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THE EAGLE’S NEST.’

217

theology, which tells us of Shakespeare’s relation to a
Being greater than himself.
The lecture passes to the consideration of the sophia
that stands above the several sciences : ornithology is
the subject of the lecturer’s present lesson, and nest-
building gives him the opportunity for his loveliest
work, wherein we are appropriately made to love the
nest - building rather than the description. And the
great artist, Ruskin says, works somewhat like the bird
—“ with the feeling we may attribute to a diligent bull-
finch—that the thing, whether pretty or ugly, could not
have been better done,” and he is “ thankful it is no
worse.” And though this is the feeling of the great,
could not even ordinary men, asks Ruskin, be so simple
in their measure that superior beings might be interested
in their work, as men are in the birds’ ?
“ It cannot be imagined that either the back streets
of our manufacturing towns, or the designs of our
suburban villas, are things which the angels desire to
look into; . . . but we should at least possess as much
unconscious art as the lower brutes, and build nests
which shall be, for ourselves, entirely convenient, and
may perhaps in the eyes of superior beings appear more
beautiful than to our own.”
It would be easy to reply that the suburban villa with
its bathrooms is—whatever else it may fail to be—more
convenient and ingenious than a nest. And as for the
noise of a town and the noise of birds, compared on a
following page, Ruskin does not open any door on the
 
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