“Sometimes He scours the right hand coast, sometimes the left, Now shaves with level wing the deep, then soars Up to the fiery concave, towering high. As when far off at sea a fleet descried Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds Close sailing from Bengula, or the Isles Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring Their spicy drugs: they on the trading flood Through the wide Ethiopean to the Cape Ply, stemming nightly toward the pole. So seemed Far off the flying fiend.” Do you not think Dante’s angel the most spiritual? He says, “he wore The semblance of a man by other care Beset, and keenly pressed, than thought of him Who in his presence stand.” And Milton— “——on some great charge employed He seemed, or fixed in cogitation deep.” The thought here is evidently borrowed from the Italian “_lender’s book_.” There is a strange propensity to follow these lofty flights; as when in looking from an eminence we feel a temptation to breast the blue ether below us. We are fairly in the wake of Satan when he “_Shaves with level wing the deep_, then soars UP to the fiery concave—” And now since we are pinion-mounted, like Icarus or Daniel O’Rourke, let us select a few more familiar specimens of flying. “Look you,” from Coleridge— “Triumphant on the bosom of the storm Glances the fire-clad eagle’s wheeling form.” And lo! from Shelly on eagle, “—— a winged form On all the winds of heaven approaching ever _Floated, dilating as it came_: the storm Pursued it with fierce blasts and lightnings swift and warm.” The Viking’s war-ship, from Longfellow’s Saga of the Skeleton in Armor is a brave picture, “As with his wings aslant, Sails the fierce cormorant, Seeking some rocky haunt, With his prey laden: So toward the open main, Beating to sea again Through the wild hurricane, Bore I the maiden.” And Dryden, in his Annus Mirabilis, hath likewise a warship that _flies_! “With roomy deck, and guns of mighty strength, Whose low-laid mouths each mounting billow laves, Deep in her draught, and warlike in her length, She seems a sea-wasp flying o’er the waves.” But of all winged things the sky-lark is the bird of the poets. Hear Shakspeare— “Hark! hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings, And Phœbus ’gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chaliced flowers that lies; And winking May-buds begin To ope their golden eyes: With every thing that pretty bin, My lady sweet, arise.” Or this from Shelley—