We are too close to Infinite love and wisdom to play pranks before
it, and provoke comparison between our paltry juggleries and its
omnipotence and majesty.
CHAPTER XI.
AMERICAN WILD ANIMALS IN ART.
The hunter and the sportsman are two very different persons. The hunter
pursues animals because he loves them and sympathizes with them, and kills
them as the champions of chivalry used to slay one another--courteously,
fairly, and with admiration and respect. To stalk and shoot the elk and
the grizzly bear is to him what wooing and winning a beloved maiden would
be to another man. Far from being the foe or exterminator of the game he
follows, he, more than any one else, is their friend, vindicator, and
confidant. A strange mutual ardor and understanding unites him with his
quarry. He loves the mountain sheep and the antelope, because they can
escape him; the panther and the bear, because they can destroy him. His
relations with them are clean, generous, and manly. And on the other hand,
the wild animals whose wildness can never be tamed, whose inmost principle
of existence it is to be apart and unapproachable,--those creatures who
may be said to cease to be when they cease to be intractable,--seem, after
they have eluded their pursuer to the utmost, or fought him to the death,
to yield themselves to him with a sort of wild contentment--as if they
were glad to admit the sovereignty of man, though death come with the
admission.
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