The impression of enormous strength, massive yet elastic,
ponderous yet alert, impregnable for defence as irresistible in attack; a
strength which knows no obstacles, and which never meets its match,--this
impression is as fully conveyed in these figures, which are not over a
foot in height, as if the animal were before us in its natural size. You
see the vast limbs, crooked with power, bound about with huge ropes and
plates of muscle, and clothed in shaggy depths of fur; the vast breadth of
the head, with its thick, low ears, dull, small eyes, and long up-curving
snout; the roll and lunge of the gait, like the motion of a vessel
plunging forward before the wind; the rounded immensity of the trunk, and
the huge bluntness of the posteriors; and all these features are combined
with such masterly unity of conception and plastic vigor, that the
diminutive model insensibly grows mighty beneath your gaze, until you
realize the monster as if he stood stupendous and grim before you. In the
first of the figures the bear has paused in his great stride to paw over
and snuff at the horned head of a mountain sheep, half buried in the soil.
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