Mr Danby could scarcely have chosen a better subject for the display of his great powers than that of the Deluge. In this highly effective and beautiful work of art, an Angel of light is introduced, weeping over the lifeless bodies of a giant and a female, who, floating above the swelling waters on a hastily constructed raft, were crushed to death by a fallen tree. This part of the scene is evidently illustrative of that passage in Scripture which refers to the "Sons of God," who "saw that the daughters of men were fair, and they took them wives of all whom they chose." The "Sons of God," according to the best commentators, were a race of men favoured by God, but who generally incurred his displeasure, and perished with mankind in general.
"_Calmly the martyr Guthrie met his fate._"
Mr James Guthrie, minister of Stirling, was executed at Edinburgh, on the 1st of June 1661, for his adherence to the Covenant. In his dying speech, he solemnly declared,--"I take God to record upon my soul, I would not exchange this scaffold with the palace or the mitre of the greatest prelate in Britain."
The incident here versified is founded on fact, although I have taken the liberty slightly to alter the details,--to change the scene, as it were, of the heroine's birth-place,--and to give her a name of my own choosing. The case is thus narrated by Dr Rush of Philadelphia, in his "Lectures on the Utility of a Knowledge of the Mind to a Physician," lect. xi.:--
"During the time I passed at a country school, at Cecil county, in Maryland," says that eminent medical philosopher, "I often went, on a holiday, with my schoolmates, to see an eagle's nest, upon the summit of a dead tree in the neighbourhood of the school, during the time of the incubation of that bird. The daughter of the farmer in whose field the tree stood, and with whom I became acquainted, married, and settled in this place about forty years ago. In our occasional interviews, we now and then spoke of the innocent pursuits and rural pleasures of our youth, and, among other things, of the eagle's nest in her father's field. A few years ago I was called to visit this woman, when she was in the lowest stage of a typhus fever. Upon entering her room, I caught her eye, and, with a cheerful tone of voice, said only--'The eagle's nest!' She seized my hand, without being able to speak, and discovered strong emotions of pleasure in her countenance, probably from a sudden association of all her early domestic connexions and enjoyments with the words I had uttered. From that time she began to recover. She is now living, and seldom fails, when we meet, to salute me with the echo of--'The eagle's nest!'"