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Hence one has defined him to be a featherless biped, a definition which is equally applicable to an unfledged fowl: another to be an animal which forms opinions, than which nothing can be more inaccurate, for a very small number of the species form opinions, and the remainder take them upon trust, without investigation or inquiry.
"Here among us," he writes from college, "are barely one or two who do not flutter off, all unfledged, into theology, having gotten of philology or of philosophy scarce so much as a smattering. And for theology they are content with just what is enough to enable them to patch up a paltry sermon."
We could make out the chicks inside and hear them croaking; we hewed open one egg with hatchets, and dug out an unfledged chick bulkier than twenty vultures. Sailing on, we had left the nest some five and twenty miles behind, when a miracle happened.
Of the eldest, Grace Crawley, we shall hear much in the coming story. She was at this time nineteen years old, and there were those who said that, in spite of her poverty, her shabby outward apparel, and a certain thin, unfledged, unrounded form of person, a want of fulness in the lines of her figure, she was the prettiest girl in that part of the world.
Eustis expostulating with her daughter, the news of Mary Virginia's unannounced engagement had sifted pretty thoroughly throughout the length and breadth of Appleboro; a town where an unfledged and callow rumor will start out of a morning and come home to roost at night with talons and tailfeathers. That Mary Virginia had all James Eustis's own quiet will-power, everybody knew.
But that man shall be the eternal slave who says to Duty I WILL NOT. Nor do I care to tell such a man of the "THOUSAND FOLD" of the truth concerning that altar, that it is indeed the nest of God's heart, in which the poor, unsightly, unfledged offering shall lie, until they come to shape and loveliness, and wings grow upon them to bear them back to us divinely precious.
The spritish, fantastic youth impressed those he encountered, even when he was one of the unfledged eaglets hatched in the ancient eyrie of his precipitous city, whom Browning tells us are not counted "till there is a rush of wings, and lo! they are flown," "What was so taking in him, and how is one to analyse that dazzling surface of pleasantry, that changeful, shining humour, wit, wisdom, recklessness, beneath which beat the most kind and tolerant of hearts?" asks Andrew Lang.
Now, all these pleasures had departed; gold, unhallowed gold, gotten hastily in the beginning, broadcast on the rank strong soil of a heart that coveted it earnestly, had sprung up as a crop of poisonous tares, and choked the patch of wheat; gold, unhallowed gold, light come, light gone, had scared or killed the flock of unfledged loves that used to nestle in the cotter's thatch, as surely as if the cash were stones, flung wantonly by truants at a dove-cot; and forth from the crock, that egg of wo, had been hatched a red-eyed vulture, to tyrannize in this sad home, where but lately the pelican had dwelt, had spread her fostering wing, and poured out the wealth of her affections.
'tis easy to see that those two unfledged Cupids are already over head and ears in love with each other. Have a care, Master Argyle thy pretty mistress may be lost to thee to-morrow; go back to thy books and thy studies for she is not for thee. Ah, the devil!
Young might, for two or three years, have tried that kind of life, in which his natural principles would not suffer him to wallow long. If this were so, he has left behind him not only his evidence in favour of virtue, but the potent testimony of experience against vice. We shall soon see that one of his earliest productions was more serious than what comes from the generality of unfledged poets.
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