whether or not Nature--O most matchless creature of
thy kind!--gave thee, or gave thee not, the gift of an immortal
soul!--Better such creed--fond and foolish though it may be--yet
scarcely unscriptural, for in each word of Scripture there are many
meanings, even when each sacred syllable is darkest to be read,--better
such creed than that of the atheist or sceptic, distracted ever in his
seemingly sullen apathy, by the dim, dark doom of dust. Better that Fro
should live, than that Newton should die--for ever. What though the
benevolent Howard devoted his days to visit the dungeon's gloom, and by
intercession with princes, to set the prisoners free from the low
damp-dripping stone roof of the deep-dug cell beneath the foundation
rocks of the citadel, to the high dewdropping vault of heaven, too, too
dazzlingly illumined by the lamp of the insufferable sun! There reason
triumphed--those were the works of glorified humanity. But thou--a
creature of mere instinct--according to Descartes, a machine, an