"Nature he reproduces, ranging fine From least to longest feathery plumes aline, Thus imitating birds, that on the air With balanced wings are poised in lightness there."
Whilst our noble Laureate in "Locksley Hall" goes in for aerial machines, "Argosies of magic sails," and "airy navies grappling in the central blue."
As to that essay of mine published in the first number of Ainsworth's Magazine, August 1842, long before the Patent Aerial Company started their projects, and very much noticed at the time,--Mr. Claude Hamilton ingrafted it in his work on Flying; the Duke of Argyll in a note before me commends this principle of copying nature as the true one; a Signor Ignazio of Milan in 1877 adopted almost exactly my Flying Man,--which was for the lecture enlarged from Cruikshank's etching of my own sketch: an aerial flapping machine, a sort of flying wheelbarrow, was some twenty years ago exhibited at Kensington: whilst in the _Daily Telegraph_ for July 10, 1874, you will find recorded the untimely death of one M. de Groof, the Flying Man, who unhappily perished at Cremorne after a successful flight of 5000 feet. All these are on record.
Extract from Proverbial Philosophy (Series iv. p. 375).
"All of us have within us the wandering Crusoe spirit; We come of Norse sea-rovers, and adventurers full of hope: And man was bade to tame his earth, to rule it and subdue it,-- Whereby our feet-soles tingle at an untrod Alpine peak-- But shall we not fly anon with wings, to shame these creeping paces, Even as steam hath worked all speed on land and sea before? Is not this firmament of air part of the human heritage, Which man must conquer duteously, as first his Maker willed? There needeth but a lighter gas, well-tutored to our skill, The springing spirit to some shape of delicate steel and silk,-- A bird-like frame of Daedalus, and gummed Icarian plumes, Ancient inventions, long forgotten, to be found anew! When shall the chemist mix aright this rarer lifting essence To make the lord of earth but equal to his many sparrows? When will discovery help us to such conquest of the air, And teach us swifter travel than our creeps by land and water?"
And finally from my "Three Hundred Sonnets" hear Sonnet No. 189--