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Updated: May 7, 2025
They may seem peculiar instruments for probing tradition particularly the sentimental ones. The critic has not yet admitted some of the heartiest among them Audubon's sketches of pioneer life, for example into literature at all. And yet, unless I am mightily mistaken, they are signs of convalescence as clearly as they are symptoms of our disease.
Here this bird, which according to Audubon's observations in Louisiana, is shy and recluse, affecting remote marshes and the borders of large ponds of stagnant water, had placed its nest in the lowest twig of the lowest branch of a large sycamore, immediately over a great thoroughfare, and so near the ground that a person standing in a cart or sitting on a horse could have reached it with his hand.
He was struck with the man, and has given the story of his interview with Boone. It is so illustrative of the character of the hunter, that I give it to you in Mr. Audubon's words. "Daniel Boone, or as he was usually called in the western country, Colonel Boone, happened to spend a night under the same roof with me, more than twenty years ago.
Audubon's life illustrates strikingly the compelling power of devotion to an ideal. Few men have met such discouragements as he, and fewer still have overcome them.
I do not know what Alice did with the wax-flowers. As for the nine hundred dollars, I appropriated it to laudable purposes. Some of it went for a new silk dress for Alice; the rest I spent for books, and I recall my thrill of delight when I saw ensconced upon my shelves a splendid copy of Audubon's "Birds" with its life-size pictures of turkeys, buzzards, and other fowl done in impossible colors.
Of its treasures of literary and artistic interest it is impossible to give categorical details. Perhaps the library prizes most the magnificent elephant folio edition, in four volumes, of Audubon's "Birds and Quadrupeds of North America," with its colored plates, heavy paper, and general air of sumptuousness.
But the work of both men was distinctively American, for Audubon devoted his life to the study of American birds, and Agassiz the latter part of his to the study and classification of American fishes as well as to services of the most valuable kind in the field of geology and paleontology. Audubon's story is a curious and interesting one.
Audubon's drawings have far more spirit and artistic excellence, and his text shows far more enthusiasm and hearty affiliation with Nature. In accuracy of observation, Wilson is fully his equal, if not his superior. Mrs. Audubon and her baby son were sent back to her father's at Fatland Ford where they remained upwards of a year.
As to works on ornithology, Audubon's, though its expense puts it beyond the reach of the mass of readers, is by far the most full and accurate. His drawings surpass all others in accuracy and spirit, while his enthusiasm and devotion to the work he had undertaken have but few parallels in the history of science. His chapter on the wild goose is as good as a poem.
Either the Baltimore oriole has changed its habits of nest-building since Audubon's day, or else he was wrong in his drawing of the nest of that bird, in making the opening on the side near the top. I have never seen an oriole's nest that was not open at the top.
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