Page:Ainsworth's Magazine - Volume 1.djvu/47

like Ariel. Aldermen must waddle still, predestinatedly, as the Strasburgh goose overburdened with a liver, or ducks cooped on the deck of a collier. Here is encouragement to temperance—here an antidote to gluttony; to fly, you must live like an anchorite, and daily diminish your lentils for the better expansion of your pulse. For a flying man, give me the limp and lithe, active, sinewy, skin-and-bone young fellow, who can waltz upon the tight rope, run down wild horses on the plain of Texas, or dive to the corals of Bermuda from the man-of-war's maintop. An Indian tumbler, dancing on his bamboo cane,—a wiry Bushman, leaping aside from the lurking lion,—a famished Van-Diemenite, running up the palm like a cat, to batten on its juicy crown,—a jockey etherealized from fat,—in short, a strong stripling, redundant in health, light of heart, vigorous, bold, and happy. Here is a fit disciple for the Flying Philosopher.

But how, with this cumbrous bulk of gas overcoming human heaviness, to govern the mass with these weak arms—О! Faraday and Brand, find us somewhat lighter; I much despair of flying upon carburetted hydrogen. But, if we must attempt it, as verily we might, let it be somewhat as thus:—Falstaff declares that grief had blown him out like a bladder; let gas do alike for voluminous garments of caoutchouc. Swell out the birdlike shape on back and belly, arms, and legs, till the inner man himself is as the hawk's heart, surrounded with lightsomeness and buoyancy. By delicate steel springs between the shoulder-blades, communicating with a fan-like wing, strengthen and fledge man's elongated arm; give him a waistband of sand, to be let out by a spring valve, reachable by the mouth, to regulate his rising; another similar valve to control some upper part of the gas-garment, to give him the power of sinking; the man to be made as light-headed as can be, by a monstrous silk helmet, inflated, with a peaked beak to cut the air. He would thus look like some huge Morphia, or Thanatos, of the moth species, and if rendered buoyant enough to overcome the power of gravitation, might as well fly by well-directed efforts of exertion, as he may swim by the like efforts. Whether the buoyant power should be under him, as Grecian Pegasus and the winged horse of Persian story, or over him, as the roc of Arabia and the ram of Polypheme whereto Ulysses clung, experience best might tell: perhaps it should be both. Only, let the would-be-bird beware, that even if he mount per gas upward, he be not, as it were, tied to a rocket, to come down with the stick; and if he mount not at all, but leap boldly off the housetop, let him be careful he meet not the fate of that white-robed flutterer of Cairo, who, standing on a tower, gathered the wind into his garments, jumped into the courtyard, and—got smashed.