used by him several times[1] to ornament his verse. I suppose his belief[2] was the same as Montaigne's, "God has ordered that the whole ocean should be stayed, made stable, and smooth'd without waves, without winds or rain, whilst the Halcyon broods upon her young which is just about the solstice, the shortest day of the year,[3] so that by her privilege we have seven days and seven nights in the very heart of winter when we may sayl without danger. Their females never have to do with any other male but their own, whom they always serve and assist without ever forsaking him all their lives: if he happen to be weak and broken with age they take him upon their shoulders and carry him from place to place and nurse him till death. But the most inquisitive into the secrets of nature could never yet arrive at the knowledge of the wonderful fabrick and architecture wherewith the Halcyon builds her nest for her little ones, nor guess at the matter. Plutarch, who has seen and handled many of them, thinks it is the bones of some fish which she joyns and binds together, interlacing them some lengthwise and others across, and adding ribs and hoops in such a manner that she forms at last a round vessel fit to launch; which being done, and the building finished, she carries it to the wash of the beach, where the sea, beating gently against it, shows her where she is to mend what is not well jointed and knit, and where better to fortify the seams that are leaky, and that open at the beating of the waves; and on the contrary what is well built and has had the due finishing, the beating of the waves does so close and
- ↑ Noah's Flood [iv. 1646]. "Elegy upon the noble Lady Aston's departure for Spain" [iv. 1251]. England's Heroical Epistles, "Mortimer to Queen Isabel" [i. 251]. Pol. xxiii. [ill. 1107]. Pol. xxvii. [iii. 1182].
- ↑ Essay lxviii. "Of Cruelty."
- ↑ Hence the propriety of Milton's celebrated lines in the Hymn on Christ's Nativity:—
"But peaceful was the night
Wherein the Prince of Light
His reign of peace upon the earth began:
The winds with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kist,
Whispering new joys to the mild ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave."
