My Literary Zoo

Title: My Literary Zoo

Author: Kate Sanborn

Release date: April 8, 2020 [eBook #61790] Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61790

Credits: Produced by Richard Tonsing, Sonya Schermann, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

KATE SANBORN’S BOOKS.

Abandoning an Adopted Farm. 12mo. Cloth, 75 cents.

“Every page is rich with its amusing and entertaining stories and references.”—Boston Herald.

“Can not fail to be of the utmost interest to any and all who have spent any time in the country and observed the ways of country people. Miss Sanborn is simply inimitable in her ability to catch the humorous in what is passing about her, and in setting it down so that others can enjoy it.”—Cleveland World.

Adopting an Abandoned Farm. 16mo. Boards, 50 cents.

“‘Adopting an Abandoned Farm’ has as much laugh to the square inch as any book we have read this many a day.”—Boston Sunday Herald.

“Miss Kate Sanborn has made a name and place for herself beside the immortal Sam Slick, and has made Gooseville, Connecticut, as illustrious as Slickville in Onion County, of the same State.”—The Critic.

“If any one wants an hour’s entertainment for a warm sunny day on the piazza, or a cold wet day by a log fire, this is the book that will furnish it.”—New York Observer.

A Truthful Woman in Southern California. 12mo. Cloth, 75 cents.

“Miss Sanborn is certainly a very bright writer, and when a book bears her name it is safe to buy it and put it aside for delectation when a leisure hour comes along. This bit of a volume is enticing in every page, and the weather seemed not to be so intolerably hot while we were reading it.”—New York Herald.

“Her descriptions are inimitable, and their brilliancy is enhanced with quaint and witty observations and brief historical allusions.... Valuable information and richly entertaining descriptions are admirably blended in this book.”—Boston Home Journal.

My Literary Zoo

EVERYBODY’S PETS.

Not the human pets of noted persons, such as Walter Scott’s Pet Marjorie, that winsome, precocious little witch, so loved by the “Wizard of the North,” or Bettina von Arnim, the eccentric, brilliant girl, whose rhapsodic idolatry was placidly encouraged by the great Goethe, but the dumb favourites of distinguished men and women.

I must devote a few pages to the various tributes to insects, birds, and animals, written about with love, pity, or admiration, yet not as pets, as Burns’s address to the Mousie:

and another to an unspeakable insect that rhymes with mouse. We remember, too, his essay on Inhuman Man, as he saw a wounded hare limp by. The fly has often been honoured in prose or verse, but we all like best the benevolent speech of dear Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy to the overgrown bluebottle, which had buzzed about his nose and tormented him cruelly during dinner, and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last. “I’ll not hurt thee,” said Uncle Toby; “I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head. Go,” said he, lifting up the window—“go, poor devil, get thee gone. Why should I hurt thee? This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”

Tristram adds, “The lesson then imprinted has never since been an hour out of mind, and I often think that I owe one half of my philanthropy to that one accidental impression.”

The Greek grasshopper must have 3been a wonderful creature, a sacred object, and spoken of as a charming songster. When Socrates and Phædrus came to the fountain shaded by the palm tree, where they had their famous discourse, Socrates spoke of “the choir of grasshoppers.”

Another makes the insect say to a rustic who had captured him:

Still another sings how a grasshopper took the place of a broken string on his lyre and “filled the cadence due.”

This Pindaric grasshopper seems quite unlike the ravaging locust of the West. Burroughs suggests that he should be brought to our country, as some one is trying to introduce the English lark.

Emerson devotes a poem to the burly dozing bumblebee, a genuine optimist:

4A delightful volume could be compiled on the literature of bird life, from the cuckoo, the earliest songster honoured by the poets, to Matthew Arnold’s canary. Passing on to animals, the Lake poets were interested to a noticeable degree in these humble companions. In Peter Bell, a poem that proved Wordsworth’s theories about poetry to be untenable, the ass is the hero, a veritable preacher, as in the days of Balaam. And Coleridge, greatly to the amusement of his critics, addressed some lines To a Young Ass, its Mother being tethered near it:

5Wordsworth also wrote on The White Doe of Rylstone and The Pet Lamb.

Southey paid his respects to The Pig and a Dancing Bear:

After sympathizing with his “piteous plight” he draws a moral for the advocates of the slave trade.

He also addressed poems to The Bee and A Spider; the latter must be given entire, it is so strong and original in its comparisons:

You remember that the pertinacity with which a spider renewed his exertions after failing six times to fix his net, roused Bruce to perseverance and success.

Cackling geese saved Rome, and Caligula shod his favourite horse with gold and nominated him for vice consul, as he considered him vastly superior to the men who aspired to that honourable position. Virgil amused his leisure hours with a gnat. Homer made pets of frogs and mice.

7The horse has been dearly loved by many famous people who have not been ashamed to own it.

Mr. Everett once told a pathetic anecdote of Edmund Burke, that “in the decline of his life, when living in retirement on his farm at Beaconsfield, the rumour went up to London that he had gone mad and went round his park kissing his cows and horses. His only son had died not long before, leaving a petted horse which had been turned into the park and treated as a privileged favourite. Mr. Burke in his morning walks would often stop to caress the favourite animal. On one occasion the horse recognised Mr. Burke from a distance, and coming nearer and nearer, eyed him with the most pleading look of recognition, and said as plainly as words could have said, ‘I have lost him too!’ and then the poor dumb beast deliberately laid his head upon Mr. Burke’s bosom. Overwhelmed by the tenderness of the animal, expressed in the mute eloquence of holy Nature’s universal language, the illustrious statesman for a moment lost his self-possession and 8clasping his arms around his son’s favourite animal, lifted up that voice which had caused the arches of Westminster

Hall to echo the noblest strains that sounded within them, and wept aloud. Burke is gone; but, sir, so hold me Heaven, if I were called upon to designate the event or the period in Burke’s life that would best sustain a charge of insanity, it would not be when, in a gush of the holiest and purest feeling that ever stirred the human heart, he wept aloud on the neck of a dead son’s favourite horse.”

Lord Erskine composed some lines to the memory of a beloved pony, Jack, who had carried him on the home circuit when he was first called to the bar, and could not afford any more sumptuous mode of travelling:

9The following address of an Arab to his horse is translated from the Arabic by Bayard Taylor:

Bayard Taylor loved and appreciated animals, and in an article in the Atlantic Monthly of February, 1877, on Studies of Animal Nature, he says: “If Darwin’s theory should be true, it will not degrade man; it will simply raise the whole animal world into dignity, leaving man as far in advance as he is at present.”

10He adds: “I have always had a great respect for animals, and have endeavoured to treat them with the consideration which I think they deserve. They have quick perceptions, and know when to be confiding or reticent. I have learned no better way to gain their confidence than to ask myself, If I were such or such an animal, how should I wish to be treated by man? and to act upon that suggestion. Since the key to the separate languages has been lost on both sides, the higher intelligence must condescend to open some means of communication with the lower.

“The zoölogists unfortunately rarely trouble themselves to do this; they are more interested in the skull of an elephant, the thigh-bone of a bird, or the dorsal fin of a fish, than in the intelligence or rudimentary moral sense of the creature. But the former field is open to all laymen, and nothing but a stubborn traditional contempt for our slaves or our hunted enemies in the animal world has held us back from a truer knowledge of them.

“In the first place, animals have much 11more capacity to understand human speech than is generally supposed. Some years ago, seeing the hippopotamus in Barnum’s Museum looking very stolid and dejected, I spoke to him in English, but he did not even move his eyes. Then I went to the opposite corner of the cage and said in Arabic: ‘I know you; come here to me.’ He instantly turned his head toward me. I repeated the words, and thereupon he came to the corner where I was standing, pressed his huge, ungainly head against the bars of the cage, and looked in my face with a touching delight while I stroked his muzzle. I have two or three times found a lion who recognised the same language, and the expression of his eyes for an instant seemed positively human.”

He also tells his experience with a tame lioness in Africa. “In a short time we were very good friends. She knew me, and always seemed glad to see me, though I sometimes teased her a little by getting astride of her back, or sitting upon her when she was lying down. When she was in 12a playful mood she would come to meet me as far as the rope would let her, get her forepaws around my leg and then take it in her mouth, as if she were going to eat me up. I was a little alarmed when she did this for the first time; but I soon saw that she was merely in play, and had no thought of hurting me, so I took her by the ears and slapped her sides, until at last she lay down and licked my hand. Her tongue was as coarse as a nutmeg grater, and my hand felt as if the skin was being rasped off.

“There was also a leopard in the garden with which I used to play a great deal, but which I never loved so well as the lioness. He was smaller and more active, and soon learned to jump upon my shoulders when I stooped down, or to climb up the tree to which he was tied, whenever I commanded him. But he was not so affectionate as the lioness, and sometimes forgot to draw in his claws when he played, so that he not only tore my clothing, but scratched my hands. I still have the marks of one of his teeth on the back of my right hand.

13“My old lioness was never rough, and I have frequently, when she had stretched out to take a nap, sat upon her back for half an hour at a time, smoking my pipe or reading.

“I assure you I was very sorry to part with her, and when I saw her for the last time one moonlight night, I gave her a good hug and an affectionate kiss. She would have kissed me back if her mouth had not been too large; but she licked my hand to show that she loved me, then laid her big head upon the ground and went to sleep.

“Dear old lioness! I wonder if you ever think of me. I wonder if you would know me, should we ever see each other again.”

If our late minister to Berlin, the accomplished poet, linguist, and cosmopolitan, could give his attention to animals as friends and companions, there can be nothing belittling in reading their praises as said or sung by those whom we all delight to honour.

Hamerton, indeed, makes a comparison in which we come out but 14second best. He says: “How much weariness has there been in the human race during the last fifty years, because the human race can not stop politically where it was, and, finding no rest, is pushed to a strange future that the wisest look forward to gravely, as certainly very dark and probably very dangerous! Meanwhile, have the bees suffered any political uneasiness? have they doubted the use of royalty or begrudged the cost of their queen? Have those industrious republicans, the ants, gone about uneasily seeking after a sovereign? Has the eagle grown weary of his isolation and sought strength in the practice of socialism? Has the dog become too enlightened to endure any longer his position as man’s humble friend, and contemplated a canine union for mutual protection against masters? No; the great principles of these existences are superior to change, and that which man is perpetually seeking—a political order in perfect harmony with his condition—the brute has inherited with his instincts.”

15Cowper, in The Task, devotes several pages to the proper treatment of animals, and expresses his admiration for their many noble qualities:

Bryant, in his well-known Lines to a Waterfowl, has a striking thought:

The dogge forsaketh not his master; no, not when he is starcke dead.—Dr. Caius.

DEVOTED TO DOGS.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.—George Eliot.

Literature, history, and biography are full to overflowing of instances of affection between dogs and their owners. Remember the dog Argus, which died of joy on the return of his master Ulysses after twenty years’ absence. The story is touchingly told in Homer’s Odyssey:

“As he draws near the gates of his own palace, he espies, dying of old age, disease, and neglect, his dog Argus—the companion of many a long chase in happier days. His instinct at once detects his old master, even through the disguise lent by the goddess of wisdom. Before he sees him he knows his voice and step, and raises his ears—

It is poor Argus’s last effort, and the old hound turns and dies—

Egyptians held the dog in adoration as the representative of one of the celestial signs, and the Indians considered him one of the sacred forms of their deities. The dog is placed at the feet of women in monuments, to symbolize affection and fidelity; and many of the Crusaders are represented with their feet on a dog, to show that they followed the standard of the Lord as a dog follows the footsteps of his master. “Man,” said Burns, “is the god of the dog”—knows nothing higher to reverence and obey. Kings and queens have found their most faithful friends among dogs. Frederick the Great allowed his elegant furniture at Potsdam to be nearly ruined by his dogs, who jumped upon the satin chairs and slept cosily on the luxurious sofas, and 21quite a cemetery may still be seen devoted to his pets. The pretty spaniel belonging to Mary Queen of Scots deserves honourable mention. He loved his ill-starred mistress when her human friends had forsaken her; nestled close by her side at the execution, and had to be forced away from her bleeding body. One of the prettiest

pictures of the Princess of Wales is taken with a tiny spaniel in her arms.

Before going further, just recall some of the most famous dogs of mythology, literature, and life, simply giving their names for want of space:

Arthur’s dog Cavall.

Dog of Catherine de’ Medicis, Phœbê, a lapdog.

Cuthullin’s dog Luath, a swift-footed hound.

Dora’s dog Jip.

Douglas’s dog Luffra, from The Lady of the Lake.

Fingal’s dog Bran.

Landseer’s dog Brutus, painted as The Invader of the Larder.

Llewellyn’s dog Gelert.

Lord Lurgan’s dog Master McGrath: 22presented at court by the express desire of Queen Victoria.

Maria’s dog Silvio, in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey.

Punch’s dog Toby.

Sir Walter Scott’s dogs Maida, Camp, Hamlet.

Dog of the Seven Sleepers, Katmir.

The famous Mount St. Bernard dog, which saved forty human beings, was named Barry. His stuffed skin is preserved in the museum at Berne.

Sir Isaac Newton’s dog, who by overturning a candle destroyed much precious manuscript, was named Diamond.

The ancient Xantippus caused his dog to be interred on an eminence near the sea, which has ever since retained his name, Cynossema. There are even legends of nations that have had a dog for their king. It is said that barking is not a natural faculty, but is acquired through the dog’s desire to talk with man. In a state of nature, dogs simply whine and howl.

When Alexander encountered Diogĕnês the cynic, the young Macedonian king introduced himself with the 23words, “I am Alexander, surnamed ‘the Great.’” To which the philosopher replied, “And I am Diogĕnês, surnamed ‘the Dog.’” The Athenians raised to his memory a pillar of Parian marble, surmounted with a dog, and bearing the following inscription:

What man or woman worth remembering but has loved at least one dog? Hamerton, in speaking of the one dog—the special pet and dear companion of every boy and many a girl, from Ulysses to Bismarck—observes that “the comparative shortness of the lives of dogs is the only imperfection in the relation between them and us. If they had lived to threescore and ten, man and dog might have travelled through life together; but as it is, we must have either a succession of affections, or else, when the first is buried in its early grave, live in a chill condition of dog-lessness.” I thank him for coining that compound word. Almost every one might, like Grace 24Greenwood and Gautier, write a History of my Pets, and make a most readable book. Bismarck honoured one of his dogs, Nero, with a formal funeral. The body was borne on the shoulders of eight workmen dressed in black to a grave in the park. He had been poisoned, and a large reward was offered for the discovery of the assassin. The prince, statesman, diplomatist, does not believe in dog-lessness, and gives to another hound,

equally devoted, the same intense affection. “My dog—where is my dog?” are his first words on alighting from a railway, as Sultan must travel second class. He even mixes the food for his dogs with his own hands, believing it will make them love him the more.

Another Nero was the special companion of Mrs. Carlyle, a little white dog, who had for his playmate a black cat, whose name was Columbine, and Carlyle says that during breakfast, whenever the dining-room door was opened, Nero and Columbine would come waltzing into the room in the height of joy. He went with his 25mistress everywhere, led by a chain for fear of thieves. For eleven years he cheered her life at Craigenputtock, “the loneliest nook in Britain.”

Nero’s death was a tragical one. In October, 1859, while walking out with the maid one evening, a butcher’s cart driving furiously round a sharp corner ran over his throat. He was not killed on the spot, although his mistress says “he looked killed enough at first.” The poor fellow was put into a warm bath, wrapped up in flannels, and left to die. The morning found him better, however; he was able to wag his tail in response to the caresses of his mistress.

Little by little he recovered the use of himself, but it was ten days before he could bark.

He lived four months after this, docile, affectionate, loyal up to his last hour, but weak and full of pain. The doctor was obliged at last to give him prussic acid. They buried him at the top of the garden in Cheyne Row, and planted cowslips round his grave, and his loving mistress placed a stone tablet, with name and date, to mark 26the last resting place of her blessed dog.