As they lived, free, dauntless ever, So the brave Aturians died; And the green banks of the river All their mortal relics hide. Yet the Parrot, ne’er forgetting Those who loved him, mourns them still; On the stone his sharp beak whetting, While the air his wailings fill. Where are now the youths who bred him, To pronounce their mother tongue,— Where the gentle maids who fed him, And who built his nest when young? All, alas! are lifeless lying, Stretch’d upon their grassy bed; Nor can all his mournful crying, E’er awake the slumbering dead. Still he calls with voice imploring, To a world that heeds him not; Nought replies but waters roaring— No kind soul bewails his lot. Swift the savage turns his rudder, When his eyes the bird behold; None e’er saw without a shudder That Aturian Parrot old! THE NOCTURNAL LIFE OF ANIMALS IN THE PRIMEVAL FOREST. If the faculty of appreciating nature, in different races of man, and if the character of the countries they now inhabit, or have traversed in their earlier migrations, have more or less enriched the respective languages by appropriate terms, expressive of the forms of mountains, the state of vegetation, the appearances of the atmosphere, and the contour and grouping of the clouds, it must be admitted that by long use and literary caprice many of these designations have been diverted from the sense they originally bore. Words have gradually been regarded as synonymous, which ought to have remained distinct; and languages have thus lost a portion of the expressiveness and force which might else have imparted a physiognomical character to descriptions of natural scenery. As an evidence of the extent to which a communion with nature, and the requirements of a laborious nomadic life, may enrich language, I would recall the abundance of characteristic denominations employed in Arabic and Persian, to distinguish plains, steppes, and deserts[65], according as they are entirely bare, covered with sand, or intersected by tabular masses of rock; or as they are diversified by spots of pasture land and extended tracts of social plants. The old Castilian dialects are no less remarkable[66] for the copiousness of their terms descriptive of the physiognomy of mountains, especially in reference to those features which recur in all regions of the earth, and which proclaim afar off the nature of the rock. As the declivities of the Andes and the mountainous parts of