Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 5).djvu/589

The accipitral birds are the eagles, the vultures, the falcons, the owls—all those birds that bite and tear unhappy mammals as well as birds of more peaceful habits than themselves. They have all, it will be observed, Roman noses, which may be the reason why the Romans adopted the eagle as a standard; as also it may not. They have striking characteristics of their own, and have been found very useful by poets and other people who have to wander off the main subject to make plain what they mean. The owl is the wiseacre of Nature, the vulture is a vile harpy, and the eagle is the embodiment of everything great and mighty, and glorious and free, and swooping and catoptrical. There is very little to say against the eagle, except that he looks a deal the better a long way off, like an impressionist picture or a volcano. When the eagle is flying and swooping, or soaring and staring impudently at the sun, or reproaching an old feather of his own in the arrow that sticks in his chest, or mewing his mighty youth (a process I never quite understood)—when he is doing noble and poetical things of this class at an elevation of a great many thousand feet above the sea level he is