Ch. 16: Humming-birds

Humming-birds are perhaps the very loveliest things in nature, and many
celebrated writers have exhausted their descriptive powers in vain
efforts to picture them to the imagination. The temptation was certainly
great, after describing the rich setting of tropical foliage and flower,
to speak at length of the wonderful gem contained within it; but they
would in this case have been wise to imitate that modest novel-writer
who introduced a blank space on the page where the description of his
matchless heroine should have appeared. After all that has been written,
the first sight of a living humming-bird, so unlike in its beauty all
other beautiful things, comes like a revelation to the mind. To give any
true conception of it by means of mere word-painting is not more
impossible than it would be to bottle up a supply of the "living
sunbeams" themselves, and convey them across the Atlantic to scatter
them in a sparkling shower over the face of England.

Doubtless many who have never seen them in a state of nature imagine
that a tolerably correct idea of their appearance can be gained from
Gould's colossal monograph. The pictures there, however, only represent
dead humming-birds. A dead robin is, for purposes of bird-portraiture,
as good as a live robin; the same may be said of even many
brilliant-plumaged species less aerial in their habits than
humming-birds. In butterflies the whole beauty is seldom seen until the
insect is dead, or, at any rate, captive. It was not when Wallace saw
the Ornithoptera croesus flying about, but only when he held it in his
hands, and opened its glorious wings, that the sight of its beauty
overcame him so powerfully. The special kind of beauty which makes the
first sight of a humming-bird a revelation depends on the swift singular
motions as much as on the intense gem-like and metallic brilliancy of
the plumage.

The minute exquisite form, when the bird hovers on misty wings, probing
the flowers with its coral spear, the fan-like tail expanded, and
poising motionless, exhibits the feathers shot with many hues; and the
next moment vanishes, or all but vanishes, then reappears at another
flower only to vanish again, and so on successively, showing its
splendours not continuously, but like the intermitted flashes of the
firefly--this forms a picture of airy grace and loveliness that baffles
description. All this glory disappears when the bird is dead, and even
when it alights to rest on a bough. Sitting still, it looks like an
exceedingly attenuated kingfisher, without the pretty plumage of that
bird, but retaining its stiff artificial manner. No artist has been so
bold as to attempt to depict the bird as it actually appears, when
balanced before a flower the swift